Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Custom Skins => Topic started by: whiteman on August 04, 2020, 12:22:43 PM
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Was wondering if there's anything in the Ultimate edition that would make life easier over the standard PSP? Going to DL a trial and give it a try and noticed its on sale, $79 vs $99 and standard is at $63. I work in Photoshop and Illustrator CS5, because i don't want to pay a yearly subscription for the new stuff, but pasting vector images into PS can get to pixelated if your have to make multiple adjustments. PSP looks like it does vectors inside it and if they hold the crisp look I'll switch over.
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I'm still using a Paintshop Pro version from about five years ago but in general Ultimate Editions tend to include a few extra programs and maybe some bundled clipart, I've never come across anything in such a bundle that makes skinning easier though. The focus of PSP's development in recent years has been photo editing which is why I have not bothered to update the program for a while. I don't use a lot of vector stuff myself so don't feel qualified to comment on its relative quality vs other programs.
I have tinkered with other graphics programs over the years such as Gimp, Photoshop and Krita but I know PSP so well now that I can just get things done much faster.
There is one limitation with PSP that is an issue WRT AH skinning though; the program is unable to save as a 32-bit bmp. Although the skin viewer and offline game can work with the 24-bit bmps that PSP outputs while you are creating your skin HTC requires the diffuse and normal maps to be saved as 32-bit bmps prior to submission. Getting round this is a bit of a faff but it only needs to be done once. First I load my finished 24-bit bmp files into Gimp, add a transparency layer and save them as 32-bit. Then I open these files in MS Paint and save them again to get rid of a bmp header issue that the latest version of Gimp has.
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I still use PSP 5.03 and an older version of GIMP to convert to 32-bit. The only downside to PSP 5 is I'm limited to around 65 layers. This is good and bad but it is at least forcing me to be a little more organized.
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Well damn lol, I'll just go in and manually clean up some stuff. Thanks for the info guys!
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Later versions of PSP don't have this layer limit, I am using X9 and some of my skins have over a hundred layers. The later variants also have tools that can be sized up to 3,000 pixels, and IIRC are better at coping with the much larger amounts of memory needed for AH3's 2048 and 4096 size skin files, assuming your PC has a decent amount of memory that is.
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Yeah, I considered going to those but I'm so stuck on the interface of 5 that the changes to the older versions are annoying. I bet if I forced myself to use it I would learn to like it, but I can't quite make the leap.
I do know that my program will occasionally (rarely) crash because of the file size. Would be great if the newer versions were more stable, however, it is a minor inconvenience, so I put up with it for now.
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Got a new machine recently so trying to put some use to it outside of gaming, I9-10900Kgeforce rtx 2080 ti and 64 gigs of ram. The familiarity of PS and illustrator is why i'm with it. I pretty much have every key command engraved into my brain, this was just one detail that annoys me with it. I noticed how sharp you numbers and insignia so i started looking into it. Anyways i have a long way to go before that stuff is a issue in this new process
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Sharpness comes from drawing the stuff yourself. You'll refine things like insignia over time to make them better. Numbers and the like are often sharp due to how you trim them. I have noticed some photos of airplane side numbers show them to be far-less-than crisp, so it's definitely a case-by-case basis.
Nose art and the like starts as a very large file, usually hand-drawn (although you can occasionally find a good base image online to work with) and shrunk down. Then you become captive to the 3D object and how it is rendered by the game.
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Yea I'm hand doing everything vector based, so its sharp till i drop it in Photoshop and resize it. doing a search i'm not the only and i feel like ive been through this before years ago and can't remember if we worked it out or not. I'll just have to figure how to minimize it. I'm used to working the other way, Photoshop for images then placing that in illustrator or indesign to keep text and vector art clean. Thanks for the help!
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Some things will get fuzzy because of the skin's resolution. Can't be helped.
I draw as much as I can directly within the master diffuse file I'm working on.
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Yea I'm hand doing everything vector based, so its sharp till i drop it in Photoshop and resize it. doing a search i'm not the only and i feel like ive been through this before years ago and can't remember if we worked it out or not. I'll just have to figure how to minimize it. I'm used to working the other way, Photoshop for images then placing that in illustrator or indesign to keep text and vector art clean. Thanks for the help!
You will probably need to touch-up parts in photoshop after you size it. For thin lines and edges, use the 1 pixel paintbrush and scale the brush down below 50%.
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A couple of months ago I upgraded GIMP to version 2.10.20 and was very impressed. I wouldn't hesitate to use it for skinning. That said, I use it for my graphics work in AH3 objects and the terrain editor.
The 2.10.20 version includes built-in Normal mapping, unlike the older versions where you had to install a plug-in. I don't think either of these powerful programs are easy to learn.
Of less interest to skinners, it handles 32,000 x 32,000 pixels x 32bit bitmaps if you have the hardware and memory (64GBs DDR4) to handle it. If not, while using such gigantic image layers, it's like the 1980s; grab lunch while you wait for the last operation to finish.
If you're using GIMP, it's well worth the time upgrading. I had a few issues with losing my preferences. Pretty common with any upgrade these days, but I had copies on another computer making it easy, if time consuming, to see what changes I'd made.
I recommend making screen shots of your important preferences, if you've done much customizing.
:cheers:
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Then I open these files in MS Paint and save them again to get rid of a bmp header issue that the latest version of Gimp has.
Thanks for the tip. I haven't run into that yet but forewarned is forearmed.
:cheers:
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The issue with any version of Gimp later than 2.06 is that it introduces a few extra bytes into the header that offsets the whole texture a few pixels to the right so the skin looks weird when viewed in the game. I mentioned this to Hitech and he updated both the offline game and the skin viewer so that it could read the latest Gimp bmps correctly. However the issue resurfaces when the skin is submitted and modified into HTC's "res" format that compresses the five submitted bmps down to two 4 channel image files.
So it is possible that your object textures are also displaying correctly when viewed prior to submission but are offset a few pixels after the terrain is converted to res format. You can see the effect I am talking about in this BBS thread (https://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,398613.msg5285579.html#msg5285579) I started on the issue.
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I think in general any of the software packages mentioned in this thread are easily capable of producing excellent skins, its far more important that the skinner is really familiar with the software and knows how to get the best out of it than which software is used. There are various advantages and disadvantages to each, but there are usually work rounds for these. PSP lacks 32-bit bmp compatibility and it is necessary to add Nvidia's normal mapper as an add-on but I reckon it has the easiest interface of any of the software I have tried for a complete beginner to get to grips with.
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I was thinking about that after my post. No, I haven't noticed the pixel shift in years but I think it may be because of the habits I learned to export the bitmap files. I have far more issues with reflections.
If you still have a skin source file that has shifted pixels, I'd be curious to hear if the offset shows when those files are placed in a terrain's texsrc folder and built. The terrain wouldn't need to be uploaded as your local build engine is the same one used to create the terrain on the server. If the corrected versions of the bitmaps then show correctly, it would provide a utility for testing different export settings in other programs and potentionaly shortening your process.
After I've create the particular texture, I create a 'New (layer) from Visible', then select the layer, Copy All and paste as a new GIMP image, Ctrl+Shift+V. I just don't bother to save this temporary 'file' to the HD. If saving a grayscale, I delete the alpha at this point, which you never want to do to your original source files. If a Diffuse, I then export the new unsaved image as a bitmap, but under Compatibility Options, I check Do not write color space information. The default Advanced Options are for 32 bits A8 R8 G8 B8. Some of the terrain related bitmaps can be either 24 or 32 bit, so there's that.
As you said, the best tool is the one you're most familiar with. I'd be lost with either of the two other popular programs mentioned.
:cheers:
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OK, so I just tried Easyscor's terrain experiment. I converted one of my skins to 32-bit using Gimp 2.10 without re-saving it with MS Paint. Then I copied the skin files into the "texsrcv" folder of the terrain currently loaded into the terrain editor and built the terrain. For those that don't know doing this makes that skin the default skin for that ride for everyone using that terrain. The new default skin displayed correctly in the terrain, with no visible texture offset.
This is maybe getting a bit off topic but here's a bit more history of this problem: When HT originally fixed the Gimp 2.10 texture offset issue in the offline game and skin viewer a few months ago I successfully uploaded a couple of P-38 skins which had been converted using Gimp 2.10 but was soon told by players that they looked odd. When I checked these two skins online they both had the offset issue, but the same skin files on my local PC looked fine both in the offline game and viewer. So I reconverted the two skins using Gimp 2.06 and resubmitted them which fixed the problem.
Since I don't consider using an obsolete and hard to find old version of Gimp for this job to be a good solution for new or returning skinners I revisited this problem later. To check the issue still existed I tried to upload a Mosquito skin I had converted using 2.10. However the submission page refused to accept it as the altered header size meant the file did not match the bit count the submission page was expecting. Which begs the question how was I able to upload those two P-38 skins before? Talking to HT about this it turned out that getting the submission page to accept a range of bit counts for the diffuse and normal files for every ride would not be a trivial task so there was now no way of even submitting a skin converted using 2.10. HT suggested re-saving the file with MS Paint. I was a bit dubious about this as Paint does not even have a "save as 32-bit bmp" option but it worked fine, the bmp header bit count was restored and my Mosquito skin displayed correctly online. While its a bit of a kludge this only has to be done once per skin and the good thing about this solution is that both Gimp 2.10 and MS Paint are free and easily available to everyone.
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The upside to using an older version of GIMP like I do is you eliminate the Paint step. I will look again at the version I'm using. If I had to deal with Paint even after using GIMP to convert I'd get supremely annoyed. :rofl
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From your point of view Vraciu there would be no benefit changing from v2.06 to v2.10 of Gimp. If you were using a later version already you would be running into problems uploading your skins.
The problem with 2.06 is really just for a new or returning skinner because they will have great trouble finding anywhere to actually download it these days. Also if someone is using Gimp to create their skins they are going to want to do it the latest version.
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From your point of view Vraciu there would be no benefit changing from v2.06 to v2.10 of Gimp. If you were using a later version already you would be running into problems uploading your skins.
The problem with 2.06 is really just for a new or returning skinner because they will have great trouble finding anywhere to actually download it these days. Also if someone is using Gimp to create their skins they are going to want to do it the latest version.
Here you go Greebo.......
https://download.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.0/ (https://download.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.0/)
All the Version 2 including 2.06.