编辑“Portrait modding”（章节）

== Animated Portraits ==
This guide will go over how to create a new portrait using Autodesk Maya, animating it and implementing it in the game.

Portraits in Stellaris are animated 2D characters. It works by having body parts split up on a texture map, assigning each body part to an individual polygonal plane, sorting them correctly in Maya and animating them using the skeleton feature.

To create an animated portrait, you will need a painting software like Adobe Photoshop, as well as Autodesk Maya 2015/2016. You will also need a plugin to export your texture to .dds. This can be done with the Photoshop plugin installed with the exporter. But we recommend downloading the Nvidia Photoshop .dds plugin (because it is simpler in this case).<ref>https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-texture-tools-adobe-photoshop</ref> The way this works is that when you “export” the file in Photoshop, it will save one file to your work folder and one file to the game folder. It can also be done manually, but then you have to copy the .dds file to the game folder.

=== Photoshop ===

But, let’s start off, and take Fungoid 11 as an example. First create a texture of your alien. Separate the body parts that will be moving in different layers, and remember to paint behind any moving parts such as arms/tentacles/jaw/ears. The original should look something like Fig.1 (observe the amount of layers):

[[File:Portrait rigging fig1.jpg]]

''Fig.1: Source texture file of alien portrait''

Next separate each layer and place them a few pixels away from each other like in Fig.2.

[[File:Portrait rigging fig2.jpg]]

''Fig.2: Body parts separated''

Select all the separated layers, duplicate them, merge the duplicated layers, add the merged layer to the bottom of the folder, rename it to “padding” (this is to prevent alpha bleeding), ctrl-select the padding layer and go to “Select > Modify > Expand”, expand it by around 5 pixels. Make sure that the expansion doesn’t connect to any other selection. Now we want to fill in the expanded area with the same colours as the body parts. This can either be done manually by painting in the area with the body parts’ colours or by using a plug-in that does it for you. A plug-in we have been using is the Free Plug-Ins from Flaming Pear found here: http://www.flamingpear.com/download.html (go to Free Plugins at the bottom), then in Filters, go to Flaming Pear, then Solidify A to fill the selection.

Now when our padding layer is done we want to create an alpha. This is done by ctrl+shift+selecting the layers, go to Channels tab in the layer window and clicking the “Save selection as channel” button at the bottom of the window.

Having our alpha created the texture file should be complete, however it is probably pretty large. Save your .psd file, then resize the image to 512x512 (don’t save the .psd file here!), save the file as a .dds with DXT5 settings and then ctrl+Z to get your original size back to your .psd.

Your texture should now be ready to be rigged in Maya.

=== Maya ===

Open up Maya and start off by creating a new skeleton. See Fig.3 for joint hierarchy.

[[File:Portrait rigging fig3.jpg]]

''Fig.3: Joint hierarchy for Fungoid 11''

You probably don’t need to create as many joints as can be seen in Fig.3 just yet, so start off by just creating the top ones: “root”, “root_center”, “spine_1”. You can add more as you see fit depending on the design of your character.

==== Material ====
Open up your .dds in Photoshop, open the image size window ({{key press|ctrl}}+{{key press|alt}}+{{key press|i}}) and change the format from pixels to centimeters. The values here are the values we will use to create the polygonal planes in Maya. The Fungoid 11 texture file is 512x512 px which results in 18.06x18.06 cm.

Go to Maya and Create > Polygon Primitives > Plane > Option box. Set the axis to Z and then input 18.06 in both height and width. Now to create a proper material for it. Go to the Hypershader (Windows > Rendering Editors > Hypershader) and create a Phong material in the menu to your left. Assign the texture to the diffuse channel and assign a black texture to the normalmap and specular map channels. You can do this by assigning a file and never adding an actual texture. Assign the new material to the newly created plane. If your texture isn’t a perfect square you will need to go to the UV Editor and move the UV edge to the texture edge (however in the example of 512x512 it is a square).

Now duplicate your plane until you have one for each body part, like in Fig.4. Add more vertices to the planes and move each parts’ vertices to exclude the other parts (make sure you have "Preserve UVs" checked in the Move Tool settings) and place them above each other in the correct positions and order. It’s easiest to work in the front view. Put them in the same order in the outliner. The one furthest in the back should be at the top of the list and the one most in front at the bottom, this is to make the game know in which order to render them.

[[File:Portrait rigging fig4.jpg]]

''Fig.4: Polygon planes to map out the body parts''

==== Animation ====

To get better deformations on your mesh you should cut it up (add more splits) to get more polygons where the mesh will deform.

Now let’s continue to your skeleton, the skinning of the character, animating it and exporting it. If you have created the skeleton already with the structure which can be seen above you need to skin the meshes to it. To do this go to the "Rigging" menu in Maya > Skin > Bind Skin and press the options box. Make sure your settings looks like in the picture below, important is to have 4 max influences and uncheck "Remove unused influences".

[[File:Portrait skinning settings.jpg]]

''Portrait skinning settings''

When you have tweaked the skinning, by using the Paint Skin Weights Tool for each mesh, you need to animate it. First you need to give the root joint an animation attribute which will control where your animations start and where they end. To do this, select the root joint, open the export window and press "add animation attr." while having the correct exporting project selected (in which you might have a few animation strings already specified). This will add a new attribute to your joint which can be seen in the Channel Box. If you already had some animation strings in your Stellaris export project, in the clausewitz.txt file, these can now be found in the animation attribute on the root joint. You need to have at least one called "none" and one other with whatever name you prefer. If you don't have an animation called "none" you can add one manually if you select the root joint, go to "Modify" and select "Edit Attribute". In the new window, select the animation attribute and click on any slot under "Enum Names" to add a new state and name it "none".

Now when you animate your character you need to set a key on the animation attribute on the root joint for where your animations start with "idle" (for example) and "none" where they end. If done correctly, it should look like in Fig.5, each pillar is an animation and the space between where the graph is on 0 value it is "none".

[[File:Portrait rigging fig5.jpg]]

''Fig.5: Graph of “animation” attribute for “root” joint''

==== Shader ====
For the body you should use the shader "PdxMeshPortrait", to use this select the shader your made previously in the Hypershader, then in the [[Maya exporter]] window select "Stellaris" and click "add shader attr." and select the mentioned shader in the drop-down menu at the bottom of the attributes in the channel box of the previously made shader (named Shader).

If the list doesn’t contain the Portrait shader, and only contains other kinds of shaders, you can either go to <code>Documents\Paradox Interactive\PdxExporter\settings</code>, open the <code>clausewitz.txt</code> file and add the shader you want to the list (remember to also increase the number at the start with 1 for each shader you add).

Alternatively you can select the shader in the Hypershader, go to Modify > Edit Attribute…, select “shader”, click on the empty space below the shaders in the list, then write in the text box the name of the shader to add it. “PdxMeshPortraitClothes” for clothes and “PdxMeshPortraitHair” for hair. More on how to script clothes and hair later.

==== Export ====
Open up the exporter, make sure you check the “Skip Merge” option in the exporter, see Fig.6 for options (normally the export optimizes the mesh by merging separate meshes, to reduce the amount of draw calls when rendering). Set a name and location and press export.

[[File:Portrait rigging fig6.jpg]]

''Fig.6: Portrait export options''