Adding FO's palette to images/disabling AA on outer edges

[Continuum]

Hello,

Since FO's engine doesn't support anti-aliasing, we can "cheat" this ugly limitation and disable AA only on outer edges.

We must render the scene twice: with AA and without AA (of course every render must have the same size, camera position, etc.).

I used FO's blue, transparent color as environmental map.


1) Copy and paste AA to noAA Next you must make a selection on noAA layer (in this case Background):





2) Switch to AA layer and Expand the selection by one pixel (or Contract by one if you selected inverse):



You should get something like this:




3) Simply delete selection on AA layer:





4) Final "composition":







Now it's time to convert image to FO's palette before conversion to FRM.

Image --> Mode --> Indexed color --> select "Custom..." in the "Palette" field --> Load... (you must load FO's palette. Color table you'll find in Frame Animator - default.act). Next you must change "Dither" from None to Diffusion. Save the image.

Good conversion:



Bad conversion:




You can also apply noise filter on bigger "surfaces" for better conversion (test at NMA). On the smaller ones you don't noticed any differences, I guess...

 

[Josan12]

Good thinking batman.
What do you plan to do with it?

 

[Lexx]

Thanks for the small tutorial. I will test it with my talking head as soon, as I am back home again.

 

[Mr.Wolna]

@Lexx ich verstehe nicht ganz was man damit machen kann^^

To others i said that i dont understand what you can maqke with

 

[Lexx]

New and good looking graphics for Fallout.

 

[Mr.Wolna]

But ist really a lot of work to render all the Fallout graphics

 

[Lexx]

Of course. I rendered every animation step of my talking head on its own and there are 15 animations to do - every animation has up to 8 frames. This doesn't sound that much, but was 2 days of work for me.

But it is worth the new content, I think.

 

[Mr.Wolna]

?why your render your TH?

 

[Continuum]

Good thinking batman.

Batman? (o_O)

What do you plan to do with it?

With what?

?why your render your TH?

Because it's generated in 3d and needs to be "translated" into simple image (or sequence of them - animation)

 

[Mr.Wolna]

Kann man das nicht mit screenshots machen?


sry dont know how to say this in english

 

[Lexx]

No. Screenshots would have a worse quality, because of missing light, shadow and so on.

 

[Glovz]

Just a thought and it could be a crazy one at that, is that a way to batch job this sort of this and sharpen up all the graphics in Fallout 2?

I know that are ways to batch job converting .frm to .gif or .bmp - so that thought is from there, sharpen image, and batch to convert back.

Again I could be just dreaming this to be a probable possibility.

 

[Mr.Wolna]

so whats about can you make eiach grafik look better with this mmethod?

 

[Per]

Use the spellchecker, for fuck's sake, most of your posts are only half readable. You've been told before. And this is an English forum, use other languages in PMs if you must.

 

[Mr.Wolna]

WTF did i use german?

and yes i will write better, and ech time if i wrote german i said sorry because i did knew the word, ok?

Ahd thanks for your answer

 

[Wild_qwerty]

Continuum is a bit of a living legend when it comes to this sort of thing. While I know that Frame Animator is capable of dropping a high colour image down to a 256 colour palette, there are certain colours that just aren't represented in the fallout 2 palette.

Anyway sometimes you will end up with a very shitty looking image, it's not as noticeable in small FRMs and critters, but in large scenery items and talking heads it can be very noticeable.

Photoshop does a much better conversion to the 256 palette than Frame Animator can.

Hope this helps.

 

[Mr.Wolna]

Yeah that's right. I know it by myself. (Portrait Mod).

I read that 75 % dethering in PS is the best to prepare bms for converting, is that right? Or is it better just to load the FO Pallete?


@Per, i do not make this intentionally, and i will try my best to write without any misstakes, so sorry as i said i will give me effort.

 

[Per]

@Per, i do not make this intentionally, and i will try my best to write without any misstakes, so sorry as i said i will give me effort.

Well, if you made an intentional effort to use the spellchecker you could avoid writing stuff like "misstakes". It's what it's for.

 

[Mr.Wolna]

Yeah, i think my newest post is much better!

 

[Continuum]

I read that 75 % dethering in PS is the best to prepare bms for converting, is that right? Or is it better just to load the FO Pallete?

I posted the image what's going to happen when you just load the FO's palette and you'll leave Dither unchanged.


Anyway, just a small update:

You can disable AA on outer edges in Max while rendering (I discovered it some time ago), so you can skip this whole "removing AA in PS" thingie.

Customize --> Preferences --> Rendering Tab --> Check "Don't Antialias Against Background"

Now prepare 256x256 bitmap (.bmp) with R:0 G:0 B:255 (blue, transparent color) and go to Environment Tab (or press 8) and set that bitmap as Environment Map. Selecting the color in Color Selector will not work if you'll put plane/whatever with Matte/Shadow material as a "ground" for receiving shadows from object, so you must set the bitmap as background.