26 replies to this topic

[pinuck]

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND: FS Mod

I was having fun playing Serpiko's Close Encounters of the Third Kind table, and got wondering about how to do an animated roto-target in VP. After doing some tests, I asked Serpiko, and he was nice enough again to give me permission to mod another of his tables.

But the first step was just figuring out how the roto target was laid out and worked.



After a lot of googling, I never managed to find a full picture of it, but using a bunch of pics of part of it, and the code from Scapino's FP table, I eventually confirmed the layout. So I then drew it in Illustrator: (note: a day later, Serpiko gave me a pic of the whole wheel, so the moral of the story is to ask for help first!)

The rectangle at the center top of this is the only area that will be visible, but i started by drawing the whole wheel, figuring i'd decide how i'm gonna make it work later…



I then moved it to Photoshop, to try and figure out how to make it looks like it was spinning, using the smallest number of frames possible. Based on all the videos I've watched, it only spins counter-clockwise.

I still had to keep the target as the full circle in order to do radial blurs of it in Photoshop.

It has 15 arms on it, so dividing the 360° of it into 15 gives us 24° per target. So i did a radial blur on all the targets and made three versions of it, with an 8° progressive rotation of the wheel on each. So that would make three "spinning" frames, that could seamlessly loop and look like it's continually spinning, as long as I loop those 3 frames.

Here's what a few of them looked like, seeing the whole wheel.



After getting some good advice from Uncle Willy, I decided to do the whole viewable wheel as one drop wall. After listing all the permutations of how the wheel could be positioned, it turns out there's only 11 unique target combinations, even though there are 15 arms. So the plan was to crop to the viewable area I need, and make 11 pics for the possible combinations of the wheel itself, and 3 pics for the spinning animation.



I took 14 pics and put them on drop walls on top of each other, and scripted them to come up and down as necessary, using a timer and some custom code.

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, and you can see it kind of crudely in this iPhone video:



Next up: some Photoshop tricks...

Edited by pinuck, 09 August 2012 - 05:42 AM.

[oldskoolgamer]

Man bravo! That seriously looks awesome! Very nice work man!

[The Loafer]

That looks great!

[gy_ro]

Great Photoshop/Illustrator skills, it looks really awesome. You certainly made two points there; as few pictures as possible and asking for help even if you think you can do it on your own. Everyone has a different point of view and some of them are as good or better as your own thoughts. (and certainly noobs as I am can learn a lot out of these examples)

Edited by gy_ro, 09 August 2012 - 08:58 AM.

[serpiko]

i am the tester. ....
I can tell you that the game is really good.
nice mod my friend.

[thewool]

This looks amazing pinuck, you have a real talent in that software. The video clips looks real, I can think of no better compliment than that!

Looking forward to playing the full mod

p.s. many cheers to serpiko for the original work

edit: just out of curiousity, are you making any other changes for the FS version?

Edited by thewool, 09 August 2012 - 11:08 AM.

[unclewilly]

Table plays really nice.
The rototarget does look absolutely real.

Awesome job

[Slydog43]

WOW really looks real. Great job, Thanks.

[SpiffyRob]

Another great step forward. You've done it again, pinuck.

[settingsons]

Incredibly creative with impeccable attention to detail Pinuck. The results more than pay off. Thanks!

Edited by settingsons, 09 August 2012 - 07:54 PM.

[maceman]

This is going to be amazing!!! Looks sterling!

[kruge99]

I just played a few games and this is really amazing! Thanks for the opportunity to test it for you!!


Best Regards,
Todd.

[pinuck]

CE3K Part Two: Photoshop Tricks

When I started this project, I had no plans of redrawing the whole playfield, but when I started cleaning things up, I realized how much of the wonderful details of Gordon Morison's artwork was missing from the existing redraw. The only part that still had any of his great illustration style was just the blue alien. The rest was just sort of blobby approximations. Plus the typography was all wrong, and that's a big part of the style, at least it is for me.

But i didn't want to start drawing all of that complex detail by hand - there must be an easier way!

If you look at it, the only real details (for the most part) are in the black ink, the other colours just fill in solid sections underneath that complex black "plate".

The only resources I had to work with for this were images found through IPDB, google and pinballowners.com, so I had to make something work from that.
So here's a technique I like to use in Photoshop to make this process a little easier:

Black Extraction

Let's take a small part of the playfield to use for demonstration.
In real life, a larger section would probably be used, but this small bit will be better for explanation.

For this example, let's use this bit of Devils Tower.
On the left is the original redraw, and on the right is a similar bit that i got from my web searching - you can see what i mean about all the cool detail that is missing. (and the typography)



What I want from this new pic is to get just the black ink information and get rid of the rest.
Now at this point, some might think about using the magic wand or something to "select the black", but that's probably not the most effective approach.

I'm gonna start by looking at each of the RGB channels in photoshop and see which one has the best contrast between the info I want and everything else I don't want. Here's the red/green/blue channels on their own:



Clearly it's the Red (on the left) channel in this instance that has the most contrast between the black and the non-black. So we'll use that.



If we copy that channel to a new greyscale document, we can play with the contrast using Levels. Experimenting with where we drag the white triangle and the black triangle (aka the white-point and the black-point), we can end up with pretty much just black and all white in the areas we want (compare the image below with the murkier image above):



Then I'm gonna copy that to a new layer on my re-draw.psd, and line it up with whatever reference I have in place.

A useful tool at this point is tranform - start by selecting the layer and hit (Cmd-T on Mac / CTRL-T on PC) to enter tranform mode, and hold down (Cmd on Mac / CTRL on PC) when you drag each corner to be able to stretch and skew in any direction to get it to line up with your reference layer. It can be handy to turn down the opacity of the layer temporarily at first, to better see how it lines up with the reference images you have on lower layers.



The ultimate goal here is to piece together the entire black plate that we want, using as many pieces as we need from our reference photos, and drawing in whatever else is left.

If you set these black layers to Multiply in Photoshop, you can leave those layers as your black, and just paint on layers underneath for the other colours.

Tip: It's best to keep those other colours on individiual layers so you can adjust any single colour easily later on.

On the left here is our extracted black plate, and on the right, the same thing with our colours painted on layers below it (the more complicated orange shapes in the 10,000 and 20,000 circles I extracted from a photo using a similar technique as I did for the black.



And then eventually i get the whole thing reconstructed. I moved and resized a few lights based on the info in the new pieces I was pasting on, but that can be fixed up with some work in the VP editor later.

Here's 3 views of the mid-table, showing the progression.

1st is the original,
2nd is the completed redraw,
3rd is the final version after doing all the lighting in photoshop.

Note: In the end, the vast majority of the type on the table i did using fonts and illustrator, not through these photoshop techniques







So that's pretty much it for my WIP - it's not comprehensive, and certainly not a tutorial per se, but hopefully some of these details are interesting and/or useful to fellow pinheads, passerbys, and even future redraw imagineers!

cheers,
pinuck.

Edited by pinuck, 11 August 2012 - 04:06 AM.

[Slydog43]

Very informative, thanks. I really like following table author's progress!

[pinuck]

edit: just out of curiousity, are you making any other changes for the FS version?

absolutely!

There are graphic changes throughout.
Inserts have been moved and resized. Rest of PF build is pretty much the same.
Some new physics in the table, flipper settings and also in the code (JF/Rosve flipper code for example).
Obviously the whole roto-mechanism is new. New sounds for all of that too.
And new sounds for the electronic chimes.

And if the short version of your question was really "will this get re-released as a WS version?"
i'd say, if it's a simple and easy conversion - yeah, i guess soon.

[thewool]

This is amazing work Pinuck! Your playfield restoration is simply both accurate and classy.

I never realised what was missing from the original redraw. Fascinating technical tutorial...

edit: the other changes you mentioned sound awesome, just need to dig out my John Williams OST and I'm set

Edited by thewool, 11 August 2012 - 08:23 AM.

[JavaJack]

hopefully some of these details are interesting and/or useful to fellow pinheads, passerbys, and even future redraw imagineers!

Yes. Excellent.

[LoadedWeapon]

Yes my friend you have some great talent I cant wait to see this table in action... I tried to recolor the logo as best I could for the wheel art hope you like it.

Edited by LoadedWeapon, 11 August 2012 - 09:24 PM.

[Rawd]

Thank you for working on this. I am really looking forward to this one.

[htamas]

Thank you for working on this. I am really looking forward to this one.

It's already out
http://www.vpforums....u...l&f_id=6735