Graphics

[Rainbow Lizard]

This one is my Viking Faction, The Paladins of Thor. I'll make a thread on my custom factions soon.
Well, it seems imageshack just hates me today, so just an attachment.

[Buster's Uncle]

Click on Albums at the top of the page - not hard to figure out, you can start your own, and [img] link from there.  It's how I do it.

[Buster's Uncle]

Leaderheads: Two Showy Examples of the Possibilities

This is from a 40’s Time Magazine cover:


The pleasant-looking chubby mature gentleman is Tse-veng Soong, Chinese politician and banker.  He was President of the Republic of China for a few years in the late 40s, reputed to be the only man the nationalists and communists both trusted.  He was Chiang Kai-shek’s brother in-law, and the richest man in China at one time, who earlier had financed the Flying Tigers - out of his own pocket. 

All irrelevant to the purpose of this article, but, a great man at the center of great events for a good deal of his life, and at least in the US, pretty completely forgotten.  Worth looking up, if you like that kind of thing.

…

So, the cover portrait struck me as a fine leaderhead - I simply do not remember how I got from that to setting out to do what I did - which was to make him a lot younger.  This was for an Asian faction leader to go with an artless custom faction of Darsnan’s, so it surely resulted from discussion with him as part of that collaboration.   

-(much later) It took quite a while to track that conversation down, but Darsnan’s faction was an alt. Hive, the Protectorate, led by one Kyong Shin, described as “a person younger than Yang, and more determined/autocratic looking.”  I posted two promising-looking painted portraits of Chinese leaders and Darsnan chose Soong over Chiang Kai-shek (I didn’t know at the time they were in-laws, Soong’s sister being the famous Madame Kai-shek, whom I have also since used as a faction leader.)  I don’t see the intensity Darsnan wanted in Soong, though the subject began younger than Yang.

Naturally, after so long I can’t be a great deal more specific in detailing the process than if someone else had done it and I was speculating how.  Reviewing the exchange over it with my collaborator helps slightly.

First, I put him on a diet.

I narrowed his head -20% springs to mind- in MSPaint - this is back when I did all I could in Paint.  You can see the marks on the background near his head and where his ear tips repeat.

Then, I pasted him into Photoshop and started working on him with the Smudge Tool, my perennial favorite.  The face needed general streamlining in shape, as simple narrowing hadn’t gotten nearly all the fat in his cheeks.  Of course I went after the lines in his face, softening, and more often, removing.

I brought his hairline lower and a bit further in on the sides - always a youthful cue, even in the un-baldest of older men. I added a widow’s peak, as Soong had what might be the remnant of one and that seemed somehow in keeping with an intense personality, looking a little predatory. 

I narrowed his ears slightly to make them stick out less and because ears grow slowly all your life, and are another subtle cue of age.  I slimmed the tip of his nose a good deal for the same reason, incidentally also adding to the intensity of expression I was working toward.

I took out the smile lines, both youthening and, well, taking out smile lines.  I worked the puffy lower cheeks in until I got a gentle, non-chubby/jowly jaw line - it tended to follow the hollow of the cheeks, making a nice, slender, triangular face.

It was a very long process, time spent deep in creative right-brain mode as I ended up virtually redrawing the face completely.  Right-brain mode being what it is, I would have had trouble detailing what I did in very high resolution at all five minutes after I finished.  A thing that surprises and impresses me now is that the posts I made at the time indicate that I did the whole job in under six hours - it looks so thoroughly redrawn that I’d been assuming I’d messed with it for days.

   

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Kyong Shin. 

I fancied then that Soong might have looked like that in his youth, and have since seen a photo at around that age - Shin could be his brother, anyway.

“Wow! Thats pretty high quality,” Darsnan said.  This portrait customization was how I found out I had real talent for this - I was very surprised by how well it turned out.  The quality of what you see is reduced a little deliberately, because it looked so real that I worried it would look too much like a processed photo set against a painted backdrop.  The anatomy of the cheeks is off, but it looks like an original creation, not an altered picture off the web. 

All that was left to do was change his clothes.  Darsnan wanted something North Korean, so I redrew that suit into a green mao jacket.  Clothes are like hair in being easy to alter massively and get satisfactory results.  I think, looking back, that iconic as the mao style is, I should have futured the collar more - but it’s hard to see any detail in the collar, even in the larger, pre-scan lined and SMAC(X) palleted versions here, so it doesn’t really matter.



Kyong Shin has been my avatar at CFC for years - I wear one or another of my custom faction leaders for an avatar everywhere, and this early work is one of the ones of which I am still proudest.

………………………………...........................................................................................


I stumbled over this semi-colored line drawing while looking for a hippy woman to lead an alt. Gaian faction:

     

It looks very much like the sort of thing my sister had as posters hanging in her room when she was young.  The subject was framed in a non-traditional way for a leaderhead, (which I assume is why Darsnan had me make something different for alt. Gaians later), and too much work to turn into something I could use, but I just plain liked the shot, and decided to have a go at it.

This one, I did on my own, and therefore have a lot less old post commentary to refresh my memory about how I did it.  But my purpose in this particular tutorial is not to tell you how to do what I did, but to show you that it can be done, and figured out as you go, by an untrained artist with little experience and little expertise in Photoshop. 

However, here's what little that I do remember, just to get you started:  first I did a flood-fill, with the paint bucket tool, of a peachy  Caucasian skin-tone.  Erred on the side of a golden tan, because a nature hippy is going to get some sun.  That filled less of the white space of her face and neck than you’d expect, and I did some smearing around with the Smudge Tool on medium Threshold.

Coloring is easy; it's giving the work depth that's hard.

Now this next part is the big secret to converting a line drawing to a full-color painting well: I selected the lines that defined her nose and jaw and turned them into a much darker shade of the same peachy skin-tone, almost brown.  (Shadows have a little less color saturation, as well as being darker, because light carries color.  That’s why you see more-or-less in black-and-white on a moonlit night.)  Then I worked the lines with the smudge tool on low power, to blur them in realistically. 

I did the same sort of thing with the lines defining her lips, eyes, and eyebrows, all separately for the differences in color needed.

That was only the beginning.  I used the dodge/burn tool to darken or lighten areas to give her cheeks, and darkened her some eye sockets.  Blended all with the Smudge Tool. Made her some bosoms, and managed to not get carried away by making them too big or too obvious.  All much more complex than that, and I took a while doing it, but that’s the basic technique.  You just have to understand lighting and facial anatomy, and be persistent.  If I could figure it out, you can, too.

I was very happy with how it turned out:



Attractive, and a little more mature, with a hint of intensity the original didn’t have.  I like.  But this one was a bit of a heartbreaker - the freckles didn’t make it through the transition to the AC pallet and scanlining.  I’ve also never gotten any word that anyone but me liked it.  But I know good work when I see it, and I did very good work here.

(Incidentally, I don’t see the problem with the framing - she’s just sitting close to the monitor/camera.  We don’t have to follow the official style slavishly.   We just want leaderheads that convey personality and look like they could be video conferencing.)

       

Good luck with your future ambitious projects; I have poor eyesight and had a blurry monitor at the time, and had to figure these out as I went.  You can do it.

[Buster's Uncle]

Based on discussing it with Kilkakon and encouragement from my artist sister, I remembered a few details about how I colored the line drawing, and have just now edited in four paragraphs of vague technique.  Those who've already read it might want to look again at the second part.

[Buster's Uncle]

My First Faction Graphic 
or:  How I Got Started Modding


SO, I’m like a lot of people; I played SMAC for years, and eventually got curious if there were any goodies online - I think I downloaded the TNG-Picard “Federation” and the Ric Fair Wrestlers faction off The Arrival 6-8 years ago, but couldn’t get them to load/work and gave up pretty quickly. 

In, I dunno, late ‘08, I finally got Alien Crossfire.  I’d wanted it forever and played with it over a summer a few years before until the loan of the CD ended.  Finally I had my own copy.  I never thought it was much of an upgrade, but new SP movies were a lot of fun after all those years, and I loved having twice as many opponents to choose from - it lent some freshness to an old beloved game for me.

This swiftly lead to me rooting around back online looking for goodies again and to try to find out how to get the custom factions I had to work, and straight to trying out SMAniaC.

Now, Maniac’s since become a pal, and I wouldn’t dream of badmouthing, but I didn’t care for the SE changes - I guess I found the reasoning behind them too tough to follow.  But the seven custom factions he included - well, here was more variety and freshness again.  I got very interested in custom factions and resumed looking for them and information about how to install and fix.

Probably everyone who’s ever taken an interest in custom factions has experienced the same; there are a lot of custom factions out there that sound great in the description in some forum’s Downloads section, but lose a lot of appeal when they’re downloaded only find out they have no graphics, leaving you looking like Deirdre again, or have the Free Drone graphics file renamed but unaltered again, or, thanks to the antichrist of SMAC(X) modding, Facedit, the Hive or partly-customized graphics with the Hive bases and often the logo and diplomacy landscape again.

(Do not touch Facedit, folks.  It is so buggy and awful as to almost constitute malware.  There are much better ways to do every single thing it does, unless you‘re very lazy and/or stupid.)

So I had six custom factions with a full spectrum of those shortcomings downloaded - not a single full graphic in the lot.  When I finally worked out how to load them into SMAC(X) (had to fix the Wrestlers rules file first), no one but the Feminine Union had any colors to their flags or text (which was illegible that way)- and Britney's color was too hard to tell from Sister Miriam’s. It was even more annoying to have identical non-colors for the rest; something had to be done.

Poking around, I saw the difference between the Union's .pcx file and the rest- there were little color boxes in the lower left-hand corner (it’s a difference between SMAC and SMAX, which you should always do because it’s easy and vanilla SMAC just ignores it, so no harm, but essential for working right in Crossfire). After that, the fix was pretty easy.

It also bothered me that The Eighth Faction, or Mindworms With Minds, defaulted to Gaian graphics and colors.



I had an old copy of Photoshop5 that I never used, or much knew how to, because like all high-end graphics programs the interface is very user-hostile to anyone who hasn’t had a long time to become familiar with it.  It would open the uncommon .pcx format, though, and I wanted to play them Mindworms and not have them suck by looking exactly like Gaians, so I set out to “put sunglasses” on everything to at least make them distinguishable.

I think the first thing I did was paste the graphic over into MSPaint - say what you will about Paint, but it doesn’t take a PhD and six months to figure out how to do what can be done there.  I think I tackled the bases first, doing some rather inept red stippling on the bases to make them Xenofungusy.  Remember, I was new to graphics modding, not  SMAC. 

And I gave Deirdre glowing red eyes.  Something about the nature of the faction and those default graphics put the idea in my head that it was a result of a lab experiment run amok, and visually mind-controlling Deirdre was my first step into the greater area of the storytelling aspect of SMAC(X) that has been my real specialty, not just the art, since.

It was a customization that I could do in under an hour now, but took a couple of days then, what with figuring out how.  -It is the nature of telling a story well that even many relevant details have to be left out to keep the length reasonable - I was rooting around all the official art files in my AC root folder on my hard drive, and searching/figuring out answers to technical questions and doing some hardcore lurking through old threads on SMAC forums, mostly ‘poly, all at the same time.  All the stuff was informing all the other stuff I did any given day/week.

So I did the most basic of art customizations to make the Mindworms individual - a little red on the bases and a little red eye on the leader - then started fixing up the half-done, half-Gaian .pcx files that came with the Cannibis League.  Then I’d get an idea about something else to do on the Mindworms art.  I was working on both for a couple of weeks and got into fixing up the Wrestlers, who had Believer bases and needed improvements to the other elements, The Federation, which needed a real captain (named Kirk), and custom bases, the Borg, with an excellent leaderhead and logo, but Hive bases, and the Feminine Union, with it’s crapulent leaderhead of Britney Spears crying out to be replaced with her in her Queen of Mars get-up from the Oops, I Did It Again video - I was new enough to Alien Crossfire to not recognize the Usurper bases the Union had, and someday, I’ll have to fix that, but I did create a neat logo to replace the Firaxis spiral it had been given.

Then I commenced on my first all-original faction, the Pretty Princesses, based on/for my perfect niece, five at the time - this was half her life ago.  Custom everything, completely original, including the .txt files, and I daresay the nicest bases I ever drew from scratch, the house she lived in then.

It just kept snowballing, as did my enthusiasm - I ended up in a manic spell, getting as little as four hours sleep a night, waking up itching to get back to it.  This went on for a month.

I don’t recall exactly how I went about it, but I tracked down the native life in units.pcx and pasted a tiny mindworm onto Deirdre’s forehead.  I made her skin ruddy, as if her body chemistry was a little xenoformed.  I found the .bmp of the mindworm in the lab that’s in the SMAC(X) folder and used it in the center of a blanked-out Gaian logo silhouette as the new logo - and superimposed the worm over the diplomacy landscape.

I ultimately decided that the hue-shifting I’d done in Photoshop on the bases wasn’t enough, and carefully placed the top of a fungal tower on the highest point of the bases.  There was no missing the Gaian origins, but no chance of mistaking the two.

The final touch I later came up with was to flip Deirdreworm’s portrait left-right.  The thing was finally done.



(Note the joke in the bottom right corner.) What I did when to which faction is a complex issue, but this is the first one I set out to make, and the first I finished.  The Eighth Faction is ridiculously overpowered, but in the game?  The art hints at a story, and it looks great.

And that’s how I got started.

[Buster's Uncle]

Faction/Flag Colors


I’ve never really addressed the faction colors, because it’s pretty kindergarten-obvious stuff, and there’s not a lot to say.  But it’s still possible to mess up, so a few remarks:

This is an Alien Crossfire thing, but you should add it to your faction graphics even if you only have and care about vanilla SMAC.  If you publish/share your work, SMAX users will find your nice factions all crappy and broken, otherwise.

This is a blank version of what goes in the bottom left corner of the main faction.pcx, crammed right into the bottom left corner:



It’s not brain surgery - here it is with colors, the very first thing I did in my very first custom faction:



That’s a bright color alternating with almost black - (completely black is semi-transparent for base shadows, and would look strange as a faction contrast color.)  You don’t want to deviate significantly from bright/dark, bright/dark, bright/dark, slightly different shade for vehicle color - doing it that way is how it was designed to work, and doesn’t look as good in the game if you try to get clever. 

Trust me; I wasted a lot of time trying to get cute with the color format when I was starting out, and it just doesn’t work as well.  The base names look  fuzzy and harder to read without the strong contrast.  Same for the flags.  The borders don’t show up right on the map without bright contrasted with dark.

Don’t do what I did, and waste a lot of time trying to find a unique color for your faction.  1.) There are only 255 colors in the game palette, and 3/4ths of them are too dark and dingy to show up on the mini world map in the game, and 2.) 14 of what’s left are already taken, and a few of the second seven are already a bit too close the some of the first seven.   (The minimap thing is important, though, and if you don’t pay attention to it in play testing, the end users of your factions will tell you about it.)   

Just pick out a bright primary or secondary color that goes with the color scheme of the other elements in the faction and don’t worry about it.  Seriously.  SMAC2 should have a better palette, but there’s no point trying to make factions for it  quite yet.

And that’s really all there is to say on the subject.  Bright/dark, basic colors, and spend your time worrying over the other elements that you have more choices about.

[Rainbow Lizard]

What are the dimensions of those little squares?

[Buster's Uncle]

Hold on - I'm booting GIMP to check.

The inside of the box is 7x7 pixels.  You want to just paste in the boxes, anyway.

[NewAgeOfPower]

@ Rainbow

Like the Paladin design, but you need to change the Diplomacy Background.

[Rainbow Lizard]

And how about the positioning?

[Buster's Uncle]

What positioning do you mean?

[Rainbow Lizard]

I mean the co-ordinates that each one occupies, for example, I can tell the first one has it's bottom left at (768,0).

[Buster's Uncle]

The color squares?  Just copy/paste the whole color box set in at once from another faction .pcx - if the blue border lines fit the bottom left corner exactly, just inside the .pcx, no pink/purple border, you've got the position exactly right.  I would guess the game only samples one pixel in each box, so it's hard to screw up.  I've seen people run the box borders off the edge accidentally, and it doesn't seem to break anything, just looks sloppy to other art modders.

You're thinking like a programmer, which is fine for understanding what's needed, but trying to do it very much the hard way for this, I think.  That's why I was surprized when you asked for the box dimensions.

Would you happen to have teh haxxor coding skillz, sir?  If you can decompile and fiddle with the game code, you could be a VERY popular person around here.  TOO popular, in fact.

[Kilkakon]

Yeah I work off existing templates so the boxes are already there, makes it easier.

[Rainbow Lizard]

So how are you doing on the next graphics sheet?