Converting PS: Torment Character Anims., ...and the issues you will encounter. Options

[JJL]

I've just spent the past several days attempting to make Dakkon's animations playable within the Baldur's Gate 2 scheme. Initially the process seems very simple, but you will eventually hit the following roadblock(s):

1.) PS:T apparently generates its own east-oriented animations. Whether it mirrors three of the west-oriented variants automatically or not, I cant say. Hopefully someone else here can.

2.) What the above means is that you are left with character animations that will only face to the south, southwest, west, northwest, and north. Once your order the sprite to face eastward, either the BG-programmed animation for the slot you're using will manifest, or the character disappears until they're turned westward again.

I utilized every program I could find to make this work. This includes:

BAM Workshop 1
BAM Workshop 2
Creature BAM-It!
bamresizer
and the ICL-whatever, which was quite useless in this regard.

Of the list, only BAM Workshop 1 was of any help, except for one crucial lacking: flipping individual frames horizontally doesnt alter the position of the animated portion of the frame. Instead, it does just that: flips the animated portion without moving its placement on the transparent canvas. What you end up with in this case is an animation in which Dakkon's feet no longer stay put, as his sword strike seems to collide with an invisible barrier, repelling his entire body backwards like a spring. In short, it ends up looking pretty lame.

I've tried everything I could think of to remedy this. I've tried exporting both sequences AND frames from BAM Workshop 1 and editing them with a plethora of other photo-editing programs (Photoshop CS2, Macro Flash 8.0, Fireworks, etc.), but there's always an issue with the canvas being completely re-vamped (enlarged). This leaves me with a Dakkon who is misaligned with his "proper" animations, as well as a complete lack of preservation where transparency is concerned.

In conclusion, the good news is this:

1.) PS:T BAMs are laid out much the same as IWD BAMs.
2.) Most of your work is done simply by exporting original BAMs from one game and re-naming them to suit another.
3.) The BAM re-sizing issue has already been worked out thanks to the bamresizer program mentioned above. (Which works like a charm, by the way)

The bad news is this:

1.) PS:T BAMs must generate its own animation mirrors for eastern orientations, as there are no corresponding "XXXXXXe.BAM" files that I've been able to find.
2.) I've found that, using the only really USEFUL BAM editor (BAM Workshop 1) there is absolutely no way to reallocate the animation to generate a proper east-oriented counterpart. (The implied simplicity of such an issue as image-mirroring vexes me to no end, by the way)
3.) .GIFs are utterly useless in this regard as well, as they will not preserve transparency without a great deal of work, and even if they do the animations themselves are still misaligned.

Anything mentioned above is only based upon my understanding of the factors mentioned, and is certainly subject to scrutiny by those who have pulled this off successfully. It could be that I'm simply overlooking something, but from my experience it is either impossibly tedious or nigh-impossible to make this happen. It is my hope that someone will prove me wrong, or at least provide some insight into the issues I encountered.

[Rabain]

There used to be a TeamBG tutorial going around outlining how to import PST animations to BG. It did include something about the non-existent east facing problem.

I can't find the tutorial on the new site www.teambg.eu , perhaps they decided it was useless?

[Rabain]

Okay this is the part of the tutorial I was talking about:

Firsts off extract all the bams you want...

and rename them to the BG2 format

(Mxxxa1, Mxxxsc etc...)

then load up bam workshop... look at the file of your choice.. you see it has 5 angels of animation S,SW,W,NW,N

you need to make a copy of this bam file and put a "e" at the end of the name.. so Mxxxa1 becomes Mxxxa1e

in this "e" file remove the N & S animations... and flip each frame round on the other 3.. so now you have NE,E,SE

add blank sequences untill there are 8 (0-7)
move them so 5=NE 6=E 7=SE

then all we need to do is align the east movements..

this is done by looking at the size of the bam's frame (in the x,y values)
and then looking at the horizontal value for it..

X size - Hz value = the new Hz value you need...

change every H value on the bam.. and it will work 100% with no off circle frames..

Repeat this for every bam you wish to convert...

[JJL]

Thank you so much for providing the formula I was too lazy to figure out on my own! While it'll still be a tedious process, at least now I/we all know it's possible.

As for everyone else, please dont hesitate to share anymore insights you might have regarding this issue. I'll make more posts here once I've made some actual progress in this endeavour.

[Sir-Kill]

I have not tried it but I think that DLTCEP can create the mirror frames

[Galactygon]

Yes, under .bam editing you can use Tools -> Create Mirror Frames to convert PST animations to BGII animations in a single (or, few) click of a button. I have not yet tested this, but according to Avenger it should work.

http://www.dragonlancetc.com/forums/index.php?board=9.0

-Galactygon

This post has been edited by Galactygon: Jul 27 2006, 09:32 AM

[igi]

I can't find the tutorial on the new site www.teambg.eu , perhaps they decided it was useless?

Or, perhaps, one of the following:
+) Never knew it existed
+) Had forgotten it existed
+) Couldn't find a copy
+) Busy with other things (including RL)

Still, if you'd prefer to think that the purpose of the teambg revival is to actively suppress modding information, feel free to think so (you'll be wrong though).

[Rabain]

Why the assumption that I was hitting out at teambg?

I mentioned there had been a tuturial under the teambg tutorials that used to be available, it is not available on the new site, that's a fact.

I don't need to list the reasons it might not be there instead of sending JJL off on a wild goose chase.

If you wish to make the assumption that I "think that the purpose of the teambg revival is to actively suppress modding information" it is you who are wrong and not me.

If you read the first post JJL does mention at the end that in his opinion "it is either impossibly tedious or nigh-impossible to make this happen" . Following on from that it is not a huge leap for me to assume that teambg came to the same conclusion and hence the reason for it not being in your tutorials.

Please consider when replying that though some things may sound negative they aren't necessarily an attack on a site/individual, thanks.

[igi]

I don't see the need for you to take a random guess as to why something isn't available at TeamBG (and I think that '.. decided it's useless' is a particularly negative guess).
If there is something missing from the TeamBG site, which you think should be there, drop us a line!

However, I apoligize for the somewhat harsh tone, espcially if it was not your intent to disparage TeamBG.


Do you have a copy of the tutorial in question?

[Baronius]

igi, we certainly still have the TeamBG tutorials formerly available on Chevar's site. I even offered to give it to you after teambg.eu was founded and you PMd me to link to your new tutorial site instead of Chevar's. The offer still stands, if you need the files of the former TBG tutorials, I will consider it my duty to transfer it to the new TeamBG.

[igi]

I thought we had all the old TBG tutorials up? I'm certain we have some of them. I'll check now.

EDIT: We do indeed seem to have all the old TBG tutorials from the TBG Tutorial site up. If anyone has any TBG tutorials that we don't have on the site, feel free to send them to any member of TBG.

This post has been edited by igi: Jul 27 2006, 06:53 PM

[Avenger_teambg]

dltcep contains a some tools to support conversion of bams.
I've used it successfully for a lot of stuff, like:

1. reverse animation (good for generating missing wake up cycles)
2. creating the mirror animations
3. dropping every second frame
4. reducing orientations

Probably there are more.
I created those when i needed one, and they come without tutorial.
If anyone want to use them, and volunteers to write a tutorial, feel free to experiment and ask me.
Additional benefit would be that if you need some extra feature for animation conversion, i can add it.

[Chronis]

This is a really old post, but I just converted fall from grace's animation to BGII and I thought I would write a brief walk through on how to convert such animations.

You need three programs to make it work

1. A program to rip the original BAM files from PST (I used Near infinity beta but others are ok)
2. DLTCEP (you will do the majority of your work here as the BAM workshops screw stuff up)
3. BAM workshop I for one step that DLTCEP cannot do it

don't use BAM workshop II its useless

Step I (grabbing the animation files)
First grab the bam files you want from PST. These will be to big, and missing three orientations that will need to be manually added

Step II (making the e.BAM file)
Second, create the missiing orientations. In BGII each aninimation action has two files for its animations. PST animations are missing the _____e.BAM files. These files are basicially the animations for North East, East, and South East. To make a torment animation work in BGII you will need to create an _____e.BAM file for each of the original BAM files taken from Torment.

To do this quickly and efficently you will need two programs, DLTCEP, and BAM workshop I. Most of our work will be in DLTCEP and BAM workshop tends to screw up the shadows.

To create the ____e.BAM file you should do the following.
Open DLTCEP and load a copy of the BAM file you are interested in.
Create eight blank new sequences at the bottom of the BAM
The first five should be left blank.
For the last three, may a copy of the animation sequence you will need to flip
in sequence six you should copy the south west animation (flipsto)--> north east
in sequence seven you should copy the east animation ---> west
finally in sequence eight you should copy the north east animation -------> South west
When this is done save the file with the appropriate e.BAM file name

Finally we need to do the one thing DLTCEP cannot do without screwing up your file, remove the extra sequences. Open BAM workshop I and load your e.BAM file. BAM workshop can deleate whatever your extra frames. You final file should have eight sequences, five empty ones, and three mirrored animations.

Congrats you now have a fully functional BAM file that can be imported into BGII.
However since torment animation files are a lot bigger then BGII it will need to be resized.
(unless you want it to be huge)

Step III (resizing the animation)
This should be straight forward as someone has developed a great program that does this called BAM resizer, unfortunatally the docummentation that comes with this program is wrong so getting it to work pratically requires inside knowledge.

To get this program to work you need to open a dos prompt, go the the directory where you copied the resize program and use the following command.

bamresize -p 75 C:\bams\*.bam

75 means reduce in size by 75%, and the directory should be changed to wherever your BAM files are. 75 is a good default number and worked for fall from grace's animation but you can adjust this to whetever you want.

Step IV (optional step) style points
the resizer is not perfect. Sometimes in the resize process it can shift things in a frame by one pixel. This is not noticable when the character is moving, but can be seen when the are standing still as a slight shift up and down kind of like they are levitating.
For fall from graces' animation conversion this was only a problem in one BAM file, the one where she was standing totally still.

This BAM file had 12 frames per direction of which 3 or four had the funky shift.
I fixed this by deleating the funky frames and making a copy of the frames on either side of the damaged ones. This can be done in BAM workshop I

Original..........Fixed
1...................1
2...................2
3...................3
4...................4
5...................5
6...................6
7 - funky....... 6 (copy)
8 - funky........11 (copy
9 - funky........11
10 - funky......12
11
12

This fixed the shifting without changing the overall animation run time much and looks quite good.

You will need to look at your animation in game after you resize it to see if you need to do step IV as some animations may not need it.

Step V importing you animation into the game

I am assuming you know how to do this. If not shoot me a message and i'll refer you to other tutorials that have been posted that do a good job describing this

Good luck on your animation.

This post has been edited by Chronis: Sep 30 2007, 01:35 PM

[Galactygon]

To do this quickly and efficently you will need two programs, DLTCEP, and BAM workshop I. Most of our work will be in DLTCEP and BAM workshop tends to screw up the shadows.

The shadow screw up can easily be fixed. All you need to do is set the second colour of the palette to (0,0,0) rather than bright pink (I forgot the RGB values atm). And the first colour should be set to (0,255,0) rather than (0,151,151). (0,255,0) is the true RGB colour for transparency, not (0,151,151), and the true colour for shadows is black, not pink. The game simply sets the opacity to 50% for the second colour in the palette, in case of creatures. In case of ground items, the second colour of the palette should be set to (0,255,255), so the game reads it as the highlight when the player moves his mouse over the dropped item. I have not tried other values for the ground items as of yet.

I should drop igi a line about this by the time he updates the IESDP.

Finally we need to do the one thing DLTCEP cannot do without screwing up your file, remove the extra sequences. Open BAM workshop I and load your e.BAM file. BAM workshop can deleate whatever your extra frames. You final file should have eight sequences, five empty ones, and three mirrored animations.

So far, I have never encountered this, even though I have done a lot of sequence deleting.

Step IV (optional step) style points
the resizer is not perfect. Sometimes in the resize process it can shift things in a frame by one pixel. This is not noticable when the character is moving, but can be seen when the are standing still as a slight shift up and down kind of like they are levitating.
For fall from graces' animation conversion this was only a problem in one BAM file, the one where she was standing totally still.

This BAM file had 12 frames per direction of which 3 or four had the funky shift.
I fixed this by deleating the funky frames and making a copy of the frames on either side of the damaged ones. This can be done in BAM workshop I

Yes, only Photoshop could do proper antialiasing, but that would mean having to fix the blurred outlines. Which is also a pain. Cuv has done some of these in Photoshop (IIRC), but even he has to struggle with pixelated images.

-Galactygon

[Cuv]

Yes, only Photoshop could do proper antialiasing, but that would mean having to fix the blurred outlines. Which is also a pain. Cuv has done some of these in Photoshop (IIRC), but even he has to struggle with pixelated images.

-Galactygon

Yes, what I discovered is that I can export an entire sequence with BAMWorkshopII (then dump this tool) as a .GIF. Make my edits in Photoshop... linking and locking all the layers... I can flip all the images at once. Once that is done, I can import the entire sequence back into BamWorkshop and not lose any alignment.

The problem arises here... Bamworkshop messes up the color of the imported gif. Too bad, really... it would make things a heck of alot easier if I could just make my animation BAMs in Photoshop. Or possibly, a GIF ---> BAM---->GIF converter (which igi suggested to me 'might' do the trick), but I cant make programs. The frames can be individually fixed in BW, but really takes us back to square-one. The only step you actually save is the alignment.

On a side note: I have got Morte and TNO working with the BGII style of animations (that are mostly used for animals, Irenicus, Ellesime, etc). The type with no east facing animations, and let the game mirror them for me. Currently they only stand, walk and attack. No other animations working atm, will get back to them.

Also, I have figured out the format to use on the MDK slots... but DLTCEP and BW are not cooperating with the overloaded sequences.

When I feel a little more inclined for personal *torment*... will give Chronis' method another try. So very tedious, but without better animation editing tools... what can we do?

Cuv

[Cuv]

If anyone is interested, I have begun converting the PST animations for use in BGII.


You can find them here:

Got 7 converted so far, more on the way. They are free-use. Have fun

Cuv

[Galactygon]

Cuv: Thank you very much for those animations! (are you sure you don't want to take over the reins of BA?) Seriously, I promise to get back to them once I resume work on Bestial Animations.

That will happen fairly soon, since once I am done with items (although I might decide to do kits/classes first), I will reach a point in Lost Crossroads where I cannot continue on without finishing Bestial Animations first.


-Galactygon

[Galactygon]

Oh, on a side note, you will have to give ingame colours to some of the animations, since only a few ingame slots allow for palette colouring.

So the best solution is, IMO, to make many variants of the same animation with different palette colours. This is a serious pain to do, but it is the only way.

-Galactygon

[Cuv]

Galactygon: Glad you can use them... and thanks for the tip on the coloring. I wont worry too much about that just yet, but will keep it in mind when converting going forward.

I was also hoping to get together with you on BA. I have some serious ideas about standardizing the Animate.ids to avoid conflicts between mods and giving certain animations consolidated into slots. I have done some experimentation with the ways to play a death animation for certain creatures that are housed in a weapon slot... and it looks promising. I threw some pics in that PST thread I have going in General Discussion at SHS... the whole thread is an evolution of my learning curve

Also, I was thinking that some animations look similar enough to all use the same death animations; ie: Wights could all be put in a single slot... pick or create a good generic death animation for all of them to use, then that would totally free up 2 full slots. The same could be done for shadows and ghosts, and possibly some of the demons.

Also, I dont know if you have done any work on this yet, but I know the configuration of the MDK slots and what is required in format to utilize them. The problem is working with BamWorkshop and DLTCEP at the moment... but I bet I can figure out how to make a few animations that can be used for NPC's without extra weapons animations to use on them... or move something else to those slots to free up yet more slots.

Cuv

[Galactygon]

I was also hoping to get together with you on BA. I have some serious ideas about standardizing the Animate.ids to avoid conflicts between mods and giving certain animations consolidated into slots.

I am open to that, though we have to keep feet circles in mind. In other words, when I came up with what to place where, I placed similar animations in similar slots, so that Giants and Verbeegs, for example, would end up in the Frost Giant slot, since they have large feet circles.

I have done some experimentation with the ways to play a death animation for certain creatures that are housed in a weapon slot... and it looks promising. I threw some pics in that PST thread I have going in General Discussion at SHS... the whole thread is an evolution of my learning curve

If it really works with very few flaws, I am open to it.

Also, I was thinking that some animations look similar enough to all use the same death animations; ie: Wights could all be put in a single slot... pick or create a good generic death animation for all of them to use, then that would totally free up 2 full slots. The same could be done for shadows and ghosts, and possibly some of the demons.

I think I tried doing that, but I am not sure I succeeded or what extent I did.

Also, I dont know if you have done any work on this yet, but I know the configuration of the MDK slots and what is required in format to utilize them. The problem is working with BamWorkshop and DLTCEP at the moment... but I bet I can figure out how to make a few animations that can be used for NPC's without extra weapons animations to use on them... or move something else to those slots to free up yet more slots.

That would be really nice. I figured the MDK slots used the BGII format (and I wasn't sure it worked), so I decided not to worry about them and completely forgot about them.

-Galactygon

This post has been edited by Galactygon: Oct 25 2007, 07:49 PM