TEASER: Enhanced Stock Animations (Regular Male)[message #278538]
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Mon, 25 April 2011 10:25
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Bio |
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Messages:62
Registered:April 2009 Location: Rhineland-Palatinate/Germ... |
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First off, sry if this is a little unstructured. I'm a bit light-headed since I worked on LOBOT/JADES for like 30 hours straight.
I put in a lot of hours the last week and a half and I'm quite happy with the results (though it took substantially more time than anticipated).
I managed to implement all features I wanted to add. Fixed all the bugs that I was aware of (safe for one in the BARE scripts). Everything appears to be quite stable indeed and I will be able to release both the first beta version of LOBOT (based on the MT development branch from a couple weeks ago, which should be reasonably stable) and also the first pack of finished and useable content (as part of the JADES project) for LOBOT.
This post is about that content pack and I would like to give a little preview before I'm off to get some sleep.
Comparison of new enhanced regular male animations against the stock regular male animations:
The first pack of fully usable logical bodytypes for LOBOT is an improved and more dynamic version of the regular male stock model. There are no new layers compared to the stock animations. Although the shadow is an actual separate layer. The pack consists basically of 4 sti files for every stock sti file. 1 sti file for the rgb channels and one for the alpha channel and that for the two layers (body, shadow). All animations currently in the game have been generated (I only tested a relatively small sample of these - there probably still are some problems to be encountered).
That alone of course would not add much to the game. However I also added a set of different statures for the stock bodytype. I already hinted to that in the alpha blending thread. I defined 5 statures to be generated (the process for generating the content is fully automatic and the stature configuration could easily be altered and the body type re-generated):
Short - scaled to 90% of the default animations
Below average - scaled to 95% of the default animations
Average - not scaled
Above average - scaled to 105%
Tall - scaled to 110%
If we assume that the average height is round about 178 cm (5'10) this spread gives us a range of 160 cm to 196 cm that can be represented in-game.
The size of this content pack is substantial. There are 1761 sti files total with a total size of over 120 MB. The generation of equivalent packs for the female and big male models will boost that to well over 350 MB.
I improved the quality of the scaled animations a great deal in comparison to the last screen shots I posted. I like the result a lot. The animations look crisp, there is very little blurring.
Note that the palette I used did not have the fixed colors used in the stock versions for the shoes, so shades of gray were used instead. I consider that a blessing in disguise as the darker shoes look much better in my opinion. (or maybe they are dynamic after-all, in that case I should re-generate with an appropriate palette).
Note that the alpha blending is best visible when comparing the shadows of the enhanced versions to the stock ones (smoother edges, also made the shadow a little lighter as in the stock animations - like it better that way).
Note that the average stature (the one in the middle) is not scaled. It is identical to the stock one (save for the colors of the shoes). The animations were at different frames when the screen shots were made, but the two animations are actually congruent (except for the shadow since that is in a separate layer). There is no alpha blending done for the body and the shadow (actually, technically there is for the shadow, but no smoothing).
All 5 new statures in a combat setting:
One more thing. I used one-pass resizing with the catrom filter. My script supports up 2 two passes (with different filter settings) with the image from the 2nd pass blended upon the first one. There are loads of possibilities to optimize the re-sized animations. But as it stands the one pass catrom is already looking very serviceable to me.
[Updated on: Mon, 25 April 2011 10:31] by Moderator Report message to a moderator
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Re: TEASER: Enhanced Stock Animations (Regular Male)[message #278571]
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Mon, 25 April 2011 19:04
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Bio |
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Messages:62
Registered:April 2009 Location: Rhineland-Palatinate/Germ... |
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Logisterici want fat bodytypes for meltdown, hitman and nails
looks great
guess I could play around with different aspect ratios and see how it would look if the width would be increased slightly.
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Re: TEASER: Enhanced Stock Animations (Regular Male)[message #278575]
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Mon, 25 April 2011 19:22
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Bio |
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Messages:62
Registered:April 2009 Location: Rhineland-Palatinate/Germ... |
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Off_TopicThat's pretty cool Bio, should add even more individuality to Mercs.
Is it feasible to add new shirt types, long sleeved for example?
If this was implemented, you could mess around with each Merc's field of view.
In fact my plan is to add long sleeves. I plan on using a partial bodytype created by CheKa a while back as a starting point. My idea is to diff his images with the stock ones and save the delta as a new layer. But I'm still unsure, whether long sleeved shirts should be the default or displayed according to some other attribute (unfortunately there is no slot for general clothing and it makes little sense to decide according to the vest slot since there generally will be a vest in there which says nothing about the desired sleeve type).
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Re: TEASER: Enhanced Stock Animations (Regular Male)[message #278597]
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Mon, 25 April 2011 22:15
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Bio |
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Messages:62
Registered:April 2009 Location: Rhineland-Palatinate/Germ... |
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To visualize better how such a filter setup looks like I devised one that could be used to match against those soldier instances that are supposed to be rendered as short regular male (note that I didn't test it, so it might not be syntactically correct):
SOLDIER_CLASS_NONE
MERC_TYPE__PLAYER_CHARACTER
MERC_TYPE__AIM_MERC
MERC_TYPE__MERC
MERC_TYPE__NPC
MERC_TYPE__EPC
MERC_TYPE__NPC_WITH_UNEXTENDABLE_CONTRACT
REGMALE
IsRandomizedSoldier
60
Dr. Q
IsRegularMaleShortUnnamed
IsRegularMaleShortNamed
You would then use "IsRegularMaleShort" as the filter for the short regular male bodytype.
Actually you could do away with "IsRegularMaleShortNamed" and simply list all the named soldiers in the OR block of "IsRegularMaleShort".
For the other statures you would have similar filters (except for IsRandomizedSoldier which would be referenced by all statures).
[Updated on: Mon, 25 April 2011 22:18] by Moderator Report message to a moderator
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Re: TEASER: Enhanced Stock Animations (Regular Male)[message #278617]
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Tue, 26 April 2011 04:19
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Bio |
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Messages:62
Registered:April 2009 Location: Rhineland-Palatinate/Germ... |
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SharkDA criticism: taller people tend to have proportionately narrower heads/feet/hands compared with short people. However, the stock art could always be replaced at some time in the future.
Also, the resized sprites look "fuzzy". This is bad, IMO. Maybe you could post a series of sprites using different resizing/interpolation algorithms and we could vote on the results?
Sure will do that, but not right now. My original idea was to do a 2 pass resizing the first with a cubic filter (catrom has the least blurring with imagick), the second with smart pixel resizing (which generally gives good results, but sometimes results in not so pretty artifacts - blocks of 4 pixels of the same color, that stand out a lot) and blend the two together (lay over pixel resized over the other with a visibility of 40%-60%). The idea is to compromise, get some of the smoother edges with alpha information (where the block artifacts occur and are most visible), but also retain most of the sharpness away from the edges.
I did not do that right away, as I found that the catrom looked pretty decent in-game. Keep in mind, that the images posted here are resized to 200% and also reduced to 8bit resolution compared to 16bit in game, which certainly enhances unfavorable blur artifacts. So I'll revisist that, but not right away, looks good enough in-game for now, when the animations are actually moving.
edit: actually the gif files do not amplify any artifacts. While the lower number of colors is easily detectable, the alpha blended/blurred regions are looking not notably worse in the gif files.
[Updated on: Tue, 26 April 2011 09:09] by Moderator Report message to a moderator
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