64 stock ships rotated to 40 facings

[digdug]

I make the mask by rendering it. I place a black texture on the mesh and then change the background to white. Render and invert the image to get a perfect mask. I then merge the frames and finally reduce the colours from 24bit to 8bit.

[PM]

I place a black texture on the mesh and then change the background to white.

Does this mean change the textures of the entire model to black, and render the model on a white background?

[digdug]

yes, and turn off the lights in the rendering scene and you get a perfect mask

[EDIT]
I have to admit that recently I have been using a feature in Bryce that automatically make masks. But the method I just described works in any 3D software.

[PM]

This sounds confusing. After I load the model, I need to...
1) Change all textures to black so that model appears as a silhouette.
2) Remove all lights (point and background?)
3) Render all-black model on white background.

[digdug]

sorry, I'm not a real expert in 3D graphics.
However you just described exactly what I do.

1) Change all textures to black so that model appears as a silhouette.
2) Remove all lights (point and background?)
3) Render all-black model on white background.

Then at the end invert the final image so that you get a white ship mask on black background.

[PM]

Thanks. This confirms what I suspected. Also...

finally reduce the colours from 24bit to 8bit.

Does this mean convert from RGB mode to grayscale?

[Aury]

I just skip making sepparate mask renders and simply render a single png with transparency, which I then use my spritesheet assembler to generate the ship image and the mask for it.

[PM]

To digdug: How did you apply the Oracus logo on the ship model? Did you use materials or something else?

[digdug]

I used a single texture with 2 layers.
Bryce allows to build textures with up to 3 layers, as you can see, I'm using the penitent logo over the stained metal texture. (I'm also using the darksteel plate for bump mapping, so that the large image looks better)
The stained metal is applied parametrically and autoscaled, while the logo is applied as "object top". I needed to tweak a bit the size and position of the logo to get it right.

About the other settings, I just made it specular and metallic, so that it's bright and shiny and there is also 5% ambient light so that the shadows are not completely black but they are slightly dark grey.