Graphics

[Buster's Uncle]

Well, you may have noticed that I don't tend to do things halfway, and if I'm going to put up art goodies files, it makes all kind of sense to cover all four of the elements - also, there's nothing but good in backing up what I have on hand in an organized fashion, and, too, I freely admit that this stuff is bait to attract more participation to ac2.

And, you know, helping and good works is extremely validating to your sense of self-worth.  I can alway use me some validation.

Right now, I'm pulling together the first of my instructional blog posts for putting up here...

[Buster's Uncle]

[Graphics]

If creating/modifying graphics doesn’t interest you I doubt this will.

My specific examples are from Alpha Centauri, but most of the techniques, and all of the comments about the thinking behind the artistic process and decisions should be universally applicable.  The THINKING, in fact, is the main thing in this old article that is still useful.

My first purpose here is to give potential graphics guys a leg up, so I have to go into torturous detail to be really helpful, as I don’t know what they do or do not already know how to do. I don’t have a sophisticated graphics set-up at all, and do a lot the hard way in simple, common programs, but that makes it more universal, albeit perhaps often extraneous to someone with PhotoshopUltimateSuper 2020.  (Also note that if you have Windows7, most of the comments about MS Paint no longer apply, but many of the techniques will still work in other programs.)

You have been warned.

So, while working on the New Vikings (an alt. Pirates faction) today, I started a little status report with a name suggestion to send Darsnan, but things went pretty smoothly, and it turned into running notes to send with the graphic instead…

It occurred to me that a few months (years now) ago while I was a lurker looking for information about various things I wanted to learn to do, I would have loved it if someone had posted about their creation process in really boring detail, naming programs used and tools, and what-not.

And I thought that the bulk of the email [with the blow-by-blow I didn’t waste Darsnan’s time on added in brackets] would make a start.

So I’m going to try to describe the entire actual creation of an faction graphic- we’re in for a long post(s)...

I hope my process will be at least of some interest to any other artists currently active, too- and that they’ll feel free to do the same, and also post here on any miscellaneous graphics issue they want. The next time I do some random graphic myself, this is where I plan to post it.

***

[Darsnan had suggested a name, Ulrik Magnussen, that sounded, not Finnish to me, but Norwegian. (Graphics stuff is coming- it’s all connected, anyway.)]

A Finnish name site was first hit when I looked. Because the original subject of the portrait I’d chosen was apparently named Jim, I chose a j name, Jali (yahlee), for no Jim-looking equivalent at hand, its exoticness and that it doesn’t sound as much like a chick’s name as many on that list.

Magnus was first in the M’s, so I’d say Jali Magnus was a lock, if you’ve nothing to add. Easy to remember, spell and type, too. 

[I’d already cranked up the contrast in Photoshop on the bases he’d sent me this morning .

[They were Network Node’s work, and like a lot of his bases, pretty and well-designed, but to my eye, too pastel-looking to look realistic in the game.

[(Looking at it over a year later, I should have gone to the trouble to clean up all those light pixels around the edges of the bases. They really stand out when you zoom in; small details are important if you want to do good work.

[(In fact, I now think I really muffed fixing up on this set; if I did it over, I‘d zoom in tight and do something about all the speckle-y highlight-and-dark bits all over the base {which cranking up the contrast made even worse} with careful use of the smudge tool to smooth out the flat surfaces to let the details and lines of the base stand out more - tedious work, one pixel at a time, but again, attention to detail is everything in good art.)

[Then I selected the lot and pasted them into the copy of the whole Pirates .pcx I’d previously pasted into MS Paint. I use paint for this because it’s not something Photoshop 5 is any good for- Paint lets you move your paste around before you drop it.  GIMP is good for that, though, and if you have Windows7, you can no longer do this in Paint - no “Draw Opaque“ function anymore.

[Then I opened the blank .pcx (you can get it here) with the empty AC graphics boxes that Maniac had posted sometime in the past in Photoshop (all I began using Photoshop for was opening and saving, and did all the work pasting back and forth between Paint and Lexmark Photo Editor, which complement each other nicely used this way- if either did color manipulation I’d have never gone to the trouble to learn how to use Photoshop). I zoomed on the datalink leaderhead box and selected/copied it. I switched to a second copy of Paint in which was waiting the portrait I’d prepared. (A blow-by-blow of that kind of thing is enough for its own post later.)



[I pasted in the box from blankpcx.pcx, right-clicked the sample tool in the middle to make the .pcx’s background color this copy of Paint’s background color. I then turned off “Draw Opaque” and hit [Ctrl]z to undo and make the purple-filled box go away. I then [Ctrl]w-ed to resize the image- there were several minutes of trial and error before I found 55% to be ideal for getting what I wanted of the figure to fit in the diplomacy box at what I judged was a good size for the game - ideally you want to get the figure somewhere roughly about the size in the frame of the official factions. So now I had the picture in front of me sized like I wanted with the box it had to fit in around it- I selected what was inside the box and [Ctrl]c-ed. Now it was time for the scan lines.



[(Note the change to the collar. I've erased more lapels than you'd believe to make clothes look a little more futurey. This image didn't need much work, though.)

[I think I’ve now spent more time preparing this essay than I did assembling the faction graphic- I’m going to post this much and continue later.

[Next up: manual scan-lines with an old edition of Photoshop that lacks an automatic function to do it for me. I’ll probably describe how to do it the really hard way with only Paint and any program that will adjust contrast, too.]

[Kilkakon]

I like the leaderhead. Very nice choice there, epic shadows going on too.

[Buster's Uncle]

You like, huh?  I thought an old man in a turtleneck and sweater, if not all that futurey, looked plenty nautical, and I sorta liked the dicotomy of an agressive faction with a gentle-looking leader - lends nuance, so to speak.  The official factions tend to telegraph who the good guys and bad are with their faces pretty obviously, (though Lal fools you); sometimes you want to lay it on thick, but sometimes-- you want something more subtle.  This was intended as the latter.

[ariete]

hi uncle, thanx to support the recruits

i must write you because i know you edit artwork using gimp too. I wanna make flc file for my custom faction so i've opened an exist .flc file and my intention is substitute the different images with custom images.
i 've saw first picture of a .flc file is black with some signals. I read chuft thread on creation .flc file using Psp and he talkin about 4 pink square (colour ff00ff) to add at the extremety of the picture, this i've saw in old faction .flc file, for the new faction i don't see this.
first question : using gimp can i substitute my custom picture (perhaps not with blue hue but just skyline) with the existing in a default .flc file, it run on the game?

[Buster's Uncle]

I never mastered .flcs.  Despite what chuft says, I figured out how to make one without the programs he metioned, but mine had the colors messed up, crashed the game, and I've entirely forgotten how I did it.  It did work as an .flc, but not quite right for AC.  I wish I could be more help - you do need to compile a .gif of 20 or so black-and-white frames at 87x105 pixels first, if I recall, and you can do that in GIMP.

[Kilkakon]

The pink would be whatever colour is transparent in your image.

[Buster's Uncle]

Scan Lines

[Continuing directly  on from the last graphics how-to post, another old article that I publish [with a few bracketed remarks written today inserted] for the illustration of the thinking behind  my process, and in the belief that some people out there will have old systems and need instructions for obsolete programs, or only have something they must adapt one of these techniques to be able to do scan lines.  The more advanced scan lining technique I describe first here will still work without the useless W7 MSPaint, but instead using old versions of GIMP (awkwardly) with one of the contrast-altered copies of the portrait pasted into a second window with a transparent background layer added.  Better is to download the latest version of GIMP and use the new function Filters>Distorts>Erase Every Other Row.  Two future articles will address my evolving scan lining technique, the second using the function I just mentioned and taking under a minute.  Stay tuned.]

Lacking an automatic function that will do scan lines for me, I’ve worked out two ways to do it manually. I’ll tackle them in reverse order of invention.

Once it fits the frame the way I want, I select the inside of the box [[Ctrl]c to copy] and switch back to Photoshop.

The diplomacy frame I selected still waiting, I paste in the portrait. [Ctrl]v to paste] I reselect the picture- inside the box this time- and reduce the contrast 30% [Image>Adjustments>Brightness/Contrast...] (usually- sometimes I think it needs to be brighter, and increase the contrast by the same amount, or reduce it 15% and increase the next by the same- I’ve found a 30% difference in contrast is about perfect for good scan lines.) In this case, the shot I'm working with is just a little too bright/colorful, so I'm definitely reducing the contrast. [In retrospect, I maybe should have gone -15% contrast over +15% - the original shot really looked better at its original levels.  I was still pretty new at this when I wrote it up.]

Then I paste again to drop another copy (which still has the original contrast level) on top of it.

I select a horizontal box the width of the picture, but only one pixel high, at the top of the portrait and hit delete.



I hit the down arrow key twice- which in Photoshop, moves the select box down two pixels- and hit delete again. I use a two-handed technique, hitting the delete button with a finger of my left hand, and the down arrow with a finger of my right.  As I fly down the picture doing this, pixel-wide stripes of the lower-contrast copy of the portrait underneath are revealed every other row.

When I get to the bottom, I select the whole portrait inside the frame and click Layer>Flatten Image. This makes the two copies one layer- with the scan line striping I made- that I can copy and paste into place on the copy of the whole faction graphic in the other copy of Paint.

(Then I go back to the copy of Paint holding the leaderhead, reduce it in size 80%, and repeat the process- then 73% of the datalinks size, then 60%, and I'm done with the leaderhead.)


[Now a digression about the size/crop technique I still use, though not in Paint anymore.  I don't know why I didn't write this thing in order.]

-Selecting the empty box:


and pasting it over the portrait.

(This particular portrait fit the box just right at 56% of the original I was working from. His head is centered nicely in the frame and will be about the size of the official factions in the game -just a bit on the large side. Note that I ran the bottom edge of the box off the bottom by one pixel; I'm not pasting the box back in, just the part of the picture inside it, and there's no reason to crop a pixel row's worth of his body out in favor of the nothing over his head - given that it's pretty well centered at his eyes either way.)

Note that the background color is set to the purple that's transparent in the Alien Crossfire expansion, and the lower thingy [that's the Draw Opaque off box] at the bottom of the toolbox is selected. [Look for what the arrow is pointing at, if you're stuck doing this in an old version of Paint.  (I'm very frustrated with the W7 Paint upgrade.)]

(It means the background color is transparent for stuff you paste in, like the purple inside the blue box. I paste in the box once, right-click on the purple inside with the eye dropper -looking sample tool, which sets the background color to the right shade, [control z] to back up to before I pasted, and paste it back in.)


[Now for the older, truly stone-knives-and-bearskins techniques.]

I used to do the resizing with nothing but tedious trial and error, getting something close to the right size and shape, then seeing if it fit the box, shaving off a few pixels and trying again. It took a bit longer that way, to say the least.  In those days, once I had the portrait size/cropped for each box, I’d open two copies of Paint and paste the portrait into one of them. Then I’d paste it into Lexmark Photo Editor, reduce the contrast 30%, copy it that way, and paste into the other copy of Paint.

Now for the fun part. [That was sarcasm] I’d zoom in on one of the copies of the portrait at 800%, and begin using the line tool to draw horizontal white lines one pixel wide though every other row of the picture.

It’s simpler to describe, but took 20 times as much tedious work to do. (Your eyesight is probably better than mine, so if you have to do it this way, you may find it easier than I did.) When I had done that to the whole shot, I’d paste it on top of the other copy of the picture in the other copy of Paint with Draw Opaque switched off, (white is the default background color,) resulting in a scan lined shot.

[Remember that back then I was assembling the graphic in another copy of Paint (because Photoshop5 won't let you move your pasted elements around before you deselect and drop them in,) and only pasting the whole faction graphic back into Photoshop for saving as a .pcx at once when I was finished.  Hey, it worked for me.]

(Next up: fun with logos and such.)

[Buster's Uncle]

Diplomacy Landscapes

A little selection of 39 possible DLs for your convenience, because Uncle loves you.  Credit goes to Ariete for all the beautiful "Landscape" series of 11 pics in the .zip.





(See also Random  AC-ish Wallpapers  for more DL fodder.)

[Buster's Uncle]

In the transom: a set of people pictures, many of them paintings, that would make good leaderhead source material - some generic logos I'm turning up and taking out any words - and of course, more how-to stuff.

[Kilkakon]

Are those pictures from the gallery? If so, they just worked in my relic IE version...

Landscapes will be a nice win. I realised the other day on the way home from Uni that the base pics that you have don't have matching landscapes, meaning I'll have to do some Googling (which I can't actually).

[Buster's Uncle]

They ARE gallery-linked, so that's good news.

I've made one or two landscapes by taking some alien landscape art (or making an Earth landscape fungusy) and sticking in part of a base somewhere in it all blurry with distance...

[Buster's Uncle]

[Another old how-to, but as always, edited to contain no misinformation, given what I’ve learned since.   I’m still learning how to do this stuff better as I go, too.]

Pickly had a question about changing the background colors in the (faction)2&3.pcx files with GIMP while replacing faction logos. To be honest, I use Photoshop for that because I'm used to the select tools there- so my answer wasn't as helpful as I would have liked. I've done a little testing using the Hive2.pcx now, and here's what I learned.

After loading the .pcx into GIMP, I selected Image>Mode>RGB (a lot of functions aren't available with the .pcx set to Indexed colors, so you have to switch mode to RGB, then put it back to Indexed before you save.) First, I used the square select tool to select the entirely black-and blue part.



Then I used the fuzzy select tool to add blue from the rest of the image to that- it's the fourth tool on the top row of the toolbox, a wand with a round yellow bit on the end. Mine had the threshold setting at 31. When the fuzzy select tool is in use, you can use those red mode buttons at the top of the current tool settings to add or subtract to what you're selecting. It's better to hue-shift everything you're going to change the same way at once when you can, as then you don't have to keep track of as much.



(Note the stuff the red arrows are pointing at. It's stuff you need to find to do this. I didn't find the Add and Subtract buttons right away, myself...)

After some tedious individual pixel selection, zoomed in real close -but fortunately, it's a small image with high contrast, so not TOO tedious, compared to some I've had to do just lately- I ended up with this:



[In retrospect, I should have selected those purple bits against the red to hue-shift with the rest…]  Then, Colors>Hue-Saturation. In the control that popped up I shifted the hue of everything selected -90 (to the left)- I'd arbitrarily decided I was preparing the background for a green logo- your mileage will vary- and got the following, which needed the logo erased. I used the circular select tool



Afterwards, the smudge tool and a lot of nitpicking work zoomed in close is great for cleaning up anything that doesn't look right around the edges.



Here it is at 100%, ready for your green custom logo to be added.

…

Saving it can be a bit of a problem in GIMP; this particular one should save fine as-is, but doing anything to the purple background in the main faction .pcx or [faction]3.pcx renders said background non-transparent.  One way around this is to add a transparent layer, use the Select by Color Tool (with the Threshold set to 0) to select all the background shade, delete it, and then select the entire pic and paste into a blanked-out copy of the .pcx, then save that.  It should already have the right palette, and you only have to Save As to change the filename to what you want.

In cases where the background transparency color is untouched, a simpler way is create a GIMP AC palette; open palette.pcx from your SMAC(X) root directory.  Windows>Dockable Dialogues>Palettes.  Right-click on the background of the Palette box>Import Palette.  Check the Image option at the top>Import.  You should now have a palette called something like palette.pcx at or near the top of the Palette box.  This probably sounds harder, but unlike the transparent background copy/paste dodge, you only have to do it once.

Whenever you save a faction .pcx, first Image>Mode>Indexed and in the Indexed Color Conversion pop-up, click Use custom palette, uncheck Remove unused colors from color map, and click on the colorbox under Use custom palette to load your palette file.  Hit Convert, then save the .pcx as you normally would.

I’ll go into this GIMP palette issue and the workarounds in more detail in a future post.

[Buster's Uncle]

Leaderhead Portraits

84 pictures suitable to build AC leaderheads from.  Some are more ready to size/crop and drop into you next custom faction than others - pretty much all need the clothing altered futuristically for most purposes.  Almost all are far larger than you'll need, to make alterations easier before you reduce them to leaderhead size.

For beginners, look for a future post on how to convert a photograph -or painting done in a slightly too impressionistic brush style, for that matter- into a leaderhead that will look good in the limited SMAC(X) palette and be compatible with the level of realism found in the official factions.

[Buster's Uncle]

Logos

84 logo images to use in your next custom faction.

Logos are the easiest part of a faction graphic, so I didn't exactly kill myself cleaning some of these up, and many will need coloring, but this should help you get started...