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Spent my day making a black version of the animated arrow signs from TrackMania 2020. The original signs are made by Nadeo and are white. The main reason I made these black signs is that the white ones hardly stand out when used on top of the Valley, Desert or Snow backgrounds. White on light colored backgrounds results in low contrast, it makes it quite easy to not see the signs and their direction in time when driving some tracks.
At first, I thought it would be as easy to invert the colors, but in reality that was not the case. I had to increase the contrast by a lot to make the black stand out more, specifically when it turns to gray, otherwise at some moments, the arrows will almost not be visible. On top of that, working with transparent video is a mess, even in Premiere Pro, I used ffmpeg to convert the original webm files to sequences of PNGs to keep the transparency. Although, that quickly was not worth it as I needed to apply a background before the contrast adjustment effect even would work. Afterwards, the invert effect. At last, it needed to have a transparent background again, so I used the ultra key effect to key out the white background. Especially this last step needed multiple attempts to reduce flickering. For exporting I used a plugin to export it to the webm format again.
In-game, it looks great, even from up close. If you get very close, you can see a grain effect when the arrows "blink", but that is acceptable. The only thing which I am a bit sad about is that these arrows are slightly thinner than the original white ones due to the many effects I had to apply. If I knew something about creating animations, I would have rather tried to recreate them from scratch. I originally thought it would have taken a few hours. In the end it took me a full day (about 8 hours) as figuring out how to do it, running into issues and tweaking/testing took a ton of time.
27 авг 2024
