Creating, importing new scenery art?

[harmond]

Any tutorials around for that?

What i need to know;

what resolution should i be working with? What format (PNG, BMP, etc?) and is the scale of the art set in the mapper or does resolution itself decide how big or small it will appear in the game?

It also seems FrameAnimator doesn't understand alpha channel at all so how do you set a background color to be transparent and still not having e.g black outlines? Any good tricks? I tried the Options for transparency without much luck, they all made it look quite bad with either black outlines or it didn't remove the background at all.
Saving a .png with transparency seems to make the transparency part a pure white, you can kind of getting it to work but with ugly white outlines instead of black.

As for adding the art itself. I would first like to play around with adding art (let's say some trees) to the original game. How would i do this?

I have the mapper, Dat Explorer, FrameAnimator.. all works fine. Just need to get a grip on exporting properly, then the whole import process which i bet is cumbersome since it's an old engine.

Thanks.

 

[harmond]

For future reference, I think i got my answers here:
Graphics Modding Questions | No Mutants Allowed (nma-fallout.com)

I extracted some original files and it seems like there's no specific resolution that you are forced to use

 

[Lexx]

There is a size limit for scenery graphics. Don't remember the exact values, but if the image is too big, there will be artifacts when moving the screen around.

 

[harmond]

ok, good to know! not that i think i would get any problems since i try to replicate the sizes of the original art.

 

[harmond]

What are you (few modders that are one here still) using as export format?

Isn't GIF kind of optimal because then you can see the Color Table at Export and remove unwanted hues by just hitting delete (web export in PS). I tried it for one object and dropped it on a fallout screenshot with brown background in FrameAnimator, and there was no visible outline of any sort.

I'm still new to this so i'm not sure it's a good way.

I guess limiting colors in the texturing phase (on the 3D object you're gonna convert to 2D eventually) can be a good too, thinking that in the end those are wasted anyways.. less colors to remove etc.

 

[Lexx]

Convert colors to indexed with the Fallout palette before saving to either bmp or png (personally I only use bmp).

 

[harmond]

yes i do that too.. and it's default.act from framanimator you should load, right?

got any special tricks for saving as .bmp and not getting e.g blue outline (if using pure blue as the background?) you just manually edit until it's fine?

 

[Lexx]

Well, you need to remove all alpha transparency before converting.

 

[harmond]

Yeah, i use a pure blue instead of an alpha channel or transparency. i do tend to get a lot of blue and purple hues around the object though.. but making it a GIF and then removing all the unwanted hues seems to work, so maybe i'll stick with that.

 

[harmond]

replaced the boring dead trees.. though not very happy with the shadows yet.

tried messing with the tiles, it seems like you can make them at least a little bit more hi-res, but if you make them too big (2x the size) the ground looks buggy sometimes.

 

[Gizmojunk]

13.00-13.26

 

[harmond]

Trees are usually the first thing i mod these games with.
just adds a ton of atmosphere for me personally (and to tons of others i guess, my flora overhauls mods are usually quite well liked). Can't stand just looking at brown i guess hehe

 

[Zorchar]

replaced the boring dead trees.. though not very happy with the shadows yet.

Could you upload frms please?

 

[Lexx]

tried messing with the tiles, it seems like you can make them at least a little bit more hi-res, but if you make them too big (2x the size) the ground looks buggy sometimes.

You can't upscale tiles. They have a fixed size which you should not divert from.

 

[harmond]

Could you upload frms please?

Sure, I can share them when i'm done with them.

You can't upscale tiles. They have a fixed size which you should not divert from.

Apart from graphical glitches, are there any other bugs that you know of?

 

[Lexx]

Well, yes, graphical glitches. Isn't that enough?

 

[harmond]

Well, yes, graphical glitches. Isn't that enough?

depends on how severe. if you up the resolution just a bit the glitch is very rare and subtle. i changed all the EDG* .frms and it wasn't bad. It doesn't handle 2x the resolution though, then the glitches are very visible and annoying.

 

[harmond]

when you look at the tiles art, it seems like it's just repeating itself over and over, i had a difficult time finding which of the sand textures the first area used because the exact same are used so many times just with different names. not sure i can see in the editor which tiles the map is using?

No one attempted to give the world a little bit more varied look by varying these? Same with the trees. It's a bunch that looks almost indistinguible, you can have fun with that doing e.g 2 leafed trees, 2 dead trees + a joshua tree.. they are used many times throughout the game, so it can make a big impact just changing these im thinking.

 

[Lexx]

not sure i can see in the editor which tiles the map is using?

While in tile-mode, click on the ground with the yellow cursor and then hit the p-key. This will make the mapper jump to the tile.

All desert tiles are used pretty much everywhere. Pretty sure they aren't exactly the same, though. Also: They aren't placed at random. Tiles in specific pattern will create a "bigger picture".

 

[harmond]

Ah cool, very useful. Should have asked earlier lol

yes, i just got the Tile Cutter from PJ so i understand it better. They are probably slightly different but they share the exact same color scheme.. maybe it would not be advisable to change them to new ones with new colors because it would get really messy with some of the art which partially also uses the textures.