Animate.ids slots and recolouring BAMs Options

[pasco95]

With the free slots in animate.ids how do I assign an animation into one of the spare slots without it crashing the game; I copied all the animations from one creature and renamed them to the required animation name (to be specific I copied and renamed all the MMIN**.bams exept the mindflayer ones, just the minotaur ones, to MCYC**.bams and added the required line to animate.ids assigned IC_CYCLOP using shadowkeeper then opened my save and the game crashed, I also tried it with MHIS** or whatever the histichai (spelling??) one is and it crashes the game to) Basically I want to use a Minotaur animation that is a different colour than the standard one without overwriting the original, which leads me to my second question, is there an easy way to recolour BAMs or do I have to do it frame by frame pixel by pixel to make it look good? Can you apply an effect to a creature/character that changes their overall colour?
Cheers guys.

[Sir-Kill]

I cant check right now but if the animation you want to change has *clown colors then it is easy. if not you will have to re do all the frames. if that is so you could try batching all of them in psp or maybe in ph.

clown colors are the very bright red, blue, green, ect that make up the animation instead of more realistic colors

[Galactygon]

Unfortunately, the slots are hardcoded so as to allow skin/cloth colouring. Only a few limited ones from BGI allow you to do that.

As Sir-Kill said, the best way (which I haven't done) is to extract all the frames and run them through a batch file in Photoshop or something similar.

-Galactygon

[Vlad]

Check my tutorial in the Tutorial section of BWL. If it helps...

[EDIT] There is nothing about colours, though...

This post has been edited by Vlad: Aug 7 2008, 05:08 PM

[pasco95]

Haha, I'm a knucklehead! I realised I only exported and renamed half the BAMs! I've done the rest but haven't tried it in game yet but i'm sure it will work. Do you have to assign a .2da to it? because I don't really want it to have any sounds. Also, any ideas on how to recolour the BAMs? Can I add an effect to the creature to change the colour? I've tried it with effect (50) character colour 1 but it only lasts for a second then reverts back to the standard colour, i've set the time to 7600 which should be an hour right but it only flashes up. Any ideas for an easy way to change the colour, I basically want a minotaur to look darker (almost black) or lighter (almost tan) instead of the generic brown one.
Cheers

[devSin]

Do you have to assign a .2da to it?

No, it will work just fine without.

Can I add an effect to the creature to change the colour? I've tried it with effect (50) character colour 1 but it only lasts for a second then reverts back to the standard colour, i've set the time to 7600 which should be an hour right but it only flashes up.

That's probably one of the color pulses (the pulse speed determines how long it stays, but IIRC, it only goes up to 255). There's two RGB tint effects that can be used to apply a solid tint to the entire character animation; one uses a brighter method, and the other is darker. Keep in mind that this tint is an overlay (you'd mostly want to use a brighter color than you normally would to prevent it looking like a nondescript blob) and will effect the whole animation (weapons and anything else part of the final model); it's not perfect, but you should be able to easily make the thing almost entirely black.

There's also a solid color glow that can provide a more subtle variation (since the minotaur doesn't have palette locations, any of the low-value locations in the effect should alter the whole animation IIRC - I'd just use "Major color" or one of the armor locations). You should be able to use RGB 0,0,0 to get a slightly brighter minotaur (or you can try a very light pink or orange).

I'm not able to look for the specific opcodes at the moment; you can check the IESDP, and I believe some of the trolls (SoA's small ice trolls and ToB's fire trolls) and possibly the slayer shadows use the bright tint effect if you want to see the correct usage. You'll probably have to mess around with it a bit to get something tolerable (these effects work best on lighter animations like the trolls, which are originally a pretty faint green - the color changes aren't even visible on the shadows where BioWare tried to give a slight red tint), however.

[Vlad]

I remember I introduced this kind of changing colours in discrete time, when made the Chromatic Dragon in TS. In fact, it has nothing to do with BAMs. I did not modify the BAMs of the dragon, but assigned only colour glow of dfferent colours to it. If I am not mistaken, you can also create an item whith a certain colour glow and transparency which make the creatures of any colour you wish. You can change any kind of colour that way. You don't need to mess with BAMs.