Messed up skins: what happened?

Discuss the creation of various model formats for Quake engines, and related matters to modeling.
frag.machine
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Re: Messed up skins: what happened?

Post by frag.machine »

OneManClan wrote:
frag.machine wrote:OneManClan, be aware that even if you correctly picked a color from the Quake indexed palette, sometimes a tool in the painting program you're using may replace it by another color index, in the same palette.
Jeez :shock:
IKR ? First time I stumbled on this problem it took me a good time to realize what hell was going on.
OneManClan wrote:
frag.machine wrote:At least with older versions of Paint Shop Pro this happened to me more than once: I painted some skin area with the an indexed color (say, index 0) and later, when using the color replacer tool, the program silently replaced it with another color index that closely matched the RGB values (but using a completely different color index).
Ok so it's NOT a simple matter of 'use older software'? *sigh* Man, did those 14 year old boys in the 90s really have to navigate these obstacles to make their Quake skins? Anyway:
As I said, my experience is mostly old PSP versions and recently GIMP. I was never really a Photoshop fan, so I can't say if this is the case too, but ...
OneManClan wrote:
frag.machine wrote: a) create your skin using your preffered painting tool (Photoshop, PSP, GIMP, whatever). Don't worry about pants or shirts colors correctness at this stage: just focus on producing your 24-bpp texture;
b) save it in a engine-friendly format (TGA or PNG, I would advise against JPEG because they may look really bad on alias models);
Ok the phrasing of the following step confused me.
frag.machine wrote:c) from this TGA/PNG colormap texture,
I'm not sure if you're using 'colormap' and 'texture' as verbs or nouns.. or by 'texture' do you mean 'the skin'?
In graphic programming terms, the colormap is the array of pixels that describe the colors. Modern game engines don't use just color pixels in skins: usually you can have additional images to represent bumpmapping, luminosity, transparency and other effects (that's the case of DP and FTE, at least). Originally the Quake engine only supported colormap textures and in most cases it's the only required "component" to build a high resolution skin, so yeah, most of time colormap == texture (without the mentioned effects).
OneManClan wrote:
frag.machine wrote: create shirt and pants versions (basically removing the undesired parts and using grayscale to the visible parts),
:? Use eraser tool to remove the shirt and pants(?), and then.. 'using grayscale'? I don't follow. Bear in mind that I've drawn blood and goo running down a players chest 'over' the (team coloured) bits, though I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing.
An image speaks more than a thousand words, so here goes:

Image

Please note that this is for Darkplaces, others engines may (or may not) support this naming convention.

OneManClan wrote:
frag.machine wrote:d) go back to your first texture, scale down the color applying the Quake pallete to it;
I assume there isn't a 'scale down the color' stage before applying 'the Quake palette to it' Sorry for being pedantic, but please confirm, you mean 'apply the Quake palette, which will scale down the color'?
Just applying the Quake color palette should scale down the image to 256 colors, but again I am not a Photoshop user, so please confirm this with other sources.[/quote]
OneManClan wrote:
frag.machine wrote:e) knowing which color indexes represent the pants and shirt colors in the pallete, use them where appropriated;
f) save the resulting texture in a pallete indexed format (256 color BMP or PCX), so you won't incur in accidental color mismatch;
g) use the resulting image with your favorite utility to add/replace skins in the model.
Ok g) confused me. The 'resulting image' is the skin itself, yea? How do you mean use [my new skin] with my favourite 'utility' to 'add/replace' skins in the model itself? [EDIT: Oh, I get it, you mean to use QME (or whatever) to put the skin on the model. This mod 'Doomface' involves changing skins dynamically on the same model, ie these are all player skins, and will be changed multiple times (as required) during gameplay. An earlier prototype stored all the skins in the mdl, but Ezquake can't load models with over 100 skins
Correct, QME, QuArK 4.07 or any other tool of your preference.

I have no knowlegde of any engine that allows to load/unload skins dynamically. Back in the good ol' days there was this skin pack player.mdl with 250 different skins working nicely on vanilla GLQuake. I assume the problems you found are related to memory usage due to the number of *high resolution* skins you're using, right ?
I know FrikaC made a cgi-bin version of the quakec interpreter once and wrote part of his website in QuakeC :) (LordHavoc)
Spike
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Re: Messed up skins: what happened?

Post by Spike »

frag.machine wrote:I have no knowlegde of any engine that allows to load/unload skins dynamically.
QuakeWorld player skins have always been external to the mdl itself, and thus dynamically loaded.
So instead of 'progs/player.mdl_0.tga' its 'skins/somenamehere.tga', with 'stuffcmd(self, "skin somenamehere\n")' (or equivelent) instead of 'self.skin=0'
Everything else including the _shirt and _pants part of the file name is the same.

Traditionally with QW player skins .pcx is used (with the pcx palette ignored and assumed to match the quake palette). So basically the same as you'd find within an mdl, except external and thus individually (down)loadable.
The pcx files are typically padded slightly, allowing for people to draw their name in there so people know who made it. The engine chops off the extra at load time so that it matches the size specified in the mdl. This does not apply to tga images, which are not allowed any such padding (thereby allowing higher resolutions).
ceriux
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Re: Messed up skins: what happened?

Post by ceriux »

try this

http://www.mediafire.com/?1m2idht0n1sdpsi

i just opened it in photoshop and indexed it to the quake pallette
OneManClan
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Re: Messed up skins: what happened?

Post by OneManClan »

Hey Ceriux!
ceriux wrote:try this
http://www.mediafire.com/?1m2idht0n1sdpsi
i just opened it in photoshop and indexed it to the quake pallette
'tf_scout01.bsp'? [EDIT: I meant 'tf_scout01.bmp'] I think you might have been working with the wrong file.

Are you sure you used the 'tf_scout32.psd' file in the zip I posted? It should have 3 layers of blood and 1 of puke.
Last edited by OneManClan on Mon Mar 11, 2013 6:25 am, edited 1 time in total.
ceriux
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Re: Messed up skins: what happened?

Post by ceriux »

it should be a bmp not bsp.

it is a bmp. bmps are bitmaps, its the file type you use when importing them into a model.

oh i didnt realize there were layers ill get to work on the others.

here are the other layers http://www.mediafire.com/?o7de7ozqtn5c7q3
OneManClan
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Re: Messed up skins: what happened?

Post by OneManClan »

ceriux wrote:it should be a bmp not bsp.
it is a bmp. bmps are bitmaps, its the file type you use when importing them into a model.
Sry, I meant 'bmp'.
ceriux wrote:oh i didnt realize there were layers ill get to work on the others.
here are the other layers http://www.mediafire.com/?o7de7ozqtn5c7q3
Well.. I:

1. Opened one of the files in GIMP
2. Export as pcx

And... it opened NON-MESSED UP! Sure, the face was 'teamcoloured', but the skin wasn't 'messed-up'!? I'm almost finished re-painting all the skins in GIMP, so it's academic now, BUT I'd rather use Photoshop in the future, and still don't understand what I did wrong (if anything)...

Could you please tell me exactly what you did?
ceriux
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Re: Messed up skins: what happened?

Post by ceriux »

all i did was open it in photoshop , then indexed the color using a (custom pallete "quakes pallette") then saved as bmp


image>mode>index>custom
OneManClan
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Re: Messed up skins: what happened?

Post by OneManClan »

ceriux wrote:all i did was open it in photoshop , then indexed the color using a (custom pallete "quakes pallette") then saved as bmp
image>mode>index>custom
image>mode>index

Q: Did you get a dialogue box saying "merge layers?" (OK, and cancel)?

>custom
ceriux wrote:I used custom, selected the quake palette, and saved as BMP (the only options were 8 bit).
Hmm.. I did this ( looked good ), then I opened it in GIMP ( still looked good ), and exported as *.pcx (still looked good ), loaded it in quake ... and....

:(

STILL got the messed up skins! I'll test tomorrow to see if this skin will work by putting it into a mdl., as opposed to what I'm doing which is 'setting the player skin' dynamically. I'll report back, there must be an explanation for this. Thanks!
ceriux
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Re: Messed up skins: what happened?

Post by ceriux »

when you change the format of an image to something that's not compatible with layers you'll get that message. also maybe gimp is messing up the palette index table? have you tried using another tool to convert to pcx? maybe try fimg, i think it can convert to pcx and automatically saves and loads using the quake pal.
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