Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: Transparency in Gaming Bitmaps

Acumen opened this issue on Nov 20, 2002 ยท 10 posts


Acumen posted Sat, 23 November 2002 at 3:40 PM

Thanks for all the ideas, guys. I posted a reply a couple of days ago, discussing the pros and cons of each suggestion in turn. But it seems to have gone AWOL, so I'll give you the short version. A number of the same ideas were repeated in different ways, so here's the summary: * Render non-antialiased at an increased resolution, then scale in postwork: I've had a crack at this, but came up against a bit of a wall. How would I reduce the image size without using antialiasing the document, as it seems to blend the edges anyway when I reduce the image? Unfortunately I use PSP rather than PhotoShop. While it's effective, it does mean I have to rescale each frame manually, which could be rather time-consuming. * Use a different transparent colour, like black, and then let the edges blend naturally: I originally started off using pure black (0,0,0) as my transparent colour, but this proved to be a very bad idea, as the game uses a gothic/noir setting, very dark and shadowy. So making black a forbidden colour wasn't very effective. Bikermouse, why do you advocate green over magenta? * Use hardware anti-aliasing: Not only do I have no clue how to do it, but my code is currently so badly optimised that I don't think it could take the strain at run-time. :) One other idea that works well is to use the Cartoon w/ Line for the backdrop picture instead of Silhouette. This creates an outline around the figure (in addition to dropping the foot shadows), thus separating the magenta background and the figure from within Poser, while still allowing me to anti-alias. The only drawback is that I'm then stuck with the outline itself. I can edit this out in postwork quite easily, but the ideal would be if I could turn the outline colour to magenta, and then it would blend seamlessly with the background. Unfortunately, its colour seems to be fixed to a dark grey (15,15,15), and doesn't seem to adjust if any of the configurable colours (foreground, background, shadow or floor) are modified. I don't suppose there's any other way to tweak this outline colour from within Poser? If so, this would be the perfect solution. But thanks again for the brainstorming session. This has given me a lot of tactics to try out. As for those requested props, I thought it might help if I gave you an example of what I was looking for. If you do a search for BlackGazza in the 'Rosity Poser Art Gallery, the first three images that come up show off the items to good effect. It looks like it was originally released as one free package (collar, two bracelets, belt, not sure what else). I presume that, based on typical terms of redistribution, it wouldn't be legal for someone else who's previously downloaded the props to email them to me, if the original author has moved on and can't be contacted?