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Hi, y'all.

Right, so here it goes. I've got an effect/decal thingy. 16 images, layoud out correctly, and all that stuff's done.

I've been looking at Higgin's tutorial:

http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=81003&b=24

I've made other effects in the past, but for none of them I've had to do what Higgins says here:



Right. Now I have NO idea what to do here.

Well, wait a mo, yes I DO have some sort of idea. It's just I have both GIMP and Photoshop. I prefer using GIMP because I'm more used to it, but in GIMP there's LOADS of weird alpha maskey things to choose from, and quite frankly I'm not sure which I should use.

So, let's see: I've managed to get the background of my decal transparent. There's no blotchy edges because I used the "Colour To Alpha" feature, and removed all the black background. It looks just as I want it to in game.

If I save it like this, with transparent background, when I put it in FPSC it appears with a white background, which ain't good.



Make a new mask... If I click "Layer", then "Mask", then "Add new Mask", I have loads of options. Which one of these is right for FPSC?

1) White (Full opacity)
2) Black (Full transparency)
3) Layer's alpha channel
4) Transfer layer's alpha channel
5) Selection
6) Grayscale copy of layer
7) Channel (then there's a drop down menu, that doesn't work... buggy gimp )

So what do I do from here to make the decal appear transparent in the engine? I'm confuzzled. Thanks for the help.

never used gimp, sorry, but in photoshop, you would:

select the transparent parts of your layer (ctrl+click on layer thumbnail), then select the Channels tab and use the second left icon at the bottom to create an alphachannel from your selection.

there is also a tool out there called somewhat like DecalMaker which can generate animated decals from a series of tranparent png files....

You would select #2. You want to make sure there is black around the edges (#000000) so it gets alpha mapped out in game.

In photoshop, select the parts you need with ctrl-click on the the layers panel.

Next, go select > save selection > new channel > ok

Make sure you're saving it as a .dds file too, make sure the mode is either dxt 3 or 5 (preferably 5, 3 makes the alpha blocky).

Yes! Thank you! I did it! wahoo!

I've made decals before, but it only seems to be this time I'm running into bother (because I'm using ParticleIllusion for 'em )

Thanks!

I would've used Decalmaker, but it doesn't work for me.

You'll soon find my decal effects on the TGC store, hopefully. Rick is looking into setting up the store for this kind of media.

Making decals isn't so much of a problem, it's animating them realistically that gets tough.

With 16 frames of animation, you need to be pretty skilled to determine the pace of the effect and get something that is not too slow or too fast depending on the type of effect displayed.

I've considered using one of these particle programs to export some cool looking pre made effects but most use a lot more than 16 frames so you would need to tailor them quite heavily which again could end up looking not so good.

If anyone knows of a particle program with high quality effects and relatively low frame output, please post.

@Nomad Soul:

I know what you mean, summing up an animation in 16 frames is hard. But you do know you can double that to 32 frames? Just make your decal image twice the size, then in the decal specification FPI file thingy, specify the number of rows and the number of columbs and FPSC will automatically play all 32.

As far as I know, you can't go beyond 32 frames without bugs.

A couple of particle programs I recommend are ExGen and ParticleIllusion. I've only used ExGen a little bit, but that has some very customisable particles. ParticleIllusion is professional, and especially used in videos, but you can export it as individual, black-backgrounded files without too much bother. most of the effects in PI are pre-made, however you can customise most of the factors like size, colour, and life duration - set it to 16 and you can fit an animation into 16 frames.