BrickED - 3D Sprite Editor - b905 RELEASED!

[uzurpator]

Today I made the autosave and some performance improvements. I was also hunting the crash that prevented me from completing the work yesterday, but to no avail.

Anyhow - this is the generated sprite:

paris_house.PNG (4.85 KiB) Viewed 3156 times

And this is the model from which it was generated:

bricked_2.PNG (136.28 KiB) Viewed 3155 times

[Quast65]

Will it also incorporate shading?
Right now it looks to me that the grey sidewall has the same color in each view.

Edit:
It also doesnt seem to generate a consistent shape for the groundtile.

[uzurpator]

If by shading you mean lightning - then here:

cube_2.PNG (12.9 KiB) Viewed 3066 times

this is the same brick, but lit from a different direction, and, of course, it is palette correct.

If by shading, you mean the color gradients on a single wall, that is up to the artist. For now, it is a little tedious because the paint tool requires a click on every brick, but the painting operation is next on my TODO list, along with cube-selection. Darken/lighten tools are also planned.

The ground tile is a toughie, as I don't control how Vulkan, which means 'GPU' does it - as it is to rasterization to decide. If anything - it will require either fixes by hand or some sort of automation later in the pipeline.

[Quast65]

If by shading you mean lightning - then here:

Yes, I mean that

If by shading, you mean the color gradients on a single wall, that is up to the artist.

That is what I would call texturing.

The lighting is most important as it is plays a crucial role in how the game looks, good that that is in it.

The ground tile is a toughie, as I don't control how Vulkan, which means 'GPU' does it - as it is to rasterization to decide. If anything - it will require either fixes by hand or some sort of automation later in the pipeline

It could be handy then to just advise to not draw in a groundtile to begin with. So just the structure. It can then be placed on a groundtile (if needed) before coding. It maybe saves also some rendering time.

[luxtram]

Anyhow - this is the generated sprite:
paris_house.PNG

This is getting good. Very interesting. When do you plan to do a beta release to let other people to test it too?

Also why not GPL? It would give you a little better control over the code.

[uzurpator]

It could be handy then to just advise to not draw in a groundtile to begin with. So just the structure. It can then be placed on a groundtile (if needed) before coding. It maybe saves also some rendering time.

Everything is up to the user to decide. That being said - you are guaranteed to be either _on_ the tile or a pixel off, which is trivial to fix in post-production, or I"ll even make it done automatically. Speed is irrelevant, even 360 sprites of TTD size are done pretty much instantaneously.

This is getting good. Very interesting. When do you plan to do a beta release to let other people to test it too?

Download link to build 596 is in the first post. I do this as a side hustle to make some money - at some point - so I'm not going to open-source it. However, If I did, I certainly would not GPL it.

[Mrsunman]

Just tried it yesterday, seems pretty neat, although there is a list of some things i wish for, if that's OK :
- Able to draw lines and smooth pen curves (Currently you can only place one-at-a-time)
- Model imports from other sources? a converter?
- better sorting of the TTD pallete in the left, you could take note from the MS DOS pallete and how it's organized.

This project looks really good still! It'll be a great tool to make uniquely shaped buildings and such, as well as suppling their 4 views. cheers

[ebla71]

Download link to build 596 is in the first post.

Interesting and very helpful for a person who isn't precisely a big graphics artist like me - thank you very much.

Tried to draw something and then turn into a NewGRF, but nmlc complains

Code: Select all

nmlc ERROR: Image file "gfx/test_0.png": 8bpp image does not have a palette

although file "transport_tycoon_palette.png" is in the indicated folder "..\BrickED_build_596\content\palettes" and color selection looks like in the tutorial

[uzurpator]

- Able to draw lines and smooth pen curves (Currently you can only place one-at-a-time)

Stroke paint and stroke shade/texture is on my TODO.

- Model imports from other sources? a converter?

Considering what BrickED does - highly unlikely. Voxel formats might be importable with some work but straight meshes - that would require "pay me lots of euros" of effort.

- better sorting of the TTD pallete in the left, you could take note from the MS DOS pallete and how it's organized.

In 'content/palettes' there is a palette file which you can order any way you want. You can also create a copy of It and edit 'content/config/config.txt' to point the editor to a different palette file.

nmlc ERROR: Image file "gfx/test_0.png": 8bpp image does not have a palette

Ok - that is a problem I didn't forsee. nmlc seems to require indexed png images, while BrickED generates regular ones, albeit with colors limited to TTD palette. I'll work around it, but the library I'm using does not support indexed pngs.

[ebla71]

nmlc ERROR: Image file "gfx/test_0.png": 8bpp image does not have a palette

Ok - that is a problem I didn't forsee. nmlc seems to require indexed png images, while BrickED generates regular ones, albeit with colors limited to TTD palette. I'll work around it, but the library I'm using does not support indexed pngs.

It can kinda be fixed when you use a template *.png file for example in GIMP which already has the palette incorporated and then copy/paste the BrickED image into that.

However, when doing so I ran into another problem:

Code: Select all

nmlc warning: "summit_cross.nml", line 29: "gfx/summit_cross_2.png" at [x: 89, y: 2]: 136 of 2816 pixels (4%) are animated, but ANIM isn't in flags

The sprite still shows up when NewGRF is loaded, but with some very weird psychedelic animation colors

Strangely, the *.png itself does not show this (BrickED image is 2nd from left), only inside OTTD:

[ebla71]

It can kinda be fixed when you use a template *.png file for example in GIMP which already has the palette incorporated and then copy/paste the BrickED image into that.

However, when doing so I ran into another problem:

The sprite still shows up when NewGRF is loaded, but with some very weird psychedelic animation colors

Strangely, the *.png itself does not show this (BrickED image is 2nd from left), only inside OTTD

Additional information which might be relevant for bug tracking:

Export of sprites from BrickED was at significant magnification (10x or 100x) but then I had to scale the graphics back down in GIMP in order to match the template.

Could it be this added the strange "animation pixels"?!?

[uzurpator]

Shameless bump for build 604, with some improvements.

Additional information which might be relevant for bug tracking:

Export of sprites from BrickED was at significant magnification (10x or 100x) but then I had to scale the graphics back down in GIMP in order to match the template.

Could it be this added the strange "animation pixels"?!?

OTTD uses some colors in its palette for special-fx - such as water, translucency, or fire ( like on the oil refinery ). If those pixels find themselves on a sprite in random places, you will find the result to be a blinking mess. Since GIMP has no idea what kind of meaning pixels have, it used closest approximation of color from the available palette when it resizes the image from the 10/100x magnification to the proper size. This is not going to work.

For pixel-perfect and palette-correct results in quarter views, you need to compensate for deformations that come from the 3d perspective. There really isn't a good solution for this because you are working with 1-brick->1-pixel paradigm. In quarter view this 1-brick is more like 0.7 of a pixel - and since pixels cannot be merged.

If you take the 'paris-edited.ase_brk' model and render it as BrickED suggests in the window, you are going to get a pixelized mess of incorrect size:

paris_ed_mag.png (3.35 KiB) Viewed 2609 times

If you render it with sizes 32/60/32 for the quarter views, you are going to get a proper building:

paris_0.png (3.7 KiB) Viewed 2609 times

Note that those 32/60/32 is the _size_ of the model. This, effectively, undoes the 3d perspective deformations, and once 1brick->1px returns to be true. However this only works in quarter views, as in any other angle such transformation is not useful.

If you worked solely with 3-4-5 pixels per each brick, the result is going to look fine. Because OTTD is paletted in 8-bpp, you can't brute force 10x magnification and then scale down the result.

[uzurpator]

Bumping for the glory of Release 622. It took a little time to get it going as I needed to rework a part of my linear algebra when hunting for the erratic behavior of light. There are some other improvements, the release notes are as such:

Release Notes:
1. Added a possibility to press 'Del' key to erase selection.
2. Added a possibility to press 'Esc' to stop current operation ( like paint, place brick, etc )
3. Added focused brighten / darken brush
4. You can now drag the model view when placing bricks
5. Added an arrow showing the direction of light
6. Fixed an issue with light direction being erratic at extreme camera angles
7. Updated 'paris-edited' sample
8. Sprite generation window now remembers some values on subsequent openings

[uzurpator]

Bump, because Update:
DOWNLOAD: BrickED b645
Release Notes:
1. Various bugfixes, which are not visible to the user, but allow further expansion of the project
2. Sprite size info is now saved to the model file

[uzurpator]

Bump, because Update:
DOWNLOAD: BrickED v905
Release Notes:
1. Various bugfixes, which are not visible to the user, but allow further expansion of the project
2. You can now specify a color gradient for a brick. Here is an example of using this feature.

foobar.PNG (129.75 KiB) Viewed 420 times