Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: Transparency in Gaming Bitmaps

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


Acumen posted Wed, 20 November 2002 at 3:46 PM

This should probably go in the Game Development section, but this forum is clearly where the action is. :) Excuse me if I over-explain my point, but I know this isn't a programmer's forum and I want to make myself clear. I'm using Poser 4 to create pre-rendered bitmaps of character sprites in a non-commercial game demo I'm developing in VC++. I have to specify a particular RGB value as a transparency mask, in much the same way as a particular tint is filtered out in chromatography (I'm currently using a magenta background (255:0:255), as it's a pretty rare colour). This works fine if I don't anti-alias the render (but obviously there's a substantial drop in image quality, which I'd like to avoid). But if I use anti-aliasing, the edge of the character becomes smoothed against the magenta background, and I wind up with a one pixel thick purple outline around the character. So, ultimately: is it possible to anti-alias a model in Poser without anti-aliasing the backdrop? Or can you think of another way of getting around this? Unfortunately, cleaning up after myself in postwork isn't an option, because I need to create a vast number of different character animations, and touching up each file manually would be enormously time-consuming (we are, after all, talking 30fps). I already paste a silhouette of the figure onto the background before rendering, so that I can keep the fake foot shadow that Poser produces in my final render, so adapting this silhouette figure is probably my best option. I've experimented with adjusting the camera settings to perhaps create an artificial outline by making a slightly larger background figure, but this gives rather mixed results. Anyone have any other ideas? Oh, and while I'm here (this is my first post to the forum, despite owning Poser for several months), I'd like to thank the community for their endless generosity. It's a pleasure to come home from work and find all sorts of cool new quality goodies in the freestuff section. And while I'm on the subject, I've seen an excellent set of bracelets/collar credited to BlackGazza in a number of gallery shots, which were apparently freely available at some stage (presumably long before I got started here, as I can't find them anywhere), which looked ideal for one of my punk characters. Apparently he made a whole set of those? Would anyone know where I might be able to get hold of them now? As they're apparently bondage items, I've even risked dipping into more "exotic" sites like Thralldom and Renderotica in my search, but they don't seem to be available there either. Could anybody shed some light on this please?