PERFECT SPRITE EXTRACTION

[Sombre]

Sorry for the caps but this really is a HUGE announcement. Thanks to something Endoperez said in a sort of offhand manner we now appear to have a way of extracting perfect (though not attacking) sprites from Dom3.

This is going to be a MASSIVE help to modders like myself who have previously had to pretty much redraw the sprites by eye and hand in order to modify them,... AND it's going to mean any random fool (if you'll pardon the term) can now make graphical alterations and new units and whatnot that fit in with Vanilla dom3 more or less perfectly. With this method there is literally no excuse for dodgy or very basic graphics any more.

Here's how I did it, following Endo's guidance.

Turn off the filter in graphical preferences.
Switch resolution to 800x600.
Find the unit you want and right click on it to bring up its display screen.
Then printscreen (screengrab), paste it into a graphical app and cut out the graphic you want.

THAT'S IT.

If I'd known this a few months ago,.... wow that woulda saved me a LOT of time. I'd also have made probably twice as many mods.

THANKYOU ENDO! I really can't stress that enough

[Endoperez]

It might not wprk just right, though. Half the human sprites I get are about 40 pixels high instead of ~32. Singularity's post has some details.

[Endoperez]

Okay, now I got why it didn't work when I last tried it. I used 800x600 resolution fullscreen and took the screenshots from windowed mode, thinking that what I saw was 800x600. However, it isn't! Even though the command line file, at least, claims that the default windowed resolution is 800x600, using commandline -r 800x600 in the shortcut makes Dom window much smaller. Unit screenshots can be grabbed from windowed mode if you have a shortcut with that property.

Any sprite wishes? I'll do some Caelum ones first.

[Endoperez]

Wow, it will be EXTEREMLY easy to grab sprites if you just change the GUI into something that is of single, even color everywhere and put GUI opacity into 1. Then just PrtScreen, paste, use color chooser to select all black that's ever-so-slightly hued by the background, change it into color of your choice. Then change the shadow, pure black, into magenta. VERY FAST!

[Sombre]

I honestly think this is so easy that we don't even need a sprite library any more - you can just get whatever sprite you need at any given moment.

I have just made two new units using this technique. The old way of doing things this would have been like an hours work or something, to get it this good. It took me literally 5 minutes.

The bmp with the two new units (which will be for ulm reborn) will be attached in a moment.

[Sombre]

I'd like to add that, now, if anyone needs any more complex artwork done for their mods (stuff that goes beyond changing the vanilla sprites a bit, making attack sprites etc) I will probably be free to do it, provided I like the mod.

Might be able to do some awesome stuff for padmassa, for instance, using vanilla sprites as a base.

[Endoperez]

LA Caelum unit sprites attached to this post. This is FAST! Choose unit, take screenshot, paste, select area tool, select unit, new window, paste, select eraser, select background color, erase background, move unit/shadow to nice position, save. I did most of these twice, due to not noticing the black area between their legs. INSANE SPEED!

[Endoperez]

Gandalf, or anyone else who happens to know the answer:

Would it be possible to do a shortcut for Dominions that first replaces guiborder2.tga with some other tga file, then launches Dom with a --postexec command that somehow replaces the new guiborder2.tga with the original? Or copy of the original, actually, but you know what I mean. It would enable one Dom directory to be used for both normal games AND for ultra-quick screen-grabbing of units, with the only difference being in the shortcut used to launch Dom.

I'm pretty sure it could be done with two .bat files, but I can't write those.

[Gandalf Parker]

Its pretty much what was done in Dom2 to create the library we had. Someone also created a macro which worked its way thru the entire All_Units game to save all of the units to a graphic named for its unit ID number.

We do have a complete collection for Dom3. Altho its a couple of patches old so a few might be missing. Its in the Tools and Tutorials link.
Dom3 Unit Reference v3.04

If I remember correctly there were like 5 filters that could be turned off in order to get the cleanest image-grab. The result tended to look ugly without the smoothing and shadowing effects that the game does, but the end results were better. If you edit a "smoothed" copy of an image, and then the game smoothed it again, it tended to be pretty blurry.

[Sombre]

I can't get that link working (the one pointing to the reference, not your one pointing to the thread) and I was under the impression the images weren't the right size.

Endo: I think you underestimate the difference between drawing a peltast with a new kind of shield by hand and just grabbing the shield from one unit and pasting it on another. Look at the hoch-hammer unit I made - it's basically a modification of the hochmeister, but in order to make that before I knew about this, I had to basically redraw the hochmeister himself. That takes a lot of time and effort.

Some of the mods on here have used some fairly shakey graphics. With this technique they can cut and paste and edit a bit using these graphics and make something which looks much better and fits with Dom3. Again, the difference between drawing from a very rough / blurry template or from scratch and just modifying an existing graphic is huge.