I have been experiencing problems with ship graphics that I am making in that the exhaust images don't follow the ship's exhaust ports correctly. They appear to be beneath the ship, so they get out of alignment.
I think it must be because of the rotational axis of my models; but it might be the perspective angle of the camera playing tricks.
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I've been using the exact center of the bounding box as the rotational axis, with the ship placed at 0,0,0 on top of a black square backround.
Is that the way you made your ship facings, George?
I'm using the camera and light placements that you posted a while back.
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I could make the whole image window to the size (in pixels) I needed for a ship, but that might really foul up the camera and lighting angles, and cause some geometric distortions...
The exhaust problem is a function of the size of the ship. The larger the ship, the more pronounced the offset becomes. It isn't really noticeable until around mediumships3 size (96x96) or greater, but most requests I've gotten are for bigger ships.
Ship rotation and exhaust images
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- Commonwealth Pilot
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yeah i noticed this on the Angelus, and i thaught it was originally my Problem..but i have since decided that i still have a prett good end result. however i notice this only when the ship is ponting at the corneers of the screen.
"The world of reality has it's limits, the world of imagination is boundless..."
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Most likely this is just a limitation of the way the game paints the exhaust.
As you know, the camera is not directly over the center of rotation, therefore the path traced by any point on a ship is not an exact circle (rather, it is an ellipse).
Unfortunately, the math I use to rotate the position of the exhaust assumes a circle.
Someday I'm going to fix this either by doing more complicated math or by optionally supporting manual adjustments to the exhaust position.
As you know, the camera is not directly over the center of rotation, therefore the path traced by any point on a ship is not an exact circle (rather, it is an ellipse).
Unfortunately, the math I use to rotate the position of the exhaust assumes a circle.
Someday I'm going to fix this either by doing more complicated math or by optionally supporting manual adjustments to the exhaust position.