so sorry if you using my units in the wind age for all this time of TWA betas was so unpleasant for you
Don't get me wrong point, the soldier you made for us PLAYS really well - he's in fact one of our favorite melee units. I just wish he was a little higher res and didnt have that blueish outline.
The animations also made no sense when you gave it to me originally, so all the melee attacks you see were actually hobbled together from various non-adjacent frames.
even you aren't that close to see the areas that can be improved.
Not quite sure what you mean by this.. I zoom in a lot. I can quickly zoom back out at a moments notice by hitting H then holding zoom out. But then again you could argue that there's added incentive to zooming in when your units are higher res.
To both you and carlinho: Graydon showed me the technique to get rid of anti-aliasing so I think i'll describe it as succinctly as I can right here:
Alright, to prepare you're going to need a little plugin for photoshop that allows you to see and interact with the alpha maps in .PNG renders. Unless you're using another image type that already has an alpha channel, in which case you won't need the plugin.
http://hl.udogs.net/files/Uploads/%20Us ... ds/Png.8bi
Put that thing in the following folders in photoshop:
Program files/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop (CS2 for me)/Plug-Ins/File Formats.
If you havent used alpha channels before, while in photoshop go to the "windows" pulldown menu and choose channel so it's active. Youll see "RGB, red, green and blue", and if your image contains an alpha, below those will be "alpha".
You will want to make your render settings include a "Mask" (another term for alpha) in whatever program you are using, and the following formats usually contain alpha: TGA (targa), PNG, and TIFF. Although tiff is huge.
Also, I cant stress this enough: if you use this anti-alias method, make sure the background is BLACK. This will give you the best result. And yes, I do plan on telling you how to make the background blue for the final bitmaps. But the black is necessary for the visual quality of this technique.
Now, once youve got your images ready and you are sure that they contain alphas, you'll want to make a batch action of the following steps:
Once you have one of your unit renders open (doesnt matter which one, you wont actually be saving any changes onto it, you will only have it open in order to construct the batch action), youll want to go to "Windows/Actions" and hit the file button that starts recording a new batch action. I call mine "anti alias removal".
Step 1: left click once on the "alpha" portion of the channels window, and you will see a black and white representation of the opacity (transparency) in the picture.
Step 2: Go to "Mode", and then "adjustments" and choose "brightness/contrast". Turn the contrast up to 100. Full contrast, meaning only black and white will appear instead of shades of gray in the alpha channel. (NOTE: you will want to make a second batch action with all the steps here, but instead of 100 youll want to change it to 99. This is for use with body parts - sometimes if an image is too small, using 100 will cause the batch action to break and stop working. I have two actions: anti alias removal, and anti alias removal for body parts. All other steps will be exactly the same, just make sure the one for units is set to 100 contrast, and the one for body parts is 99 contrast)
Step 3: Now, you'll want to hold control and left click on the alpha channel in the channel window. This should highlight only the white portion of the alpha image.
Step 4: Keeping the white portion selected, youll want to click once on the "RGB" portion of the channel window. This will keep your selection from the alpha but allow you to work in the colors of the image.
Step 5: Go to "Select/Modify/Contract" and set it to contract by 1 pixel.
Step 6: Go to "Select/Inverse" to inverse the selection. Now you have the background and one pixels width of the image selected all around its edges. Now, you want to set your background color to whatever you normally use for bitmaps (I use 240/100/100, AKA true blue, which is what bungie uses). Make sure you SET the background color and that it is recorded, otherwise it may not be true blue every time (if youve been working on something else, itll simply use whatever background color is currently being used).
Step 7: hit delete. You should now see a blue-backgrounded unit render and no fuzzy blue edges. From this step I usually go to "image/mode/indexed color" and choose either "local(perceptual)" or "local(selective)". I then record a "save as" command, and choose "bitmap", and tell it to go into a folder I use (I call it render dump). Make sure you dont change the name of the saved file - or else it will always save every processed image as the same name, and an entire batch will constantly overwrite itself to a single file, wasting a lot of time.
So, in summary: Set alpha channel contrast to 99 or 100, control-select the alpha in the channels window, contract by 1 pixel, inverse selection, choose background color, and hit delete. Then save-as without altering the name (dont worry if it says "copy" at the end, dont alter anything about the name) into a folder.
Now, you will have created the batch action, so you should make sure you hit "close" and if it asks you to save, say no. Then hit "stop recording" in the batch action window. That way, when youre processing your images, instead of it bringing up 200 images and never getting rid of them after processing, it will only pop up 1 at a time, and close once the action is completed.
Anyways, if there are any questions about this method, let me know. It's worked for over 28 units i've created like a charm.
