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Right, we’ve got one frame in there. Kinda. It was a randomly screencapped one. Making 10000+ of the suckers by hand is out of the question. Enter 3DS Max.

Why Max, you ask? To be honest I’d love to go the Blender route, alas, I’ve been fed Max knowledge at the faculty for a semester and then pretty much forced myself to use it. In any case, with no time to lose, Max it is.

Since me and q2_grunt seemed to have a good thing going, I tracked down an MD2-Max importer script on the interwebs.

I imported him into Max and set him up with a sweet bluescreen. This is to save up on any additional processing, since it’s the exact colour of blue that Fallout uses as transparency. #0000FF aka R0 G0 B255 aka completely fucking blue. This same colour was used as ‘Environment->Background’ under common parameters for rendering.

Also worth mentioning, the model import is done via script menu, not via the ‘File->Import’ menu. Don’t go apeshit like me, read the readme that comes with the script.

Now then, the setup:

Very rudimentary, but whatever. Now, I tracked down his frames for idling on a spot, they go from 1:0 to 13:187 or thereabout. I don’t quite understand the system, but the digits following the colon (:) go all the way up to 479. So what you’ve got on your hands is about (12*479+187=) 5935 frames of standing still animation. ¯\(º_o)/¯ I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume those are a sort of subframes that just make sure everything goes smooth.

Now, this is the case with this one model. What you’ll be using, I assume, falls into two categories. Once in 3DS Max, you’ll have a) a shitload of frames and subframes like this q2_grunt I’m using, or b) an externally generated model which you’ll reduce in frames upon your external generation. Or not, in which case refer to a).

The point here is that Fallout animations don’t use a huge number of frames and manage to get away with it. For reference take a look at this article by lisac2k. You’ll see the number of frames per action is barely in double digits. This of course varies from action to action, but we can cover that later. I’m assuming that if you plan on simply replacing a critter, it’d be best to match the number of frames it uses for any given action. If you can get your hands dirty with coding, you’ll prolly be able to bring to life a whole new critter along with any number of frames you’d care to shake a stick at.

(If you really wanna know the frame amount right now, though, grab some DAT file extractors off of NMA downloads and take a peek into the DAT files. I’m not gonna be going into that, just as I’m not gonna go into 3DS Max basics.)

What I did with my q2_grunt, going with the aforementioned option a) approach, was to grab the whole timeline where he’s standing still, ergo 1:0 to 13:187 and rendered every main frame. I’m not even sure it’s possible to render the subframes. Whatever the case is here, we don’t really need to go into it. It’s all one big dirty hack to get our hands on some sprites and that’s where we’re headed. Choo choo. Here are the settings from Render setup:

…and here’s what Max spewed out after the first round:

I’m using scanline rendering without anti-aliasing, to get that nice jagged edge which works well with Fallout sprites and avoid any silly retouching later on. Also note I’ve set up the size to something about Fallout sprite size, back in ‘Render settings’.

Something doesn’t look quite right. Let’s place him into a Fallout scene and see what happens.

Uhhhh… Naw.

What we’ve done wrong is set up the camera as ‘Perspective’, when in fact Fallout uses an orthographic projection. This is exactly what we need right now, so switch the camera mode or follow this tutorial if you don’t know how.

Once in orthographic, find a Fallout screencap with clearly defined lines of projection. Say, this one. Now set it up as your viewport background, by pressing ALT+B and screwing around with the settings a bit. Remember to enforce the aspect from the bitmap. Now you’re ready to properly align the whole scene to your camera. What you want to end up with, is have your box that the model stands on, align with the lines of projection in the Fallout screencap, like so:

Now would be a good time to look into the shadows and set them up all proper like. I’ve just fiddled around a bit till they seemed to fall right. Here’s my final setup:

Following that, truck your camera far enough forward to get the model properly sized in the render. Here’s the rendered result of all this adjustment:

And when we place him into the scene, it all comes together:

Congratulations, you are now the proud owner of one sprite set. To get all 6 directions rendered, either place 6 cameras 60° apart around the model or rotate the model 60° for each render set.

You might have noticed a problem with shadows here. They tend to turn out a bit too blue, if you don’t adjust the exposure settings. I’ve tried setting the shadow density to maximum levels, but that didn’t do squat. You can, of course, manually paint them black later, but that seems like a bit of a chore. Batch processing to replace the colours could work as well.

In any case, this is it for now, and next time we’ll be looking into batch processing to index the palette over these renders and fix shadows, followed by a conversion to Fallout’s FRM conversion and all that jazz.

Checklist:
- Single 3D frame to sprite
- Indexing colour on full bitmap to Fallout palette
- Rendering from an animated 3D model in Max to a suitable batch of images, readily cropped
- Find correct camera and shadow angle

To do:
- Batch process palette indexing and colour replacement
- Batch FRM conversion, renaming and import
- Actually get a proper model or something
- Actually rig, animate and skin the fucker

So, there we were, sitting around our cave in Fallout Online: 2238, shovelling brahmin shit, abusing the slaves and crafting radios (great XP gain, BTW), but most of all, noticing how we all looked exactly the same. Well, except for me, being secure enough in my masculinity to roleplay a girl. XD

In any case, something stirred and inspired by the Warrirors Of Diversity we vowed to do something about it. Then we went out and punched cows ’till XP came out.

Later that day, however, we set out to find the easiest way to make good looking sprites. According to a post on NMA forums by Lexx, one of the 2238 developers, a Fallout player critter requires in excess of 10.000 frames of animation. Mother of God. One character type/model has to be represented in every possible combination of weapons and armour. Now make them walk and die and pick shit up. Now repeat that for all 6 directions that Fallout needs due to the hex grid… :\

It quickly became apparent that we would need to make some 3D models. As always, a man on unfamiliar ground quickly resorts to what he already knows, so I fired up Quake2, took a screencap of a dude and pasted him onto a FOnline screencap. Not completely happy with the result, I placed some Q2 player models in QuArK, screencapped ‘em and pasted them into the same image. They were in there, alright, but seemed out of place…

Here comes the semi important bit. The Fallout 2 palette is in fact 8-bit…ish. The actual amount of colours isn’t that important, as long as you have suitable software for the job. I used this guide here. After passing them through an indexed palette, they looked much more appropriate.

Now then, here is my proof of concept:

Concept stage is now pretty much complete. We now know how to get a 1 frame sprite from a 3D model. We know it kinda looks okay, but needs tweaking. By okay, I don’t mean proportions, perspective or postioning, much less style. This experiment was purely to see if a third party model can kinda blend in, palette wise and if extracting sprites from 3D models is a viable technique for us. Tick both.

Checklist:
- Single 3D frame to sprite
- Indexing colour on full bitmap to Fallout palette

To do:
- Rendering from an animated 3D model in Max to a suitable batch of images
- Batch process crop (could perhaps be done at render level?)
- Batch process palette indexing
- Find correct camera and shadow angle
- Batch FRM conversion, renaming and import
- Actually get a proper model or something
- Actually rig, animate and skin the fucker

Onwards!

Since the guys at printshop didn’t tell me their printers cut 5mm off every edge and didn’t bother to fit to paper… I give you the .pdf version: http://www.kiberpipa.org/~oskar/dmp/docs/pamphlet.pdf

Easy like Sunday morning

Helldudes go to Agram Arena 2008

The Helldudes Gaming Group (Ljubljana, Slovenia) traditionally attend the Agram Arena Summer Warhammer 40k tournament (Zagreb, Croatia) every year. This year was no different; we even scored… *khm* …very well and we have videos to prove it!

More smartass comments in the full post.

As for the video and how to make it…

First you must take one (1!) week off, make up an army list and play a test game or two. The list must be a fun one, ideally consisting of units you don’t normally use. These should preferably still be boxed, to assure a maximum work load during the week. Feel free to pick something you have no way of getting and scratch building it as well.

Should you follow these instructions carefully, the amount of sleep per night, while sustaining very little social life, should not exceed 4 hours.

Take one Canon A520 with about 400 megs of space left on the card. While everyone’s taking care of their business, you should also attempt to navigate the vehicle, refine the army list, make a delivery and, if luck should have it, record some action. Oh, and try to convince them not to smack the bloody lens when it’s pointed at them.

When you go out boozing on Saturday night, try not to lose the camera and try not to get too much sleep. It might improve your performance on Sunday and we don’t want that.

After getting back to your hometown, go out for some drinks and some good eatin’.

Now you should be just about ready to make your art film extravaganza. Transfer all the files while catching up on 2 days’ worth of forum posting and world news. Now stay up all night while chatting on IM and slowly but surely piece together your video by using Windows “I like to crash when i bloody feel like it” Movie Maker. Make sure you have no previous experience using it or disable your hands and operate the computer using your forehead and tongue.

By now you should have probably stayed up for 32+ hours, living off warm beer and cold pizzas. You should also end up with a totally kickass video. Well, at least you and your geeky buddies oughtta think so. :]

Thanks for watching.

Animated render

Maybe next time I’ll even bother to embed it. Must sleep now.

In all seriousness, though, I have learned a lot doing this; what looked like an insurmountable problem is now as easy as pie. Mmm, pie.

Hopefully you can now hear some traffic which bothered me immensely, along with the lovely sound of nature.