Graphics

[Rainbow Lizard]

Sure.  Where are your bases from? 

Drawing them from scatch is not a big strength of mine, so I usually convert a photo of a building, or use a base from another game, or alter one of the official ones where the faction is a spin-off.  Still, there are some obvious tweaks that would help the bases you have in place; briefly, they could use darkening/higher contrast and lighting from the right.  The sun's always low and on the right in SMAC.

Gimme an hour, and I'll have the last how-to I made about bases posted.   Since I moved to AC2, I've never quite gotten organized., or everything posted I intend to.

Remember the image from the alpha.txt help thread? I need help converting it from that to something more SMAC-ish.

[Buster's Uncle]

Yes, we can do that, no problem - I'm working on a how-to with lots of screenshots of processing your leaderhead ATM, because I don't recall ever doing a really thorough one about making a photo look like a painting.  Patience, my young padawan; you have my full attention, but I can only do one thing at a time. 

In the meanwhile, look into "they could use darkening/higher contrast and lighting from the right" as I said before - stepping up the color saturation should help, too.  Try fiddling with those things, and I'll be back with you shortly.

What I meant was, did you draw the bases, or are they from a game, a web image, or what?

[Rainbow Lizard]

I made them myself from scratch.

[Buster's Uncle]

Impressive.  I always hesitate about drawing them myself.

Okay, I've got the screenshots made, so now it's just a matter of time before I have something for you on the leaderhead -I'm thinking about the next guy who wants to know what you're asking about, too- and we can work on those bases.  If you have any drafts in the meanwhile from fiddling with them as I suggested, feel free to post a little .jpg of the latest first row.

[Buster's Uncle]

Processing a photo headshot into a painted-looking leaderhead

Some programs have automatic functions for turning photos into paintings - GIMP has oilify, which I don't think is very good.  Nothing, at any rate, substitutes for just rolling up your sleeves and doing it yourself, with your human judgment and an artist's eye.  The SMAC(X) leaderheads all originated as paintings, and your eye catches that, even if you don't realize it consciously.  So your leaderhead needs to look like a painting.  Here's how I do it.

Rainbow Lizard had a leaderhead that didn't take to the SMAC palette well, and asked me to look into it.  He supplied the original photo:


(Pay attention to the settings showing in the pictures after this; they mostly tell you how, while my comments will tend to focus on the equally important why.) 

Nothing intrinsically wrong with it; it looks like a leaderhead.  But the color level is low, as is the contrast, and the highlights too white, matching the background.  So that background's gotta go - first thing I did was add a transparent background layer-


-Start erasing the edge next to the spot -on the shoulder- I could tell was going to be most troublesome about wanting to select along with the background-


-Only to discover that those white highlights matched the background way too well for the Fuzzy Select Tool.  I gave up and used the Color Select Tool, after some trial and error, at the default setting-


-and then prepared to begin eliminating all the white inside the figure's borders with the Fuzzy Select Tool (Note the red-block mode setting in the Toolbox.  That's Subtract from the current selection)-


After a few minutes of zooming in and out and deselecting the easy bits on the visor at various Threshold levels -sometimes it would jump to deselect some background, and I would have to [Ctrl]z to back up and try again at a lower threshold- I got all but a bit on the shoulder and neck -


-and did a little more erasing (always have Hard Edge checked when erasing for this kind of thing) and deselecting the rest of the non-background was easy at a low Threshold of 5.0. and that erased border-



-So I hit [Delete] and started processing - and it's easier to adjust with no background to either require more selection of just the skin, or turning wierd while you alter the figure's colors, brightness, etc., if you don't select and leave it out.   Sometimes you like the background and want to keep it, and doing something like this to allow you to paste the figure back over it is called for, instead of in this case, where the background was in the way.

The thing is, photographs are just higher resolution than most paintings.  They contain more detail and more colors; not as many as reality, but a lot more than the average painting.  The eye picks up on the differance, even if you don't realise.  Remembering that is the key to what we're going to do here

First, fiddling with the Brightness/Contast; the image needed serious darkening, and higher contrast brings up detail and the color levels, too.  They also balance each other out somewhat.


And then I brought the Color Saturation up more directly.  This also brightened things more in a different way, and I darkened a little more to compensate.  Everything in this process is partly balancing dark and bright, and all processing/fiddling/altering, done right, results in the right kind of careful artificiality that says painting to the eye.  It was a little too red, so a minor hue-shift, to a hair yellower, too.


Next, I wanted to do something that would mess up the colors of the hair and visor, so I needed to select everything but them:


This involves a lot of zooming in and out, selecting and deselecting at different Thresholds, which is typical for the Fuzzy Select - a very useful tool, but aggravating.


Now here's the thing; human skin contains a lot more colors finely distributed, if you look closely enough, than anyone can manage in artwork, which is why it's so difficult to come up with realistic skin tones when you're going for realism.  Real skin has blues and even greens in it - we're going to reduce those in favor of more of the reds and yellows artists use.


That brought up the color levels 60%, so to compensate-


The shot before last, note the big bit of pink lined by lemon yellow in that problem area on the shoulder.  There's more up the edge of the neck and cheek, so to fix it:

Then I expanded the select to get all that lemon yellow around it and did something simular - in this case, hue-shifting back towards red a little, darkening a little, reducing the color saturation a little more - all of which browns both somewhat. (Browns are more-or-less dingy, dim, orange in computer colors.

Usually, in processing a leaderhead, I'd have done a lot of selective blurring of very fine details with the Smudge Tool on very low power, but this leaderhead is a younger person than most faction leader images, with much more smooth skin than usual in a photo that was low on that sort of detail, too.  There's a trade-off; no time smoothing/simplifying facial lines and fine speckling typical of photo headshots, but the lack of those details is precisely why it adapted so poorly to the SMAC(X) palette - nothing to break up the color patterns, which looked bad.

So, as I said, real skin is higher-resolution than painted, and has a LOT more colors.  Next, I simply change the mode of the image (literally Image>Mode>Indexed) to a lot less colors:


I change it back to RGB, so I can change the mode BACK to Indexed -- I'm hoping that now, it will take to the SMAC(X) palette, which has twice as many colors:


-But no.  That's a little better than the problematic problematic attempt I'm demonsrtating how to fix, but still not good enough.  I [Ctrl]z to back up a step, something you do a lot making graphics, and use that Smudge Tool to smear together COLORS where they are in thick bands and the areas I've learned are going to convert badly.  It's too idiosycratic to be worth trying to show.

Next, I do a little sharpening (Filters>Enhance>Sharpen) at around 30% and blurring (Filters>Blur>Blur) and sharpening and blurring, more sharpening - I'm not sure, but this has always been part of the process, and I think it works because low-level sharpening accumulates interuptions of those strange-looking color bands/patterns, and blurring every third or forth time keeps it from getting too pixelated-looking.  What I'm sure of is that it often makes a big difference in this painting thing.  It's another part you have to use that human judgment and artist's eye, and not something easy to/worth trying to show.

Then a little more selective smearing together of color patches and unwanted detail the sharpening put in with the Smudge Tool, still set to 10%, 20% at most.

One secret to helping when your work doesn't want to convert to the SMAC(X) palette well, is that sometimes, it will do better if you do the scan lines and THEN convert; the alternating contrast lines can break up those color bands/patterns, or form intermingled, alternating patterns that cancel out.

I've described the scan-line part before a number of times, but briefly:  select the entire image ([Ctrl]a, [Ctrl]c to copy, Colors>Brightness-Contrast>contrast +15-20, [Ctrl]v to paste back the copy,  Colors>Brightness-Contrast>contrast -15-20, Filters>Distorts>Erase Every Other Row> deselect.  Scanlined.


For a background, I pasted it over a Matrix thingy, as I did with my own hacker-type faction.  This is the original size of the image, but cropped to the exact porportions of a leaderhead, only a little larger:


However, the youthful look of the leaderhead, the videogame look of the logo and bases for the faction, and the attitude displayed in the leader quote in the .txt file suggests that a background consistant with youth doing as they please, such as a bright video game sorta background, like he had a game paused on the big screen behind him while he spoke on the comm, would be a better fit for this leaderhead.  It would also fit that the figure was obviously backlit to stand in front of something very bright.

Rainbow, see if these instructions are enough for you to do something with the picture - I'd rather make sure I'd empowered you to do it for yourself than just give you a file already processed.  Teach a man to fish, and all that.

[Kilkakon]

I like the results. I'd have done a few things a tad differently but it sure looks a lot better than the original...

[Rainbow Lizard]

Wow. Thanks for that, it was really helpful. I made mine slightly different becaus I wanted to keep a bit of the paleness.

[Buster's Uncle]

That makes sense, creatively.  This is about empowering you, not about doing it my way.  I'll be interested in your outcome.

Kil, tell us about the tad of difference in your approach...

[Rainbow Lizard]

So when's your next tutorial going to be?

[Buster's Uncle]

  Dunno.  I'm busy like a one-armed man juggling chainsaws - check the OfficialAC button at the top of the page.  I'm working on the tech section lately. 

What have you got in mind?  Have you gone back through the thread and read all the previous ones?  Got any base edits to show me?

[Buster's Uncle]

However, you've motivated me to go find everything - I'm organizing right now, and a bunch more are coming soon.  (You're doing us a service, 'cause this is Articles content to attract new members to AC2, and I've put it off for too long.)  For convenience, you might want to check here http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=articles;cat=6 and be sure you've read everything I already posted.

Some of them are very dated, but I tended to write under a subconscious assumption that people had been following the series, so reading them all helps the whole make more sense, and there's always a lot about the thinking behind the process, which is very important.

[Kilkakon]

I would have put a bit of green backlighting on.

[Buster's Uncle]

...Since all that light stuff was around the edges of his hair, and the background was mostly dark.  I was doing a quick dummy background, but I should try that and post, just to see...

[Buster's Uncle]

Bases

[This goes after "We interrupt our irregularly-scheduled program for this bulletin-".  As always, these older entries in the series discuss some outdated technique, but also talk a lot about the why and the thinking process, which is eternal, and at least as important.  It's the difference between hackwork and art.]

I’ve decided to change my format from talking about my working process on a faction I finished over six weeks ago to talking about what I’m doing now. I can go into more- and more educational- detail that way.
 
(Yesterday in the Beta Lyrae thread, Darsnan and I were discussing the possibility of changing the bases for his alt. Usurpers/Imperial Starlost Progenitors. I give these remarks about context of the work because the best game art doesn’t just look cool- it tells a story. These things have an important effect on the art decisions you make.)
 
The Starlost- my label, not his- were a naval survey expedition that was lost in space long before the Manifold disaster destroyed Prog civilization, or the schism between Caretakers and Usurpers. After many thousands of years in stasis, they ended up stranded on Beta Lyrea not long before the humans, and instantly came into conflict with the Autochthon- descendants of later Progenitors who were stranded there while the Starlost were in stasis and survived the Sentinels by achieving harmony with the environment. A lot of art decisions went to trying to suggest that the Autochthon are Progs gone native, and keeping a look consistent with their story.
 
(The Autochton are alternate Caretakers , part of my project, mostly in collaboration with Darsnan, to make alternate/splinters of the official factions. I cannot express how amusing I found it to put the aliens in log cabins.)
 
The Starlost want to create the infrastructure to build a starship and leave. I’ve gone for a look that says “Alien Captain Kirk down on his luck” with the art-
(From this to this . He has more scars, some of his tusks are broken and his armor is a little torn up, but somehow with the new color scheme, he looks less evil and more tired. The trimmed/capped rill horns help too, though that's largely a practical consideration for a starship crew...) thus the approach I took to the diplomacy landscape shot, changing the DL Darsnan pointed me at- of a ship in flight- to the ship grounded and very chewed up-looking.

Usurper DL

Gebazzu DL

Starlost DL

With the bases, Darsnan liked my suggestion of running elements of Usurpers and Caretaker base designs together to suggest that these guys are from before the schism.
 

+
 ___________________________________________________
 

So last night, I did a little cut and paste work to put the top of Caretaker bases over Usurper ones. I did some minor fiddling with the Usurper struts to splay them just slightly and make them look a tiny bit more like Caretaker ones. I finished by trimming down a Caretaker subsidiary building to paste at the top of all the Usurper elements as a dome-cap.
 
This morning, Darsnan approved the design I posted last night, and picked one of the color schemes I'd done. We’d agreed on faction color and customizing changes to the Usurper logo colors, so I was ready to begin actual assembly of the graphic.)
 
I opened the Usurper .pcx, and copy/pasted the whole thing into MS Paint. I scan lined the diplomacy landscape I’d gotten approved and pasted into the Paint copy.

Now it was time to put in the bases. I opened the .pcx I’d saved before I made .jpegs to post last night- of the version of the bases Darsnan chose- I’d just done the first row of bases, and saved a copy of only that. I copy/pasted it over the Usurper bases in Paint- my design covers the originals completely, so I did it with Draw Opaque off. I did the same with the next two rows, leaving a bit of the shields showing behind- which will make it easier to get the surround when I get to replacing the rest.
 
When I got to the first row of water bases, I had a decision to make. Some bases look okay unaltered floating; I decided these stilted ones would not. I pasted them in, which left them on top of Usurper platforms –which are pretty generic- they’re brown, though. I copy/pasted that row of bases back into The Usurper file in Photoshop, switched the mode to RGB (Image>Mode>RGB Color) to get access to advanced functions, and sampled the dark brown of the platforms. Then Select>Color Range… I set the fuzziness (how close to the color sampled it needs to stay in selecting inside the select box around the row) to 60% -somewhat exclusive and hit okay. Sometimes it takes some trial and error to get exactly what you want selected- this looked about right, with most, but not all, of the water platforms selected- the darkest parts.
 
Image>Adjust>Color Balance, and I was bringing up the blue and cyan to 100%, with a touch of green, (about 20% was all that didn’t make it TOO green), resulting in a dark, slightly greenish blue that matched the blue parts of the bases proper, but left the platforms looking like separate pieces. I fiddled a little with the lighter-brown bits left over with an eye towards matching them with the pale-gold highlights of the bases, but they didn’t want to select cleanly, and I decided the platforms looked good the way they already were. I then copy/pasted the row three times into the Paint copy over the Usurper water bases. Now, all that was left was to put the shields back.
 
In Photoshop, I opened shields.pcx- a file I made long ago of both official sorts of bare shields (and a few I invented) for just such a purpose. I pasted the Progenitor shields into a third copy of MS Paint (the leaderhead is waiting in another, but I’ve already covered that part of the process) to erase the back halves. It’s another thing that’s easier to do in Paint.

I did so with the smallest stage-one shield and copy/pasted over the smallest shielded water base zoomed in at 800%- still with Draw Opaque off, so it only superimposed the shield over the base. I saw that the shield was far wider than the remnants around the back, so I found the pip on one edge of the select box and narrowed it. I tried to match the edges of the front with the back that was already there, narrowed again, and got a nice match. I repeated the process with the next size, taking a few seconds to draw in a gap on the left with the color sample and line tools. When I’d same the same with stage 3, and tried to scroll over to the next size shield, I discovered I’d accidentally skipped the smallest sized, making extra work for myself. Oh well. I pasted the largest size –it fit this time-, needing only a few pixels drawn in on the left, as the building covered the rest.
 
I zoomed out a little and selected the upper parts of the row of water bases I’d just shielded –the upper parts are identical to the land bases, so this way is less work- and copy/pasted them (w/shields) over the stage-one-shield land-base row. Correction: I wanted to do it that way, but concluded that the shields sat too low in front to leave all of the water elements out of the select. Instead, I repeated the process one base at a time. Oh well- I think it’s instructive to leave my missteps in the narrative. I was able to select enough of the water row and copy/paste first to avoid having to draw any gaps in twice. Without the drawing and resizing, it took only a minute to finish the land row.
 
(Then I pasted the Paint master copy back into the Photoshop Usurper .pcx and saved it in an in-progress folder while I went to run a quick errand. Artists, you want to be in the habit of saving your progress often. Stuff happens.)
 
When I got back to work, repeating the process for the stage-two Tachyon shields went much more smoothly without the wasted time resizing- and because I did it on the land bases first and thus could copy/paste the entire row on top of the water bases smoothly.
 
With the bases done, it’s now time to post this and get to work on the logos…

[Buster's Uncle]

Kil, that was easier said than done, but here.

And for comparison, here it is beside the previous quick effort.  It does make the profound difference of looking real...