Some questions about ship graphics

[steelwing]

OK, I'm working on a playership mod, and I need some help with the graphics.

1. I've done all the facings already. I rendered them in Blender, and they look quite lovely. I just need to work out how to do the mask graphics. Anyone have any hints on making masks for a playership?
2. The HUD graphics (shields, armor, etc). As far as I can tell, only the shield and armor status can be customized. Is that correct? Or can I customize any other parts?

[Drako Slyith]

1. Go to paint.net, or paint if you don't have paint.net. Save your rendering under the name for the mask, then use paint can to fill white into all the renderings. It may leave some jagged edges, but if you want to be sure it doesn't use the pencil to fix bad areas. Wolfy does fancy transparency stuff but I don't know how to do that.
2. I don't know, I've never made a playership.

[digdug]

Turn off all the lights in the rendering scene (easier if you kept them in a separate layer), replace all textures with a simple black one, change background colour to white and ... Re-render all your frames

Then at the end just fire up GIMP and make the frames negative, so that the ship is white and background black, tada, you have your mask!

[Bobby]

What I do is render each frame and paste it into gimp, arranging it immediately, and putting them all on one layer. Then select the background, no anti-aliasing, not fuzzy, 0 threshold (ie just the flat black surrounding the ship), copy it, and past into a new white layer(the mask). The edges can be a little jagged(depending on original images) but it only requires rendering the facings once. Be sure not to render each frame as a jpeg initially, else you will have problems. Use the highest quality image you can and save down later. One step I missed in my early ships was to open up the mask in paint after it's done and save it as monochrome bmp to cut the file size.

[Atarlost]

What I've been doing lately is render as png with transparency and get someone with paint.net to turn the alpha channel into an 8 bit greyscale bitmap because Gimp won't. If you already have paint.net this is probably the best way to go. There are arena wall bugs with images using masks, but if it's not a playership there's really no downside and there aren't jaggies.

[digdug]

Be sure not to render each frame as a jpeg initially

yeah, render and save everything in a lossless format (BMP for example)

save in jpeg only the final image

[steelwing]

Turn off all the lights in the rendering scene (easier if you kept them in a separate layer), replace all textures with a simple black one, change background colour to white and ... Re-render all your frames

Then at the end just fire up GIMP and make the frames negative, so that the ship is white and background black, tada, you have your mask!

This worked! Thanks, digdug!
Now, for my second question...Just how much of the HUD can have custom graphics?