[Flyby]

[Originally posted by Flyby at his 'Battle Lab' forum on the former Eclipse Studios Forums, 9th Aug 2002 @ 10.31PM]

The great difficulty of making new SHP’s for RA2/Yuri is to get them in the right angle and the right position. The method is based upon the use of 3dsmax or GMAX to make your SHP’s, hence you need a good understanding of 3D modelling.

After some R&D I concluded that in order to get the correct placement of your buildings in relation of the complete SHP picture, you need to place the backcorner at the 0,0 point. For those who want to do it manually, the backcorner of your “building” needs to be in the centre of the SHP image.

These are the valid SHP sizes :

0x0
1x1
2x1
3x1
4x2
5x3
6x4
1x2
2x2
3x2
4x3
1x3
2x3
3x3
4x4
1x4
2x5
3x3Refinery
1x5
2x6
3x4
3x5

Doing it manually:
Use an orthographic camera with an XY elevation of 30° and rotated 45° round the Z-axis.

I’ve also made a script that automates the setup, takes care of the camera positioning, lighting setup, background color, etc. For the moment it can be found at http://www.deezire.net/tutorials/fil...LSET_r1_10.zip

[!] There is a know bug that causes maxscript to crash if you run the script repeatedly when using the automatic rendering setup. The error does manifest if you only use the camera setup and then render out manually. Considering RA2 is a thing of the past now, there is little chance any further development is done on the script…

And the picture that says more then a thousand words:


And this is how a real in-game SHP looks like: