Graphics

[Buster's Uncle]

See the first entry in the Misc tutorial, if I understand you correctly.

[Buster's Uncle]

Image>Mode>Indexed will hook you up, on a second guess at your meaning.

[Rainbow Lizard]

How do I get the exact palette colours you have on your smac palette? It doesn't work in gimp, so I guess I'm meant to bring it to photoshop?

[Buster's Uncle]

Crap.  I'm racking my brains trying to remember something from eight or nine months ago that I don't need to otherwise remember, because I use the pasting to a blank copy dodge and also load the finished product into PhotoshopCS and load the palette for a final save.  It's the only thing I still use Photoshop for, but it fixes palette issues for you better.

The .pal palettes load into GIMP upside-down and don't work, mind you; you have to make GIMP its own palette file, as I explained how to do in last night's post.

If you have Photoshop, definitely do that - but the blank copy paste trick covers almost everything if you don't.  Sometimes there are problems with the shadows that way, but it doesn't come up a lot, and black shadows, which will work in vanilla SMAC, just come out solid instead of semi-transparent, which isn't so bad.  You have to avoid SMAC tan shadows, though, 'cause they look really awful when they don't display black and they're solid.

There is a detailed tutorial on the blank copy pasting workaround coming in the next few days -I'll have to check- and I believe I've already explained it enough to get by in how-tos already posted.  I'm juggling a lot of information here.

[Rainbow Lizard]

Thank you. I believe I am almost finished with the current faction. I just need to add the perimeter defenses to the tier 4 base and possibly modify the .flc file. If not possible, I'll just pinch the university's.

[Buster's Uncle]

I can point you at chuft's .flc thread at WPC, but he uses a lot of programs you probably don't have, and making them is a huge pain even if you do.  I mastered everything (except getting the colors to come out right and not crashing the game ) without any of the stuff he describes, but cannot for the life of me remember how I did it almost four years ago, once.

It's pity I remember nothing about stuff I spent weeks figuring out.

Please do not neglect to share your final product in your own thread, and be sure to let us know about your future projects - you probably already have another faction or two in mind.  I, for one, wanna see them, and am always available for help.

[Buster's Uncle]

Adding Scanlines in GIMP

[Irritatingly quickly after all the work of composing this, two days, I discovered an infinitely better way, as seen in the next tutorial.  This is offered with my usual rationale for including now-outdated technique; if you aren’t using GIMP and your graphics editor doesn‘t offer an Erase Every Other Row function, you may need to adapt this process or even one of the more primitive ways I’ve described previously]

So, ariete has made a custom faction that's ready for the final touch - scanlines. Here's how to do it in GIMP:

First, I selected the big Datalinks portrait out of the working copy with the transparent background (the purple removed because of issues with how GIMP handles the transparent SMAC(X) colors - this way you can paste the end result into blankpcx.pcx and save; it also avoids pixels mixing with the purple during resizing and such to create weird halos around parts). I hit [control]c to copy the shot, then File>Create>From Clipboard - it's better to do this in a new window:





If you look closely at the shot above, you'll see the portrait was one pixel too short and two pixels too narrow to fit the box. So to resize, Image>Scale Image:





Then I clicked on the chain link beside the resize boxes (notice the difference between the two shots below) to make the change not proportional and added one pixel Height and two pixels Width to the size.





Then [control]a & [control]c to copy the resized image. Then Colors>Brightness-Contrast and lowered the contrast exactly 15%.





[Important update: I have no idea what I was thinking with this next passage and illustration screeny; that's doing it five times more complicated than needed. I'm only not deleting it because you might someday have a REAL reason to need to create a second layer that way.  Until then, just [Ctrl]v to paste in the normal contrast copy in your buffer and skip to the next bracketed remark.]

Now the tricky part; Layer>New Layer>OK. Notice that I had clicked on the new layer to make it the active one in the Layers box (Windows>Dockable Dialogues>Layers to bring that box up) before [control]v to paste in the image in the new layer, then click anywhere outside the image with the Retangular Select Tool to drop the pasted image onto the layer.




[While the paste-in is still selected] Colors>Brightness-Contrast and raise the contrast exactly 15%, making a 30% difference between the top and bottom layer.  [Deselect.]





Then I zoomed in and used the Rectangular Select Tool to select a box as wide as the picture and exactly one pixel high...





...And [Delete]. I clicked on the image with the Move Tool and hit the Up Arrow key twice and Deleted again, then Up twice more and deleted again, repeating until I'd deleted every other row of the picture in the new layer. Then I moved it back down to where it started:





Then Image>Flatten Image-




-and I copy/pasted the result back into the graphic and saved.



You'll definitely want to scanline the logos the same way, in a new window against a transparent background; it avoids all the pixel-smearing and other problems - that matters a lot more putting scanlines into something that goes against the purple background than it matter with the portraits, which have no purple background left in the square.




Coming soon: Transparent Colors, the SMAC(X) Palette Problem in GIMP and a Transparent Layer workaround.

[Buster's Uncle]

Scanlines in GIMP made simple, fast & easy


Our researchers have made a breakthrough.

Last night, I discovered a feature in GIMP that takes over half the steps out of scanlining and turns a 10-15 minute chore into something I was able to do in 55 seconds - I timed myself.



To illustrate the process, I worked from the version of ariete's male-led faction he posted this morning. I selected the largest portrait, copied, File>Create>From Clipboard (you can skip this step if you're working from the transparent-background assembly copy, but I needed the Brightness-Contrast available in an RGB mode copy, and I couldn't do that in a indexed .pcx without making more work for myself.) I went to the new copy, Colors>Brightness-Contrast>Contrast -15>Okay. [Ctrl]v, Colors>Brightness-Contrast>Contrast +15>Okay.

-All that should be familiar by now. Here's the innovation:



That's Filters>Distort>Erase Every Other Row. (Notice in the Layers box that the second pasting I'm working on now is still a floating layer as long as I leave it selected) -



This pop-up appears:

 

That's Rows (NOT Columns) Even/Odd doesn't matter, Erase.



Hit Okay, and you get:





Deselect and you get:



Notice the Layers box says just one layer now - no Flatten Image step.



That there's ready for [Ctrl]a, [Ctrl]c, and paste it back into the faction graphic. Easy.

Good hunting.

[Buster's Uncle]

Lizard, we'd love to have you chiming in on the Strategist project...

[Rainbow Lizard]

Wow. thanks for that advice on scanlining. Previously, my strategy was to get a selection of 10 or so 1x(width of image) strips, de-contrast them, move the selection down and repeat, but that saves all the time and effort. Thanks.

[Buster's Uncle]

  Ain't nothin' but a thang, man.  It's what I'm here for, to help. 



...

Incidentally, the last two tutorials were a point where I began to go heavy on the illustrations and much more concise on the text instructions -with little of the thinking behind artistic decisions.  They were the first I intended as articles, not merely instructional posts as I was writing them, and more crucial, I was working with ariete, whose English is poor, and I realized that there is a need out there for easy-to-understand instruction, without so much talk.

I think the talk about the philosophy of art/modding is very important, but clearly, it's going to be too difficult for many ESL SMACers to follow.  That's yet another reason many of my tutorials go over the same ground so many times - different focus/angles of attack, evolving technique (no way of being sure there's not a SMAC modder in Mozambique with antique software who can only manage by adapting the way I did it manually four years ago) - and/or different levels of comprehension or instructional needs (not hard to image SMACer artists existing who I couldn't tell anything they didn't know about creativity and the creative process, but would like to know how to do it in Photoshop; that's the opposite of what one expects with gamers, but they do exist).

I've got three tutorials already composed, arranged and almost ready-to-go, and three more I'm going to have to compose from scratch - because I never really addressed faction flag/map colors, diplomacy landscapes, and terrain/NL unit modding.  All will tend to be short, as I'd have already covered them if there was much to say, and that last subject is belated recognition that faction graphics is not the whole of SMAC(X) art modding, just by far the greater part.

Input about what I have yet to cover in a tutorial -and indeed, what I need to cover better- is welcome.  We have an idea in the works for a project to try to assemble these articles into a complete course on SMAC(X) art modding, and I want to get everything.

[Buster's Uncle]

Transparent Colors, the AC Palette Problem in GIMP and a Transparent Layer workaround

To my monolithic dismay, since I got back into the graphics modding saddle recently [last November],  finding myself confined to GIMP for the moment, along with changes in the Windows 7 version of Paint and my own rustiness, have left me a major learning curve I really didn’t expect. I never thought I’d have to figure out yet another way to do scanlines at my level of experience.

I certainly was shocked to find out I was getting the old ‘blue boxes around my bases’ problem at THIS late date.



In short, anything you do to the transparent background purple (or pink if you’re vanilla SMAC) will no longer be transparent in the game, and that naturally sucks real hard.  In Photoshop, sampling the background and doing a fill is all it takes to fix it - GIMP doesn’t take care of as much color stuff automatically ‘under the hood‘ for you, and replacing the exact same background color doesn’t work.  Loading the palette in GIMP doesn’t fix this. 

-Also, there a shade of blue that displays a mustard brown in-game, but I’ve only seen that be a problem with one faction that used that exact shade a lot in the leaderhead.

I don’t know if this was a Windows 7 change or what. I’d like to know, but what matters is that I found a workaround:

I assemble my factions in a blank .pcx. You can find a copy here: http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=65 (Look around the Downloads folder that file's in for a lot of other useful goodies and remember who yer buddy is.) Open a copy. I'd advise creating a palette from it before doing anything else - Windows>Dockable Dialogues>Palettes. Right-click on any palette in the menu>Import Palette. Check Image, the second option, below Gradient, and blankpcx.pcx(and a number) and import.

To get a transparent background copy to do the assembling in, Layer>Transparency>Add Alpha Channel. Then Select>By Color>click on the purple background>Delete.



(Or save a step using the Select by Color Tool in the Toolbax indicated by the red arrow above.) Now you should have the guide boxes and nothing else against a gray-checked background (the gray checks let you know it's a complete transparency).



You'll need to Image>Mode>RGB to turn on a lot of the functions in GIMP (same for Photoshop), especially color manipulation. When you’re finished and/or need to check how a color will look in the SMAC(X) palette, Image>Mode>Indexed>check Use custom palette>click on the colored square>pick the palette you made, and uncheck Remove unused colors from colormap. (While it's in Indexed mode, you can reload the palette with Colors>Map>Set Colormap.. - click on the Palette Default box in the pop-up and choose your palette.)



When the faction is finished, or at least ready to test, paste the whole thing into an unaltered copy of blankpcx.pcx ([Ctrl]a>[Crtl]c>bring up the unaltered copy with the purple>[Ctrl]v) and Save As with the filename you want. For playtesting, I usually replace the Gaians.pcx and have a look in an old gamesave with many Gaian bases - you'll wanna back up/save a copy of the graphic you're replacing, or course.

It's harder to explain than do, really. It surely sounds complicated until you've done it - then it will be no big deal.



Have fun.

[Buster's Uncle]

Creating a SMAC(X) Faction Logo


As has become my recent practice, I’ll be giving details of which buttons I pushed in GIMP - for instructional purposes, it seems to be the best choice for a powerful graphics program available for free to all…

So, for the SMACivilization SpaceMayans (the Astral Jaguar Cult) faction logo, I chose this shot out of several Alexander had posted:


It was perfect for our needs and wouldn’t be difficult to convert.

I cropped it down to the full-color shot in the corner

(Rectangle Select Tool to make a box>Image>Crop To Selection). I cranked up the contrast 60% and darkened 30% (Colors>Brightness-Contrast) to bring up the black lines, mostly. We’d talked about making the blue green, so I selected that part (Fuzzy Select Tool with Threshold at 105) and hue-shifted (Colors>Hue-Saturation>top (Hue) slider moved left until it was very green (-45 in this case)). The yellowish part was looking distinctly orange now, so I did the same there (selecting it took more time at lower power because the red part wanted to select, too - I had to click on the yellowest pixels, then change the Fuzzy Select Mode to Add to the current selection at a threshold of 25) then (Colors>Hue-Saturation>Hue +30). I was going for a typically Mexican color scheme, too, thus green and yellow instead of blue and orange.

Then to get rid of the black border and give me a transparent background to work with later, (Layer>Transparency>Add Alpha Channel. Fuzzy Select Tool at threshold 41 selecting the black background>[Delete].) I cropped out all that superfluous border (Image>Autocrop Image) and deselected the empty space left. Because I wanted to bring up the contrast again to bring out the lines, and raising contrast brings up the color saturation, I lowered the color levels in advance (Colors>Hue-Saturation>bottom (Saturation) slider -50%). Then Colors>Brightness-Contrast>Contrast +70%.



Then I loaded the SMACX palette to see if I was done yet (Image>Mode>Indexed…>checked Use custom palette>clicked on my palette file>unchecked Remove unused colors from color map>Convert) and I nearly was. I Scaled the pink Eraser Tool down to 0.01 in the Toolbox and clicked Hard edge, zoomed in and spent a minute erasing some very dark pixels around the edge.



The difference from the last shot doesn't jump out at you, but matters.  If you're not able/willing to nit-pick the fine details, you'll not make a very good grapics modder.

Now, time to paste it in. I loaded blankpcx.pcx, Layer>Transparency>Add Alpha Channel, Select by Color Tool>click on the background purple>Delete.



I went back to the GIMP window with the logo I‘d just prepared, [Ctrl]a>[Ctrl]c, went back to blank, zoomed in on the upper Council Logo box, the largest, selected the inside of the box to measure how much space I had, (86wX72h - who can remember?)



And pasted the logo in ([Ctrl]v) - surprisingly, it was already the right size.  That’s never happened before.

I repeated the process at the upper Report Logo box - it was one pixel too tall to fit, so Layer>Scale Layer>reduce by one>deselect (Reduced proportionally{just as well leave this one square}. Deselect to drop it in.) Then repeated the same process in the lowest Small Report Logo box, and the Diplomacy Logo box, being careful to center it.



And then I saved as AstralJaguarCult.png (.png to preserve the transparent background until I’m ready to save the final .pcx copy). I was done with this stage (I’ll come back to this later and make the duller versions for the other boxes when I get to the scanline part) unless Alexander wanted the logo more “outer space” when he sees it, in which case I’ll suggest superimposing a (sacrificial) dagger w/ a glowing light saber-ish blade. That should also keep me from having to re-do any of this…

Like most things graphical, I just took hours explaining something I could have done in minutes - it only sounds difficult because I explain in such tedious detail for instructional purposes. Logos are the easiest part -though this one was easier than most, and sometimes I just draw something, which I couldn‘t do well enough with bases, portraits and landscapes- you can do this.

[Buster's Uncle]

The Artistic Side of Leader Portraits  - And Size/cropping the End Result


So, for the SMACivilization SpaceMayans, The Astral Jaguar Cult, Alexander posted this:



Now, I wasn't wild about this shot - it has a lot going for it; a beautiful background and a strong sense of calculating, ruthless, personality in the figure - (the story-telling part of Alpha Centauri is very important, and the look/attitude of the leaders is the most important visual part of that) - but the face is drawn in a very stylized, unrealistic way, with heavy lines and little or no sense of depth. Also, the blue crown thing looks flat.

So, the first thing I did was set to working on the face with the Smudge Tool at small Scale and low Rate; I won’t try to describe every little thing I did, as it would take a week to write and no one would read it - also, I would still be working on it two days later, because stopping to type what I did every time I do something slows me down by a factor of ten, at least.

But I zoomed in close with the smudging at low power and started blurring the lighter areas onto the black lines, smearing them into something more diffuse, like the shaded lines in a real face, and less like drawn lines. I made the cheek lines around the mouth more curved, eliminated or lightened all those deep, sharp, straight, unrealistic lines radiating from the area where the brow, eyes and nose converge. I honestly can’t draw all that well, but I’m a pretty good sculptor who has studied facial anatomy, and using the Smudge Tool is rather like pushing clay around with my fingers.

I also used the Fuzzy Select Tool to pick out individual bits and fiddle with the darkness, too. That was how I freed up enough light skin in the ridiculously lined bit of brow under the crown to smudge around.

Basically, I did 45 minutes or so of smoothing out lines and moving shading around to give the cheeks, especially, but the entire face, too, a more realistic sense of depth. I made Montezuma a lot younger-looking in the process, which I hadn’t intended, but was okay. I regret that making the anatomy of the nose look right changed the shape/character of it so much…

I ended up with this:



Now, we’d already used shades of blue for two faction colors, so I immediately began Fuzzy Selecting the crown. That involved spending entirely too long zoomed in very close with the threshold set as low as 0.00 at times, selecting individual pixels around the edges, and dark ones that wanted to spread the select to the background and/or the face. Eventually, I ended up with the whole thing selected, as seen above.

Then it was simple to hue-shift it over to a vivid green - remember from the logo post that I was going for a Mexican red-yellow-green color scheme. Because this was for an imaginary Mayans-in-Space  faction, I actually stepped up the color saturation more, and blurred it a little to make it almost glowy.



In my opinion, the yellow of the cape was too red, and the red of the mantle around his neck was too yellow. More tedious Fuzzy Select pixel-choosing later, I had the above situation. I brought the color saturation way down to get rid of most of the yellow and used the Color Balance function to put the red back.

Then - oh. my. God. Selecting the pixels of the bracelets and the bleeping cape took forEVER. Over two hours, I think. I can’t believe I do this for free. When finally, a lifetime or two later, I had everything I wanted selected, I did the same as before - took the color saturation way down, used Color Balance to put the yellow back, and cranked up the contrast somewhat, trying to bring out the highlights and achieve a metallic golden look - that last part didn’t work so well, but I did get pretty, yellower, cape out of the deal.

As finishing touches, I selected few pixels of iris in those yellow eyes and made them golder. I wanted to give the hair a slightly unnatural blue tint, so more Fuzzy Select pixel choosing, and - it just made his hair look a lot blacker, but I liked its looks better that way, so I left it. I kept making Monty look younger accidentally, but why not? No story reason not to, and frankly, you want to cheat portraits towards looking young and attractive when there‘s no reason not to, because people would rather look at young and attractive.

I also decided to do something about the seeming flatness of the crown - the luminous swirly bits made shading for depth a problem, but it was a simple matter of selecting a pixel-wide strip at one edge of the crown where it curved around his head, darkening 40%, widening a pixel, darkening 20%, repeating three more times, then going about 10% darker for the next six or so. Then doing the other side the same way. Then doing roughly the opposite in the center. It’s a subtle effect, and the glowiness makes it imperfect, but the crown below does seem to curve around his head a little more.




...


Now it was time for the size/cropping. This part is less artistic and far more mechanical, so more how-to detail will be given than in the mostly why-to above.

I opened blankpcx.pcx and did the transparent background trick, then zoomed in on the big datalinks portrait box, selecting it - the box itself, not the inside.



I copied, then switched back to the portrait, pasting it in to get an idea of the size I’d need to fit Montezuma in the box.



This was zoomed in too tight, so I hit [ctrl]z to undo the pasting, and reduced him about 60%. When I pasted in the box and moved it around, this was about right (A little + appears in the center when I drag it around with the mouse, so it was easy to center the box on the bridge of his nose, nearly between his eyes. Perfect - so I deselected.

Now I zoomed in as close as would show the whole box on my &^%$#@! wide-screen monitor, 300%, and used the box as my select guide.



If I was working alone, at this point, I’d copy/paste into the assembly copy I already dropped the logos into. Since I am collaborating, instead I Image>Crop to Selection(ed), and saved a copy to post for Alex’s approval.



Today, he asked for a tighter crop. I gave him two crops,  (My initial choice was stronger and the first below frankly, was rubbing his nose in it,)



Full-size and 80%. He chose 80%, and now, with a little time spent making the molding behind Monty a vaguely metallic blue to future the shot up a bit more, I can proceed to drop it into the assembly graphic and move on to the bases. (The Diplomacy Landscape shot goes so much like with the portraits that it isn’t worth a separate entry.)


Next: All about bases, some why and a lot of how-to.

[NewAgeOfPower]

Oh man, you are an ARTIST.

Demarchy is almost done, was side-tracked working on Invicta