Render/.TGA request

[nigave]

Can anyone advise how to get the ingame .tga shot as shown in the clip below. These look great ingame. This is taken from Toya's release of a Leon car pack and all his cars have similar ingame shots. I have no contact address for Toya so am asking if anyone else can advise.

Thanks.

[[SSR]Hoskins]

3d studio max more then likely. The max scenes are over at my site for Race07.
If you want i can render one for you just attach the skin or email it to me.

[nigave]

A reply from the Master Renderer............

Hi Hoskins, thanks for the response. There's actually loads of custom skins with no .tga's posted. I would like to be able to do them myself. I normally just take an in-game action shot and clip it using paint and post it in the folder but it's never as good as the originals. It's how to get the all black background.
I only have paint and paint shop pro photo IX. I'm not a graphics person, my area is the physics (low end). A brief lesson would be great. if possible.

Thanks,

Nigave.

[darock]

Hey, since you're talking about car's custom skins, you really don't need true renders. (I think render is actually a 3D/CAD term.)

You need a paint program with the DDS plugin.

You basically cut out any picture of the car for the MenuImage file. It needs to be able to fit into a 512x330 pixels frame. You also make a mask from the image and store it in an alpha channel and then delete the mask. You then save the print as a 32bit tga.

It has to be named in the car's ini file.

BTW........... RACE07 distorts the 512x330 tga you give it. So you have to fake RACE07 out if you wish your menu picture to have the correct aspect ratio. It's actually not hard to do, but is a bit tedious.

[darock]

How do you make an Alpha channel................

there is a recipe somewhere around here.... or somewhere.......

I'll look to see if I can find it.

[darock]

BTW, first hurdle you need to jump is the DDS plugin deal.

There is a plugin available at nVidia's website. I never got it to work back in the PSP7 days and gave up trying by PSP8 or PSP9. But others say they have gotten it to work. I should try again, but have PSElements and it took the plugin with no problems at all. The plugin documentation is obviously VERY old, but that doesn't seem to matter. It was written for PaintShop and no mention of PSP. No surprise. And back when there was decent support for PSP, the forum had lots of people using it. So.... sorry I can't help you plug in that plugin. But it is supposed to work with PSP.

That's your first hurdle.

[[SSR]Hoskins]

sounds about right what nigave said, the file would need the alpha channel. As for
the aspect that can be dealt with by cropping.