Electronic green/blue screen?

I have some good news and some bad news.

The good news is that it's possible to achieve a fullbright texture right now. The bad news is that it takes some moderately hardcore hacking, and will require some pretty tedious experimentation to find the right object in the shaders specification.

So, if you want to try, please be aware that this is a totally unsupported technique, which is not guaranteed to work, and may break your movie, your computer, your happy home life and your fragile sanity. Still on board? Excellent. Let's hack.

Make sure that Moviestorm isn't running, and open up your Moviestorm settings directory (probably C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Moviestorm\ on Windows XP, or C:\users\<username>\Moviestorm\ on Vista), and navigate to the .cache directory within it. Delete everything in the CG directory.

Now start Moviestorm. There'll be a few files created in the .cache/CG directory. You can edit these files whilst Moviestorm is running to change the way that individual aspects are shaded. Be aware that this can sometimes be the equivalent of changing the tires whilst the car is still moving, and can be equally catastrophic.

I'm afraid it's a bit of trial and error work to find the exact bit your looking for. The following, for example, will set the ground to fullbright green (RGB 000/255/000):

Edit the file DIFFUSE_MAP_DIR_.cg and change the function FragmentOutput at the end of the file. The specific line you're looking for is

Code:

OUT.color = fragcolor;

Change this to read

Code:

OUT.color = float4(0,1,0,0);

Hacking around with the OUT.color line (which appears in almost every shader file) will enable some exciting effects, but you're going to have to spend some time determining which .cg file affects which bit of the scene. With a little effort, you can have "Ballad of Black Mesa"-like goodness, though, as the following test footage shows:

http://www.moviestorm.co.uk/MSDB/MoviePageServlet?id=332

We'll look at getting a more user-friendly method of implementation for this soon, but this kludge should appease for now, I hope.

(Extensive thanks are due to twak for giving me a whistle-stop tour of the shaders format)

Ben - just tried setting up an emissive green texture, using the following steps:

1) Load Modder's Workshop
2) Load the curved background prop
3) Select the material
4) Tick "use material", untick "User image"
5) Click "Emissive", select green colour.
6) Deselect "Show shadows"
7) Click "save"

The resulting prop still showed lighting changes in Moviestorm.

What am I doing wrong?

Nice hack, that man.

Hmm. So if, say, we used

OUT.color = float4(0,1,0,1);

that would give us a totally transparent ground texture, right?

the_nomad wrote:

Ben - just tried setting up an emissive green texture, using the following steps:

1) Load Modder's Workshop
2) Load the curved background prop
3) Select the material
4) Tick "use material", untick "User image"
5) Click "Emissive", select green colour.
6) Deselect "Show shadows"
7) Click "save"

The resulting prop still showed lighting changes in Moviestorm.

What am I doing wrong?

Change the diffuse and specular colours to black too, maybe?

My template looked like this:
Code:

 <template>
   <model>Primitives</model>
   <meshes>
     <string>Prim_BackDropPan_01</string>
   </meshes>
   <materials>
     <material>
       <name>Prim_Grey_01 [0]</name>
       <ambientColor>0.5859375 0.5859375 0.5859375 0.0</ambientColor>
       <diffuseColor>0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0</diffuseColor>
       <emissiveColor>0.11764706 0.96862745 0.14509805 1.0</emissiveColor>
       <specularColor>0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0</specularColor>
       <shininess>36.0</shininess>
       <maps/>
       <flags>
         <string>USE_MATERIAL_COLOURS</string>
         <string>DONT_SHOW_SHADOWS</string>
         <string>DONT_CAST_SHADOWS</string>
       </flags>
       <parameters/>
     </material>
   </materials>
 </template>

Aha. That did it.

OK, next question - how do we edit the default floor texture (the grid)? Can't find it in the tile editor.

[UPDATE - oh, balls. It appears I can't create emissive floor textures, at least not using this approach? The Emissive property appears to be greyed out in the Tile Editor]

[UPDATE 2 - OK, I text-edited in an Emissive property to the floor texture, and it still ain't green. So I'm guessing no emissive floors for us?]

the_nomad wrote:

Hmm. So if, say, we used

OUT.color = float4(0,1,0,1);

that would give us a totally transparent ground texture, right?

Yes, it should (the final figure is the alpha, as you've correctly surmised), but a full-transparency will show whatever's hiding underneath the floor, which might not be too pretty!

There's a sort of cascade effect when you do things like that, and the results aren't always entirely predictable.

Hugh - you might want to take a few moments to play around with glinterceptor. I'm reliably informed by our engineers that it plays well with the Moviestorm stream.

Hacking the OUT.color values in various files will affect the floor grid. Bear in mind, though, the grid does not exist until an object (or character) is placed on set. That threw me for a little while until I realised what was going on.

GlIntercept - it seems easier to edit materials files, although I suppose it would be possible to use a variant on TOGLFaces to set up pure greenscreen - hmm...

I've got a working greenscreen addon, with the panorama backdrop, floors, and ceilings... green and blue variety each, no shadows, completely light independent.

(Actual walls aren't ignoring light at this point, but the backdrop is a superior solution there anyway).

Soon as I find out whether we're allowed to distribute our own AddOns, and precisely how I go about packing it up, I'll make it available here for you to use / dissect.

Woohoo!

Nice. I'm planning on doing something similar, so may the best man get there first.

How did you get the floors to emit, BTW?

Okay, I don't see anything which would prohibit me from distributing a free Addon at this point, as long as it doesn't infringe on Moviestorm's own content (which it doesn't). So here you go:

http://z-studios.com/goodies/ZSGreenScreen.addon

Contained herein are floors, ceilings, and the curved backdrop primitive, in pure green and pure blue each. (There are also some wall textures, but you'll find the walls aren't ignoring the light just yet... so use the curved backdrop.)

The items in question should be easy to spot, as they all have thumbnails.

I'm releasing this into the Public Domain, so do with it what you like.

After I grab some dinner, I'll be back to lay out the XML here that got things working, which should answer Hugh's question and anyone else's too. I will for now indicate that I did have to manually edit the materials files, I couldn't get it all done with M.Workshop.

Enjoy!

<oy, BEN_G, get that darned web//moviestorm/modders shopfront up and running tout de suite, we have customers at the door>

ain't it loverly to know that people want something before you sell it, rest assured we *want* to support saleable add-ons!

Okay, here's the Materials.materials XML code for my floors; the ceilings are virtually identical.

Code:

 <vector>
   <material>
     <name>Chroma Floor Green</name>
     <ambientColor>0.0 1.0 0.0 1.0</ambientColor>
     <diffuseColor>0.0 1.0 0.0 1.0</diffuseColor>
     <emissiveColor>0.0 1.0 0.0 1.0</emissiveColor>
     <specularColor>0.0 1.0 0.0 1.0</specularColor>
     <shininess>1.0</shininess>
     <maps>
       <entry>
         <string>specularMap</string>
         <string>Data/Materials/Floor/Chroma/ZS_FloorSpec.png</string>
       </entry>
       <entry>
         <string>normalMap</string>
         <string>Data/Materials/Floor/Chroma/ZS_FloorNormal.png</string>
       </entry>
       <entry>
         <string>diffuseMap</string>
         <string>Data/Materials/Floor/Chroma/ZS_GreenFloor.png</string>
       </entry>
     </maps>
     <flags>
       <string>USE_MATERIAL_COLOURS</string>
       <string>DONT_SHOW_SHADOWS</string>
     </flags>
     <parameters>
       <entry>
         <string>SOUNDSLIKE</string>
         <string>concrete</string>
       </entry>
       <entry>
         <string>TILE</string>
         <string>1</string>
       </entry>
     </parameters>
   </material>
   <material>
     <name>Chroma Floor Blue</name>
     <ambientColor>0.0 0.0 1.0 1.0</ambientColor>
     <diffuseColor>0.0 0.0 1.0 1.0</diffuseColor>
     <emissiveColor>0.0 0.0 1.0 1.0</emissiveColor>
     <specularColor>0.0 0.0 1.0 1.0</specularColor>
     <shininess>1.0</shininess>
     <maps>
       <entry>
         <string>specularMap</string>
         <string>Data/Materials/Floor/Chroma/ZS_FloorSpec.png</string>
       </entry>
       <entry>
         <string>normalMap</string>
         <string>Data/Materials/Floor/Chroma/ZS_FloorNormal.png</string>
       </entry>
       <entry>
         <string>diffuseMap</string>
         <string>Data/Materials/Floor/Chroma/ZS_BlueFloor.png</string>
       </entry>
     </maps>
     <flags>
       <string>USE_MATERIAL_COLOURS</string>
       <string>DONT_SHOW_SHADOWS</string>
     </flags>
     <parameters>
       <entry>
         <string>SOUNDSLIKE</string>
         <string>concrete</string>
       </entry>
       <entry>
         <string>TILE</string>
         <string>1</string>
       </entry>
     </parameters>
   </material>
 </vector>

The texture files in play are:
1) ZS_GreenFloor.png / ZS_BlueFloor.png - These are just 512x512 solid color PNG files.
2) ZS_FloorNormal.png - A completely flat normal map, 512x512.
3) ZS_FloorSpec.png - A solid black specularity map, 512x512.

Settings of Note:
A) I set all the color attributes the same, to the solid color I wanted. This includes the EMISSIVE color, which I could not set from Mod Workshop, so I manually adjusted it afterward.
B) Shinyness is set to 1.0 in all cases (the lowest integer setting).
C) USE MATERIAL (for colors) is checked; DO NOT SHOW SHADOWS is checked.

(On the backdrop prop only, DO NOT CAST SHADOWS is also checked; only there because floors and ceilings do not natively cast shadows at this point; I might have to update the addon later if "sunroofs" or multi-story sets are ever added).

To arrive at these, I basically just experimented around for a couple hours, trying each setting to see what it did. And the other couple hours was just getting used to how to organize the files for my addon, and walking through Ben S's tremendously helpful instructions, not to mention all the great discussion in this thread.

You rock. Wonder why your emissive floors worked and mine didn't. Odd.

Thank you Overman - A great first addon mod!

The law of averages states that, one of these days, Overman will do something that's just rubbish. I don't see that happening anytime soon, though. Yet again, it's Overman for the win.