New features for ColorizingDMD editor

[zedrummer]

Hello

As the editor ColorizingDMD is regularly updated with feasible requests from author (posting "Issues" on the Github, here https://github.com/zesinger/ColorizingDMD where you can download the editor up-to-date in the "Releases" section), I open this new post with all the releases of the editor, mainly for the new features (but perhaps for the bug fixes, too). The extra tool SortingCDump will also have its updates presented here (https://github.com/zesinger/SortingCDump/releases)

I remind you that, in addition to the comprehensive tutorial here https://www.pincabpassion.net/t15414-comprehensive-tuto-about-colorizingdmd, @dtatane created a Youtube channel with lots of excellent videos about the editor. He works hard to show all the new features, so don't hesitate to subscribe to his channel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJWOm6L_Lhc&list=PL_BgMMKhwOKJ9EieULq_tjClotEdiR6MO

For the authors that would like to convert their PAL/VNI roms, he also provide useful information here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqRDSM8Ix0U

 

 

Edited October 27, 2023 by zedrummer

[zedrummer]

So let's start with our new window called "Images".

You can now directly import images from files (PNG, JPG or BMP) or the clipboard to your frames using this new feature. The howto is available here https://www.pincabpassion.net/t15414-comprehensive-tuto-about-colorizingdmd#239840.

 

Joined are 2 great examples of what @Boroka made using this feature for his Serum colorization of Elvis here

Thanks

 

 

[ebor]

Wonderful feature 😍

The downgrade algorithm is excellent and saves a lot of time 👍

[KRAKEN]

Great feature @zedrummer.  I'll be honest, when this feature was first requested, I never thought it was going to work this good;  I was expecting images to be unrecognizable and too pixelated/blurry.  This looks amazing, well done once again!

[zedrummer]

Thanks mates. TBH @KRAKEN, I perfectly agree and, as I said to @Boroka on the Discord channel, I too wasn't that sure about the final quality of such low resolution downscaling. I'm happy if this is good and even more if, as said by @ebor, this is useful and saves time for the authors.

[ebor]

A small test with a video of Tron 

 

The original :

 

 

The v1.0 colorization :

 

 

The movie :

 

 

Integration of the image :

 

 

 

[zedrummer]

Much better 🤩!

[robertms]

3 hours ago, ebor said:

A small test with a video of Tron 

 

Friggin amazing! Zuse could sure use a facelift too 

[Terranigma]

21 hours ago, zedrummer said:

So let's start with our new window called "Images".

You can now directly import images from files (PNG, JPG or BMP) or the clipboard to your frames using this new feature. The howto is available here https://www.pincabpassion.net/t15414-comprehensive-tuto-about-colorizingdmd#239840.

 

Joined are 2 great examples of what @Boroka made using this feature for his Serum colorization of Elvis here

Thanks

 

 

 

As someone who has spent a lot of time doing manual redrawing and conversions on colour files, namely TMNT and some private projects, I can say that the examples shown here are very good here. Normally you can't just copy and paste a picture, you also have limitations with the amount of colours and colour matching, palette and priority as well as making the image recognisable. For this feature to produce these examples with very little work from the user is a great achievement.

 

While manually doing it "may" yield better results, the time it takes to get it looking right via the manual method probably isn't worth it for most people and this looks to be more than adequate. This may even be improved beyond what it is now to produce even better results, so this is an excellent step forward. I'm not sure if people appreciate how long it takes to do these kinds of things manually, you could spend sometimes days on a short couple of second sequence by hand.

 

If you can produce an experience that ends up with the user getting more done in less time, it's enjoyable and everyone can benefit from it, then that's a great achievement. Keep up the great work.

[zedrummer]

Thanks friends. That's exactly what we are looking for: save time but still keeping the enjoyment for colorization (and, why not, bring some new authors).

OK, I must admit that things are not all rosy, since the new image window, there are some strange display bugs that I must fix quickly. Thanks to @KRAKEN and @ebor, I have seen them. I hope to fix that by the end of the week-end.

[Aetios_PinballMag]

En français : Putain ça claque sa mère bordel de merde !!!

In english : it's amazing ^^

[ebor]

23 minutes ago, Aetios_PinballMag said:

En français : Putain ça claque sa mère bordel de merde !!!

In english : it's amazing ^^

😂

[zedrummer]

This is a f**ing compliment @Aetios_PinballMag, thanks!

[marco37]

Vite Vite Vite ! les .pac en Serum ! (pour les ZeDMD😁)

Edited April 2, 2023 by marco37

[okerra]

once again, it shows that the open community project is always superior, you are great

[goodtwist]

These examples look great. Thanks for all your efforts! – I have a quick question. You might have addressed it, but is the name "Serum" taken from the movie or short story "Reanimator?" If so, does this make you a madman genius doctor, and old DMDs un-animated corpses?  It makes sense to me.

[zedrummer]

I'm sorry @goodtwist, no reference to anything at all. Just an homophone to the initial "cRom" (for "colorized Rom"). And I like the idea to "inject" colors to a monotone original Rom, bringing it to life, so "Serum" is perfect.

[goodtwist]

4 hours ago, zedrummer said:

I'm sorry @goodtwist, no reference to anything at all. Just an homophone to the initial "cRom" (for "colorized Rom"). And I like the idea to "inject" colors to a monotone original Rom, so "Serum" is perfect.

Got it! That makes sense.  ; ) Thanks!

[ebor]

An example with the new video feature :

 

 

[zedrummer]

https://github.com/zesinger/ColorizingDMD/releases/tag/v1.24

Yes, in the v1.24 version of ColorizingDMD you can even import videos in the same window called "Images".

It is now easy to colorize a full animation at once, just find a video corresponding to your needs and within 5 minutes, you are done.

@dtatane made a tutorial for this feature here

 

[ebor]

Some new attempts to integrate videos with the Tron rom.

This feature is terrible 🤩

 

 

[zedrummer]

I know we are some versions later, but I will sum up the new features here:

• with 1.25 you can now ask to automatically draw scrollings when you have drawn key frames
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4RMrIz0Fhs
   
• with 1.26 you can automatically generate an animated GIF from several frames selected in the frame strip, with 1.29, the colour rotations are displayed in the GIFS and with the 1.31, you can choose to add the colorized frame only or both the original and the colorized ones (pressing Shift while pushing the button) to show your progress (thanks @ebor for the example here):
• 
   
• with 1.27 and 1.28 you can now manually set the frame duration in milliseconds and draw ellipses and ellipsoïdal gradients (Thanks @MrMan2k7) :
  
   
• with 1.30, a great feature in the editor: using @freezy's dmddevice64.dll copied in VPinMame directory, you can now test your colorized frames selected in the frame strip or from a txt dump directly to see how they would appear ingame. You can play the sequence forwards or backwards respecting the saved duration of each frame.
   

Don't hesitate to join the colorization author crew in the Discord channel here https://discord.gg/aK2dNaB6xR. Thanks to @dtatane, you have great video tutorials (with new ones regularly) for complete beginners, see signature.
Thanks
David aka Zed

[zedrummer]

We are now version 1.36.1, so here are the new features:

• with 1.32, as requested by @Boroka, if you have a pattern in different uncolorized frames that repeats at the same place and don't want to copy/paste colorization several times, just colorize it for one frame, select (with Ctrl) this part of the frame and press the "Auto Copy" button in the copy/paste area of the colorization toolbar. It will go through all the original uncolorized frames and copy your colorization where it will be found. Check Boroka issue here https://github.com/zesinger/ColorizingDMD/issues/43 for visual explanation
   
• with 1.34, as requested by @dtatane, you can perform a copy from one frame to one (or several) other(s) only where the original uncolorized frames are matching. This is an easy way to copy colorized background letting the animated parts in original colours to be manually colored later on. See the video tutorial by Dtatane here
• starting at 1.33 and completed at 1.35, and as requested by @MrMan2k7, a new feature called "Scroll Copy" has been added to the Image window: ColorizingDMD can automatically calculate, from an image and on a selection area of several frames, a combination of a scrolling (in any direction) and a zoom. Just select the initial part of the image (initial position and zoom) and the final part of the image (final positon and zoom) and it will colorize the selected area.
• As requested by @ebor, v1.36 along with the v1.5 of the Serum dll (download here https://github.com/zesinger/libserum/releases/tag/v1.5.0 and drop in your VPinMame directory) provide bounding boxes for sprites: you may bound any sprite to a rectangular area of the frame. In this capture of Tron by Ebor, the different elements of the scrolling in the right part of the frame are chosen randomly, so using sprites is the best option for colorization. But to avoid the sprites to "leak" on the left part of the frame (score area) when they are only partially displayed on the left of the scrolling, Ebor defined a bounding box for them. With v1.36.1 a "Spot BBox" button has been added to the Frame window toolbar to show the in yellow the bounding box of the sprite.
• 

[zedrummer]

Today v2 of ColorizingDMD was released along with a new (4th!) window for the BACKGROUNDS:

 

Before, you could not draw a beautiful scenery behind the dynamic content as the dynamic colorization is basic, it's just switching each of the 4-or-16 colors of the original ROM to another.

With backgrounds, you decide that the colour 0 is only for background and then any colour-0 pixel will be replaced by its corresponding in the background image. Backgrounds may be limited to a rectangular bounding box, so you can choose a specific area for this feature.

I think you understand that this is particularly useful for simple text frames with dynamic content, for example to colorize alphanumeric tables.

Let's take the example of the full tuto here https://www.pincabpassion.net/t15414-comprehensive-tuto-about-colorizingdmd#240740

 

Imagine you have this original frame (with dynamic content and no use of colour 0 for this content):

 

 

and you've used the image importer to create a background out of a galaxy image, you get this:

If you define the upper part of the screen as the rectangular bounding box and assign this background (along with a dynamic colorization for the text using a red gradient for the 4th color used for the text), you'll get this ingame:

 

Nice isn't it?

v2.1.0 added a button and fixed some minor bugs. Everything is in the tuto given above.

 

To use backgrounds in your colorizations, you need v2.1.0 of CDMD here https://github.com/zesinger/ColorizingDMD/releases/tag/v2.1.0 and v1.6.1 of SortingCDump here https://github.com/zesinger/SortingCDump/releases/tag/v1.6.1.

 

For players and to test your backgrounds ingame, you need to copy (and unblock if needed) the latest (v1.6.0) serum.dll and serum64.dll in the VPinMame directory, download them from here https://github.com/zesinger/libserum/releases/tag/v1.6.0

 

As usual, don't hesitate to join the colorization author crew in the Discord channel here https://discord.gg/aK2dNaB6xR. Thanks to @dtatane, you have great video tutorials (with new ones regularly) for complete beginners, see signature.

 

Thanks

Zed

[ebor]

Here's what it can  look like 🤩