Was there a way to get a projectile FX to look like a beam? I've got a power in mind that is a beam, but I want it to not have a high accuracy, and last I remembered beams always hit. I'm working in :ff:, so FFVTTR FX examples probably won't help me that much.
Do you want a beam-looking FX that can be dodged? Or just an attack that can miss?
Beams can miss, they just cannot be dodged.
If you want a beam attack that can miss, then you can just make a beam attack and give it a low accuracy.
If you want a beam-looking projectile, then that might be an issue since it seems projectiles are spawned as an independent entity while beams are a continuous texture. I'm not sure it's possible, but I could be wrong.
Somebody has done an attack that is either a beam that acts like a projectile, or a projectile that acts like a beam. I can't look in the game and see to be sure.
I believe you're thinking of the Flying Melee attacks, right? The FX Benton uses in his mods?
That's the opposite of what PG wants, unfortunately. Those are beams that look like melee attacks.
Unless you mean a different FX?
I seem to remember installing FX incorrectly, beam for projectile, and it didn't work right, but I'm not 100% positive.
Quote from: daglob on June 24, 2019, 10:41:43 PM
Somebody has done an attack that is either a beam that acts like a projectile, or a projectile that acts like a beam. I can't look in the game and see to be sure.
That's what I was remembering also, but I couldn't remember which it was, either, and haven't had time to fire up the FF computer to check.
I'll have to look into the beam accuracy. I just thought they always hit. I suppose the Dodge mechanism comes into play if it *would* have hit, then the dodge chance kicks in. Never really thought about it before.
You can use projectile FX for beams, of that I'm sure. Same for direct, though you can use that for either.
No, sadly, you can't dodge a beam at all. However, they can miss because of low accuracy, as Spyder said. I'd fix that, if I could, though it makes sense for a beam to be HARDER to dodge.
I have a feeling the answer to this will be a negative (no pun intended), but is there a way to have an FX end nif display a negative image of what's been hit? I'm wanting to do a dalek beam attack, and it classically shows the target in a negative (and sometimes with a visible skeleton). Any ideas?
Not being familiar with the Doctor Who series (yes, my head is held down in shame), do you have a visual reference of what you're looking for?
Early on they would have just the victim in the scene and over expose the entire thing: http://neiloseman.com/five-simple-but-effective-camera-tricks/genesis_of_the_daleks_the_first_extermination/ (http://neiloseman.com/five-simple-but-effective-camera-tricks/genesis_of_the_daleks_the_first_extermination/)
Later on, they started isolating the effect to just be around the victim: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-r-uIF1nN2qQ/U4zlwyqyRDI/AAAAAAAAOGM/nZmoRzx5ulE/s1600/dalek6.jpg (http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-r-uIF1nN2qQ/U4zlwyqyRDI/AAAAAAAAOGM/nZmoRzx5ulE/s1600/dalek6.jpg)
At some point they started adding a skeleton to the effect, but I'm not partial to it, and I'm sure that will be way harder to do as an FX. I'll be fine if it's just a rough rectangular effect that is a quick negative of whatever it hits.
Hmmm... Well, I do have a few ideas, they're far from perfect, and I don't know if I could pull them off, but if time allows, I'll look into this. It seems interesting.
Quote from: Panther_Gunn on July 15, 2019, 12:15:51 AM
I have a feeling the answer to this will be a negative (no pun intended), but is there a way to have an FX end nif display a negative image of what's been hit? I'm wanting to do a dalek beam attack, and it classically shows the target in a negative (and sometimes with a visible skeleton). Any ideas?
you could make a "negative" skin of the mesh that is taking damage, and use the nif+skin to make an effect...but you have to edit the original nif on nifskope anyway, to delete all stuff that is not needed. ...maybe by making an FX from scratch, you could play with lightning to get some area lightning effect that applies in a radius to objects and characters, i do not know if you could get what you want though
I've had a couple more thoughts on this. At first I was thinking I could settle with a translucent black oval to kind of cover the target. I don't know if it could be made to cycle between black & almost white for a flashing effect, but I also don't know if I'll like how it looks, either. I was going to look at the astral projection FX for Dr. Strange to see just how translucent it was & how it was done.
Then I got to thinking, an oval is kind of like a blob, which is what the low detail shadows are, so could we somehow get it to put the target's shadow (character shaped in the high detail setting, an oval/blob in low detail) over the target briefly? Is this even a realistic idea? I have no idea where to even begin to look for something like this.
Can you use one that reads from different textures? I don't know if a SFX will do that. I've done a couple, but I always have to read the instructions.
While not exactly what I was going for, this is kind of what I was thinking of for an end nif.
(https://i.imgur.com/lC3QX0u.jpg)
Or maybe something like this?
(https://i.imgur.com/yV7aQla.jpg)
I'm grasping at straws here though.
Not a bad idea, might work.
I only half understand what you're thinking of here but I'm reading a lot of ideas about how to pull off texture effects. Here's a little cheat sheet I use for some of the extended effect types tied to textures. This is for Max but the current versions of Nifskope are capable of this stuff and it's pretty straightforward.
https://sites.google.com/site/saidenstorm/part6extendedanimationexports (https://sites.google.com/site/saidenstorm/part6extendedanimationexports)
Nice find SA. This could be quite useful to anyone using NifSkope. :thumbup:
Fun stuff. I used the scroll function last night to make an animated barber shop poll for kicks. I also still endorse getting a hold of the game Knight Rider 2 somehow. It's also Netimmerse but used a much different directory system then Irrational did but the nifs pretty much take advantage of everything under the sun that can be done with the container type, there's a lot of stuff to learn by opening them in Nifskope and just checking out how things work.
Going to extend this so I won't have to come back to it, when I say that I've said before we're all doing everything wrong. Added to that so did Irrational but they did it on purpose. They didn't figure we would have the ability to manipulate Netimmerse and we really didn't at the start of things. They wanted modding to be easy for anyone so they made it so that the files pointed to common media types like image files for example. So even the tools they let out don't actually do Nif correctly. Nif is "container" as I said. One file is meant to hold and maintain everything from the model data, animation and even textures. That's why Nifskope has an export texture function. In KR2 for example you won't find any texture files in the directories, they're stored inside the nifs. Hence why I suggest that game. The KITT car alone contains so many different things nif can do it's obscene from opening doors, rocket launchers and guns that can pop out of the car, window glass and metal special texture assignments, shading and lighting data dependent on the car (different inside of it), the eye beam light and so forth. Most of this can be carried over to our stuff.
Likewise I always suggest tearing apart FF files. Specifically chicken, Tombstone, Eye Of The Reich, the waterfountain that the the statue rests on and Bachite have cool stuff going I've never seen us use normal. The chicken uses a stencil map to create the illusion of feathers. Tombstone has special animated lightning bolts. EOTR has glass texturing as well animated 3d model bubbles. Bachite has a particle emmiter built right into the main mesh so the effects will follow the track rot of the body (I've yet to figure out how to reproduce this) as well a built in ground impact model. Screwing around and breaking copies of things is your friend in short.