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Tales From The Crypt colorization (WIP)


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Hello all,

I've been messing with VP for the better part of a year, and wanted to take this national downtime to contribute back to the community. I am a huge fan of the color DMDs, and couldn't seem to find anything for one of my favorite tables, Tales From The Crypt. Having experience using Photoshop, Flash,  Dreamweaver and Illustrator, I figured the Pin2DMD editor would be accessible to use. And its a bit rough going (program crashes randomly, the keyframe isnt clear, masks change) I feel I am making progress. My first time coloring, so be gentle, or don't. I can handle constructive criticism ?. Any tips you other artists can provide would be awesome. I am enjoying this so far.

Here are some quick stills what I've accomplished so far in 24 hours.

 

still1.jpg

still2.jpg

still3.jpg

mansion.gif

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Yep, the link you sent was the same one I downloaded the other day. Build is 26.03.2020. The only bugs I have so far:

When dragging the circle around the color picker testing out colors, the entire UI will shut down to desktop. Happens random but not often.

The Select marquee tool, I can use it once, copy what I need then paste over (Replacement Drawings) but after that, I cant use it again. I have to save, exit software, reboot exe and then I can do it again. Once per session basically. Happens every time. I also cant resize the marquee even though I have a cross arrow pointer showing. 

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15 hours ago, MydknyteStyrm said:

The Select marquee tool, I can use it once, copy what I need then paste over (Replacement Drawings) but after that, I cant use it again.

I could reproduce this. For now try CTRL-A (select all) and click the select tool again to exit the paste mode. I will fix this in the next release

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20 hours ago, MydknyteStyrm said:

The Select marquee tool, I can use it once, copy what I need then paste over (Replacement Drawings) but after that, I cant use it again.

I just found out that actually you only need to click the select tool again after you pasted the content and it works again.

Can you please confirm.

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I just found out that actually you only need to click the select tool again after you pasted the content and it works again.
Can you please confirm.

Yes I can confirm once I pasted the marquee tool works again. I have noticed some displacement though when trying to Paste Over. It’s as if the copied material is not aligned with the mouse when I drag the new copy over (masks and such)
Happens a number of times too. Will test further to see if I just wasn’t copying it correctly.


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Evening hive mind,

I’ve hit an impasse tonight. I uploaded the pal and vni into my cab and ran it with VPX.

The colors for a bunch of things work but I noticed some problems with animated scenes

- the palettes I chose will sometimes show up later than the scene by a second, or disappear before the animation is over.

- the masks don’t line up to where I placed them, and the coloring is different than what I chose. It almost looks like the masks show up with a different palette.

I realize that Keyframes may be the culprit and perhaps I am not to sure on how they work.
My workflow goes like this.
- I select a scene from the raw footage and Cut a scene
- I create a new palette and assign it to the scene using the PAL button
- I color the scene using ColorMask or Replace or sometimes both
-I then get the bookmarked raw scene and assign a CRC hash to the first frame.
- here I also assign the scene that I made.

The CRC and Keyframe is a bit confusing.
Do I assign the scene to the first CRC, or to every CRC in that animated sequence?
- where should I assign scenes to a keyframe, at the one with the longest duration or delay?
When I color the scenes, do I have to color every single frame or not?
What exactly is the Duration for?
How do I sync up the scenes?
Keep in mind the colorization is working on my cab, just it tends to become jumbled.

Thanks in advance!
-


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First of all did you read the tutorial on pin2dmd.com and watch the youtube tutorial of NetzZwerg 

 

1 hour ago, MydknyteStyrm said:

Do I assign the scene to the first CRC, or to every CRC in that animated sequence?

One is enough

2 hours ago, MydknyteStyrm said:

- where should I assign scenes to a keyframe, at the one with the longest duration or delay?

at the same place the scene starts

2 hours ago, MydknyteStyrm said:

When I color the scenes, do I have to color every single frame or not?

yes

2 hours ago, MydknyteStyrm said:

What exactly is the Duration for?

that is for simple palette switches and defines how long the palette stays

 

2 hours ago, MydknyteStyrm said:

How do I sync up the scenes?

If it is out of sync cut it into shorter pieces

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Ive watched every tutorial I could find as well as the text ones and PowerPoint ones. I think my issue was not being able to visualize the keyframes a’la Flash or Premiere.

I also read that non dynamic scenes shouldn’t be set as ColorMasks, but rather as Replace. I’m in the process of changing them over and seeing if that fixes the issue


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Ok, I think I found the glitch. Non dynamic scenes (no score or changing numbers) I had set to ColorMask, and had the + sign next to the keyframe and scene. I changed both over to the Replace (paintbrush icon) and now everything seems to be working lovely. 

My next question is for those of you who have colored entire roms before...

To ensure I get the most out of the rom dump to the text file for my recording, I extended the size of the flippers in VPX just to keep the ball going as long as possible. This table has a TON of different scenes, and I was wondering if there was an alternate way to get every CRC out of the rom without actually playing the game. Not that I don't mind playing, but it can get tedious trying to find every single animation when you dont even know if its there. 

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3 hours ago, MydknyteStyrm said:

I also read that non dynamic scenes shouldn’t be set as ColorMasks, but rather as Replace. I’m in the process of changing them over and seeing if that fixes the issue

I'm always tempted to use a multi-frame colormask scene, but it seems like it never works and I always end up using multiple single-frame colormasks instead.  in fact, I'm not sure it is possible to do anything but single frame colormasks.  There is an option in the drop-down for colormask sequence, and I think that is what I'm unconsciously trying to accomplish (where each frame in sequence is keyed), but that feature is not programmed yet.

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1 hour ago, Rockdude233 said:

I'm always tempted to use a multi-frame colormask scene, but it seems like it never works and I always end up using multiple single-frame colormasks instead.  in fact, I'm not sure it is possible to do anything but single frame colormasks.  There is an option in the drop-down for colormask sequence, and I think that is what I'm unconsciously trying to accomplish (where each frame in sequence is keyed), but that feature is not programmed yet.

All new modes are ready to use given that you have a real DMD und use my dmddevice.dll.

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Unfortunately I don't have a real DMD, just a LCD. I am slugging through getting the frames colored, and I've noticed that the hash check mark for each of my keyframes disappears and reappears randomly.

I assume that the frame is keyed since it is there in the Keyframe column, but shouldnt the CRC stay checked so I can reference it, and if I scroll through the frames after my keyframe, it then shows each CRC on plane 1 is checked, as well as what scene is assigned to it, which isnt true since I didnt mark those. If I click around a bit, the checkmarks come back.  I think the hard part about keyframing the images is knowing exactly which one is marked.

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28 minutes ago, MydknyteStyrm said:

Unfortunately I don't have a real DMD, just a LCD.

Then you are limited to the use of colormask, replacement scenes and simple palette switch.  No sequence, no layered, no masked.

The checkbox is only for selection of the hash (plane) and not an indicator for a keyframe set although if you click on a keyframe it shows which one is used by the keyframe.
The assigned hash to a keyframe is also displayed in the bottom of the screen under hash.

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5 hours ago, lucky1 said:

All new modes are ready to use given that you have a real DMD und use my dmddevice.dll.

Wow, I missed the announcement I guess!  So, these new modes will work in a real pinball machine then?  Also, I have seen tutorials on Replace, ColorMask, and even ColorMask Layered.  However, I haven't noticed any information or tutorials on the use of Replace Sequence, ColorMask Sequence, or Replace Masked.  Can you point me in the right direction?  Or if there isn't any known tutorials, can you give us the management overview of how to use them?

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Hello all. Have a questions regarding the masks and dynamic content. On the Match number screen at the end of the game, I have it set to ColorMask, colored all of the required areas, but the hitch is that I have an animation that plays BEHIND the match number. See GIF. 

The Bat is masked with the third set of colors, the score and the Cryptkeeper are the first set of colors. As the wings move around behind the match numer 1) 00, the mask of the bat disappears and I see the score's brown color on the bat. 

In the editor it looks fine, but on the pincab, the masks jostle around and dont really play as I see it in the editor. Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks!

match.gif

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Are you using a multi-frame ColorMask to accomplish this?  If so, this is what I was talking about in one of my previous posts.  I usually end up doing multiple single frame Colormask scenes to get it to work correctly.  So if this match scene is a 20 frame animation, I would make 20 single-frame Colormask scenes and then have to keyframe each one as well.  However, Lucky1 is saying the Colormask Sequence mode is functional now, and I believe that is what needs to be used in cases like this (as long as it's a real dmd you are using).  However, I really haven't used that mode myself (waiting for instruction from someone who has used it before). 

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