A well written document Atrocities.
I am to lazy to write my own,
but being an experienced shipset maker I have a few things to add:
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Well, you want to make a ship set for Space Empires 4. So did I about a year ago, November 2000, and thanks to some great examples, hints, and suggestions by pro-ship set makers, I was able to make my first ship set. Since that time, I have made 15 ship sets for Space Empires 4.
Maybe you’re talking about people like myself, but we’re not “pro”. The only “pro” shipset makers would be those who made the original shipsets included with the game.
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The one thing that I noticed about making ship sets is that there are two ways to do it. The first and the one that I am going to discuss here are to use existing images. The second is to use a 3d program, and build them from scratch.
There are other ways to make shipsets, drawing them in 2D from scratch (e.g. Dogscoff’s Space Vikings), and your sample pictures suggest another, taking photos of miniatures.
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That way I will not discuss because it is rather complicated, and I lack the skill to adequately describe that process to you.
Well yes it can be complicated, and it varies according to the 3d program you use, and even in the same program there are many tools and methods to model your ships.
I use 3d studio R2, I guess I could give you some advice, but there are many modeling sites that include better tutorials than what I could write.
Anyway after modeling and rendering your ship, you’ll probably get a picture similar to what you have in step 10 of Atrocities tutorial, or if you’re careful enough with the appropriate size and cropping. Then you have to follow the final steps.
These are other programs I use:
3d studio R2
Paint Shop Pro 4 (yes, I cheat using an old Version with a bug in the shareware time limit feature)
My HTML race style viewer! It’s not only useful to view pictures ordered, I found that you can drag and drop pictures into PSP or Paint
I have ACDsee, but I never use it in shipset edition, just to revise larger pictures.
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STEP 8, (Tracing the image in yellow)
Using the PAINT BRUSH trace around the ship. Be sure you are using YELLOW as the paint brush color.
I prefer using a filled polygon to cut out a shape from the background.
And of course yellow is just for this example, you should always use a color that contrasts with the color of the ship.
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NOTE: That I have DESELECTED the Maintain Aspect Ratio Of: option. The reason for this is that no matter how good you are, once you crop something, maintaining a unified aspect ratio is next to impossible. You MOST definitely want to target for as close as you can get, but never more than 15 in difference between Width and Height. If it goes beyond that, Click the EDIT and then the UNDO button and try to get your cropping tighter.
Don’t. Deformation leads to cheesy looking pictures. Try to keep it as small as possible.
Maintain aspect ratio, and reduce larger side to 128. Then just copy and paste into a new 128x128 pic.
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I have never really made any shields. I opt to use pre-existing ones.
A good resource to easily make shields and explosions is changing hue or applying some other filter to pre-existing ones.
3d studio has a cool built-in plug-in to make explosions.
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*NOTE, in order to have the game use a custom image for the Base Ship, you will have to tell it to do so in the DATA – VehicleSize file. Just change the BITMAP NAME to BS. Default is StarBase I believe.[quote]
Yes, normal Base Ship bitmap is RaceName_Portrait_Starbase.
Note that the one of the original races, the Praetorian, includes a baseship picture.
It’s called Praetorian_Portrait_Baseship and not Praetorian_Portrait_BS as you suggest.
[quote]As far as AI goes, well you’re on your own there. Most people like to fiddle a bit with the AI, but most just use an existing AI.
Be sure to at least edit the RaceName_AI_General.txt and change names and descriptions to fit your race. Even if it’s only to avoid repetition.
I want to have a more complete helper on how to mod AI. I’m still a newbie in that. There’s a good document with details on how the AI_DesignCreation.txt works. I’d like to see things like that for the other files.
[This message has been edited by Andrés Lescano (edited 25 October 2001).]
Basic Ship Set Compiling Tutorial
Linear Mode
