toud_painttmpl

Maiyannah's Painting Template
based on (the medium painting from) Stonehammer's New Painting placeables base models version 1.0 06062021
version 1.0 2023-10-02

Template of a medium sized wall-painting for use to easily create painting placeables usable in NWN:EE

Featured in NeverwinterVault Community Content Challenge of September 2023: https://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn1/hakpak/original-hakpak/custom-content-challenge-september-2023-fixes-and-improvements

ABSTRACT (or "what the heck is this?")

This file is my attempt at an improvement at Stonehammer's New Painting placeable base models. There's a few changes, mostly to the uvmap of the model so as to provide a higher resolution image, and to eliminate a part which is unused. Right now, this only improves the medium portrait-orientation frame.

CONTENTS

• toud_painttmpl.hak
• toud_painttmpl.psd
• toud_painttmpl.readme.txt

USAGE

Using the examples

Included with this is a hakpak which contains 4 example paintings, and a placeables.2da which allows you to use them.

To place them in your module, just create a new blueprint for the desired painting, and select the painting you want. To do this, right click in the item pallete, select new, then the category you want it placed under, and then in the final dialog after you name it, check "Launch Item Properties." In the item properties dialog, select the model of one of the four paintings, so for instance: TOUD: Painting: Spring (Stonehammer/Maiyannah/Alphonse Mucha) Then place it whereever you want in the module.

IF YOU ALREADY HAVE A PLACEABLES.2DA

If you already have a placeables.2da, you will have to merge these four items into it, otherwise you will likely encounter crashes, or other strange behaviour, when trying to open the module in the Aurora Toolset or play the module in Neverwinter Nights. To merge them in, open placeables.2da in your plain text editor of choice and paste the contents of the hak's 2da at the end of the file.

It may be that you need to renumber the 2da, you can do this by hand, or you can use Tarot Redhand's excellent 2da tools here: https://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn1/other/tool/fix-and-tidy-2da-files

I would recommend them anyways, as the tool is excellent at finding problems in 2das if you have any issues.

Creating your own

To create your own, first unpack 1 of the paintings from the hakpak, and name it as you desire (ensuring the the files are all the same name, just a different extension)

Assuming we're calling the file "new_painting" then this would give us:

• new_painting.tga
• new_painting.mdl
• new_painting.pwk

The tga is the texture, the mdl the model, and the pwk the collission mesh.

First, lets make the new texture. If you open the toud_painttmpl.psd file in Photoshop (or something that can read PSD, such as Affinity Photo, or Corel PhotoPaint), you will see you have several layers. These are all set up to make generating the texture as painless as possible.

You really only need to do a couple things: paste the desired painting into the Painting group. This group features an alpha layer that will automatically crop the painting to the model's placement area. You may have to manipulate it to get it to look how you want. Thenn, hide the other paintings in this group, and you're good to go!

However, there are a couple additional things the photoshop file offers to allow you to really make the painting pop:

First, you will notice the other paintings included in the PSD (the 4 examples), all have their own alpha layer. This is a canvas texture which simulates the effect of the painting being on canvas, and you can copy the alpha mask onto your own layer to have that affect. You can use the Levels function with that alpha mask selected to adjust how strong or weak you wish the effect to look.

Secondly, if you scroll down the layers, you will notice that the Frames layer tells you to Pick One - there are a handful of different frames you can select in here by making layers visible or not, and you can choose the one that best first your artwork.

When you have completed that change, go Save As, select the format as Targa .tga, and save it over your tga file, in this example "new_painting.tga"

Once you have completed this, you need to place a new entry in your placeables.2da file as follows (again, following the example)

33007 "Painting: My New Painting! (Stonehammer/Maiyannah/Me!)" **** new_painting **** **** **** **** 17 1 0 **** **** 1

Then place it into a hak (with the other example paintings if you wish), and you should be able to add your new paintings!

LICENSE

This content is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC-BY-SA 4.0) For details, see here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

In short you are free to use or remix this content in any way you so desire so long as any derivative works are also under this license, and you give attribution. Please give attribution to both me (Maiyannah Bishop) and to Stonehammer! This means any paintings you create with this template should also be shared under CC-BY-SA

The example paintings are by Alphonse Mucha, and are in the Public Domain.

AFTERWORD

If you like this content, please consider giving the persistent world I am developing for which I developed this template a look! Called Time of Unparalleled Darkness, it is set in Ravenloft.

                Website: www.toud.pw

NeverwinterVault dev thread: forum.neverwintervault.org/t/time-of-unparalleled-darkness-dev-thread/ Discord: discord.com/invite/YTghXhpqKg