Acifer

The sling is too fast, too. So I had to change the A4/A4E animations for classic BG2. Now everything looks, feels and works as it is supposed to. Thank you all!

That sounds great! Thank you both for your help. Is there any chance of adapting this for the classic version as well (as the RNDBASE.BMPs exist there, too), or should I stick to the EE and leave the animations for BGT / ToB untouched?

I am trying to add the fomorian giant's throwing boulder ability to BG2(EE). However, the animation and the projectile do not match. The projectile starts too "early" (see the attached gif below). I created a projectile using the boulder from IWD2. As a launcher, I created a short bow with the lowest weapon speed (like the one used in IWD2 as launching vehicle). But that doesn't seem to change the starting point of the launching projectile in BG2. Does anyone know how to delay the launching of the projectile and sync it with the animation? Otherwise I'd have to change the animation sequence. That would be a lot of work...

It's great to hear that you enjoyed the mod! While Jastey will certainly have more to say about the majority of the issues, I would like to comment on two things that I was involved with Thank you! I am glad you liked that encounter. The area was supposed to be a little sidetrack apart from all the other quests. Originally I had not planned to reveal the secret about the dead mage and leave it to the imagination of the player, but since several players have already asked about it, I will now put more thoughts into what happened in this room. If there are any suggestions, I would be happy to include them. This is a bug in the Infinity Engine regarding areas that use 24bit lightmaps. I have changed the lightmaps to 8bit so that this should no longer occur in further versions of the mod.

I'm not a legal expert, so I can only add my two cents here. I've been active in all things D&D for a very long time, and I've never, ever encountered any problems with using text from the AD&D sourcebooks (in a reasonable manner, of course). Entire communities (the Forgotten Realms Wiki, the Candlekeep Forum) use this source material to fuel their site. What I have encountered several times, however, are copyright issues when using or altering graphics from these sourcebooks. Sorry for the misunderstanding with the link above, I thought it was only about the texts, not the graphics. Perhaps WotC's fan content policy could shed more light on this: https://company.wizards.com/en/legal/fancontentpolicy

Looks fantastic! This will be a great addition to the game. The only thing that might cause problems is the use of graphics by the original artists (in this case the Hobgoblin image by Tony DiTerlizzi). The b/w colour tone of the image looks great though, and it would be a shame to have to drop the image due to copyright issues.

Moving the coordinates of the "Close location" (offsets b980 and b982 in NI) to a point "outside" the chamber should be sufficient. Maybe move the "Open location" a little bit more far away from the door, too. That should make the opening point of the door unreachable if you're inside the room.

I could suggest another option: the door should only be able to be opened from the outside. If the whole party is in the room, there is no way out. But if a party member is waiting outside, there is still the possibility to open the door. This doesn't prevent cheesy tactics, but it could work well from a role-playing perspective.

I too would love to see a bestiary ingame! Also, it would be a great opportunity for modders to add their own stuff. I don't think it would be a copyright issue, since all the material has been publicly available on the internet for a long time. A good site that lists the original descriptions from the AD&D 2nd Edition sourcebooks: http://www.mojobob.com/roleplay/monstrousmanual/

Thanks! The models are not game models either. However, due to time constraints, I use some licensed models and textures from commercial 3D-asset sites.

Thank you! I have imported the animations from NWN using 3dsMax. Since it was a long time ago, I would have to search where I saved the corresponding files, then I could create a related tutorial. Thanks! The area graphics are not taken from a game. I created them on my own in a 3D program.

A good way to add water overlays in new area graphics Areas that contain water look beautiful, but are among the most difficult graphics to create for the Infinity Engine. Animated water is generated in the Infinity Engine using overlays. The process to add overlays is very time-consuming, giving mixed results. There were two ways to create these overlays: 1. paint overlays in IETME 2. create them in DLTCEP using polygons. Both procedures are not quite ideal. It takes an incredibly long time and the results are suboptimal. I create my water overlays using a third method, which I would like to introduce here. So if anyone is using 3D renderings or Photoshop to create new area graphics that contain water, I hope I can share a quick and perfect-looking approach with you. What you need NearInfinity DLTCEP IETME (Infinity Engine Tileset Map Editor) A graphics editor of your choice (like Photoshop or Gimp) Your 3D Rendering suite Step 1 - use object masks This is an area I created for my Skyfire modification that contains a hell lot of water. It's Lost Ahjuutal, a city that is slowly sinking into the Spider Swamp. Preparing all the mangrove leaves for the water overlays using the old methods would be nearly impossible and an absolute nightmare. However, every 3d-rendering-suite and every graphics editor has the possibility to create object masks. In this case, I selected the objects representing water and rendered a black and white mask: Step 2 - floodfill the water Using Photoshop, cut out all graphics in the area that do contain water using your object mask. Place another layer under the cut-out area graphic and fill it with a uniform colour. I chose the RGB colour 255.0.0 (pure red). Step 3 - create your tis-file Save this area graphic and create a tis file with it. Open DLTCEP, load the area you want to edit and create an overlay. Create a small polygon in DLTCEP for this overlay and save the area. How to do this is described here: http://www.simpilot.net/~sc/dltcep/index.htm Step 4 - add the water tilesets Open IETME, select the overlay and select "Add/Delete Tiles". Now you have to select every tile that contains the red colour. Save the area using IETME and make sure you also save the Tis-file. Step 5 - export the tileset Open the tis-file in NI, it should look like this: As you can see, IETME has attached all tiles that contain water to the bottom of the tileset. Export this tis-file as png. Step 6 - remove the floodfilled water Open your exported tis-file in Photoshop. Place the original area graphic containing water in the upper part in a new layer. Select the red colour using a colour mask and delete it from the png image. Save the file as a png. Step 7 - convert your final tis-file In NI, go to "tools -> convert -> image to tis", select the png you just created and save it as a tis file under the original tis name. If you take a look at your area ingame you will see perfectly matched water without any annoying edges:

Yes I do! At the moment I am very busy with another modification, which I will announce in the near future. I am currently working on the suggestions of my closed beta testers. I hope to introduce this mod soon, when the closed beta-testing phase will be finished. Skyfire has to take a step back for now, but as soon as the other mod has been announced for open beta I will finish the work on Skyfire. For the Grabmal mod I updated some areas some time ago, but it's up to Jastey to continue on that project.

Thank you so much for this mod - I've been waiting for something like this for years! The denoising emphasizes the painted look of the games in a very pleasant way. Can't wait to install the new graphics on my iPad!

That's a good point. When I created the encounter I didn't pay much attention to the lore, I just wanted to add two new areas from scratch that included an opponent for a higher level party. But adding a bit more lore sounds very intriguing. If you have any suggestions, let me know!

PS BAM is a killer tool for bam postproduction. I recently tried to enhance my XDR Dragon animations I created some time ago, and PS BAM reduced the size of the 567 bam files from 543 MB to 11.4 MB! Not only did it compress the bams, it optimized each frame in every possible way, reducing the size of many bams that only contained transparent frames from 743KB to zilch (1KB). Awesome!

Unfortunately I switched AA off by setting the filter size to 0. The creature model has sharp edges, but the soft edges of the shadow occur because the shadow filter uses a transparency fade; it gets more transparent at the edges. You can get rid of that that by adjusting the Color Ramp filter I guess. Another reason: if you normally choose a unique shadow color, this colored shadow will also be cast on the object, causing ugly artifacts on the object. Since Artemius has managed to separate the coloring process of the object and the ground plane (which catches the shadow), there should be no need for further adjustment if everything is set up in Blender as it should be. I should point out that I have little experience with Blender, but I did render dozens of NWN animations using 3DS Max a few years ago and am quite familiar with the issues and obstacles discussed in this thread. I'm totally impressed with how @Artemius I has put everything together so far. My experience is that you should put all your efforts into creating a well-functioning rendering setup (Blender file) and try to use as few different editors (like GIMP) as possible, since you might have to re-render and re-import your animations quite often at the beginning. EDIT: @Sam.: That sounds like just the tool we need - great! It's good to know that there are good modding tools out there these days that make life easier.

I think you are almost there. I just rendered the golem from your blender template file. First, I disabled anti-aliasing by setting the filter size to "0" ...then I adjusted the shadow color of the shadow catcher material to assign a unique, distinctive color: I do not have access to NWN files at the moment, so the rendered golem looks a little wonky without textures: I used BamWorkshop II for the conversion and assigned that "red" color as a shadow color: That way, you have a transparent shadow ingame: As you can see there are still blurred green lines around the shadow. I guess you have to tinker around with the settings of the shadow catching material. Using BamWorkshop II is very time-consuming, however, so I hope there is another tool that can handle shadow colors and create a 256-bit palette bam. EDIT: Here's the final result without blurred lines so far:

You will receive the best results by assigning a unique shadow color to your shadow catchter material, for example a strong red (RGB 255.0.0). BAMWorkshop 2 used a pink color to determine where shadows are present. That way the shadows are assigned to palette entry #1 (the 2nd palette colour) and there are no "false" shadows in the darker portions of the creature. @argent77: Is there a way to tell NI which color should be considered as the shadow color?

Awesome! The first animation looks like a Stone giant.

Thank you so much! I've been waiting for a workaround like this for ages.

Good work! And thanks for sharing your .blend file, it's especially useful because of the decent shadow catching node you created. May I ask how you managed to attach weapons? I couldn't find the corresponding mdl files with NWNExplorer.

This looks great! Adding new animations from NWN would be absolutely fantastic and sharing a step-by-step guide would be awesome. I tried to convert a couple of animations using blender but switched back to 3DS Max because of some issues I could not solve. So I have a couple of questions: - How did you import the mdl file? - How is your camera setup? - Did you manage to create a proper working shadow? This is the greatest obstacle using blender in my opinion.

Just a quick note: Guido Henkel, who created this game, was the first producer of Planescape:Torment.

That's very helpful! Thank you very much. I wonder why there a so many doubled animation cycles. Maybe they were meant for some additional animations that had to be cut out? Yes, I am working on a new dragon animation, but don't expect too much as I am not a 3D modeling / animation expert at all.