Utility: Sprite Editing Tutorial

[hEad]

Originally Posted by Sombre

Man my methods are completely different from that. A cool tutorial though. Hopefully it will wean people away from copying resizing and pasting graphics from other places (which looks awful in my opinion).

I guess I could do a step by step for the next unit I do, though it wouldn't involve tool explanations since I doubt anyone else uses PSP. Would probably just be a series of graphics with comments.

I missed this comment some how, anyway, I use Paint shop pro, have done for years, albet rather basically. A few pointers in the use of the software to churn out some reasonable sprites and i'd be off and running!

[Burnsaber]

Thanks for all kind words. It really wasn't that hard, the graphic took about an hour + typing the comments, hosting the pics and combining the downloads took about 3 hours. 4 hours well spent, it seems.

There is still more to come thought. The Spritedumps are quite old (they have the old pics for pythium mages, lack all Hinnom + Bogarus + Fomoria stuff and have some other outdated stuff), so once I'm done with Holy War I'll probably update them.

I'll also make a spritedump out of all my works and perhaps start to pester other modders to make their own. Having modder spritedumps will also be useful in the sense that they could act as a "permission" to use them, so that if someone wants to use your pic he can just take it from the dump without having to bother you for permission. IMHO, spritedumps are absolute necessity when working this method. Viewing the Organized Sprites is just time consuming and tedious.

Since it seems that there are a lot beginners to sprite art ogling this method, I'd like to restate that if you post your pics in this thread, I'll be 100% sure to give feedback and suggestions. It should prove useful to have lots of art discussion in a single thread.



Oh, right. Almost forgot. I just happened to use our Rabble Rouser as base to another pic today, so I decided tobriefly show what I did. It's important to note that you can use pics made yourself as base too. So I recolored the robe, changed hair color, gave different weapons and some open wounds and we got Zealot (Flagnellant commander). The lower guy is Warrior Priest and I decided to show him just to demonstrate the power of small changes.

Originally Posted by Aezeal

...
reading back I guess it's a bit what llama means, Burnsaber has a point, you can completely ruin a pic by doing to much.. but luckily Gimp give the option to undo step by step soo you can go back to where it's still good.
...
other stuff I've learned the hard way:
copy pasting from sprites = good
rotating 90/180/270/360/inverting etc = good
rotating it at any other angle = not good = ugly

And while Sombre has a point that resizing will nearly never get near the quality of his artwork it might still be better than you can create yourself if you are less artistic.. and your wanted sprites don't resemble anything existing. Just mind the edges is a thing I've learned .

Yeah, undo is awesome. Ctrl-Z is my friend. But like I said, I've mostly drawn humans, so I haven't really encountered any large areas to shade. Besides, shading by hand isn't that hard. I usually just slide the colors I need manually.

Yeah to that too, the rotation thing is annoying. Explanation to those who have idea what we are talking about: if you rotate an object in GIMP with angle other than 90 or 180, the GIMP will smudge the whole object. Really annoying. I've been digging the options to turn it off, but no luck. I still use it sometimes, althought the object needs *a lot* fixing afterwards.

Dom3k is quite an odd beast of an mod. You might have trouble finding a base sprite in vanilla .

[Gandalf Parker]

If you ever want to spark your imagination:
try doing a google for icons. There are tons of libraries of old simple icons (such as Win95 or win98 versions) which cover a nice range of subjects.

Try googling for icons win98 fantasy

Gandalf Parker
--
I have a very fertile mind.
Just ask mention something. I can fertilize anything.
(wait, that didnt come out right)

[Aezeal]

yeah I usually lend pics from the net.. I've improved adapting them and even though Sombre would probably agree I think that quality wise a lot of them can stand up to about dom 3 standards (for ref, Sombre's I value higher). To be honest I don't care that much for graphs in this game anyway.

The styles of the graphics are lend of course and usually aren't very dom 3 like... and even within nations styles can clash.. I don't mind... I think Sombre would, well he can aford to be picky I guess (not sure he's seen the latest work or the polishing I did on the earlier ones though)

Anyway.. I've totally stopped rotating any thing except 90/180 etc.. IMHO you can't even fix it up decently and trust me I've tried, if it doesn't even get to my standards it must mean it's really unusable

Another option I really like is Colorize.. if you use it on your WHOLE pic it will ruin it.. if you select a color first (with a certain treshold) and the colorize that selection it makes for rapid changes in color and keep intact shading (mostly keeps it intact, if you use it and decide to use otehr color UNDO till before the first change. Colorize over colorize will give unicolorish results in the end)

[lch]

Originally Posted by Burnsaber

Yeah to that too, the rotation thing is annoying. Explanation to those who have idea what we are talking about: if you rotate an object in GIMP with angle other than 90 or 180, the GIMP will smudge the whole object. Really annoying. I've been digging the options to turn it off, but no luck. I still use it sometimes, althought the object needs *a lot* fixing afterwards.

That is not a limitation of GIMP, that's because the problem is really hard in general. You can rotate multiples of 90° without trouble, of course, because that just means that the pixel data is using another orientation. But you can't safely say how you can rotate odd values and keep the pixely image intact. Especially with low resolution graphics. If you have high res photographs, then the algorithms are good enough so that you almost don't notice that things were rotated afterwards, but for sprite graphics, you'll have to do it by hand, at least fix the image afterwards, no way around it. That's because the image consists of pixels, and the computer has no means of sampling new data.

[DaveCG]

Hey burn just letting you know thanks alot for this, it's inspired me to start doing unit, it's off to a alright start, I'm having fun, I'm not sure the lion tribe are enjoying my fashion makeover though

[Burnsaber]

DaveCG, those look pretty good. I really like the Orange/White + Black color theme. Nice contrast. I really couldn't find any flaws in the regular guys. Good job on those.

The pose on the (hero probably?) on the golden shield-guy* looks a bit.. epic? I mean that he has his back facing on the enemy and fighting backwards. If he's a hero or rare unit of some sort, I'd think that he's okay (rare units can look special), but if he's a recruitable of some sort**.. I also noted that his swords hilt is fully visible (meaning that he isn't actually holding it, since his fingers should be around the hilt).

If you want to change the pose, I'd suggest you just select the head and mirror it vertically. Then he should be facing in the right direction.

You have really good advantage on doing black-skinned units. Since those are quite rare in dom3, you could probably get away with just turning former white guys to black guys and changing their equipment a bit. If you need new mage pics, I'd suggest recoloring some Mictlan priest (the highest quality half-naked dudes). Also, easy alternative on the Sorcerer would be if he was holding his staff two-handed (you don't need to change his pose, just make him hold the staff vertically)

* free tip: In the future, you should remember that "naming" the units in the pic are helpful reference points (example in this post http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showp...9&postcount=33)

** Note: This is just a personal preference. Poses like that probably have their fans.

[DaveCG]

Thanks for the tips! the golden shield guy is meant to be the king of what is to be a EA Machaka, a cap only special dealy type thing, I was playing Dr P EA Machaka mod and noticed he had a king unit, and I thought I'd try and make a sprite for it, then it got on to "Hell, I'll make an entire EA Machaka, based around lions and the sun (hence the orange deal)" and yeah, epic might be the right word there

As for the hilt thing, I'll be sure to tidy that up, could you tell me how to mirror in GIMP? I've worked out rotation thanks to you, but in the tutorial you said mirror as well, and for the life of me I can't find the button/thingy, is it possible to mirror in such a way that he strikes forward with his sword? or will it auto mirror him ingame? I've been meaning to set up a file to test them ingame, but I was having too much fun messing about...

Thanks for the suggestion about Mictlan, I was sort of going for their head pieces anyway, might as well take their bodies too :P

Anyway, like I said thanks for the tips and I'm going to keep trying, got too many ideas and not enough skill/time, I just made a horrible failure of a creature, spearmen riding lion don't look right, heheh.

[Burnsaber]

First just select his head, then click on the icon that's third from top and third from right. It has this two-faced arrow on it.

On the lion rider, see if there are any quite naked riding units in the game(I can't think of any at the moment, but there must be some, amazons perhaps?). Just then pick the rider and recolor his skin (and give breast reduction surgery if they're amazons).

[DaveCG]

Cool thanks alot, I'll be sure to find me some naked folks to use...ermm..yeah.

Also, last question I swear, I think I've done something horribly wrong, I've started testing out my unit ingame and my kings normal sprite appears fine, but when they attack, it's the giant black box of doom, with purple shadow, attack sprite in the middle of all this, I'm guessing I coloured something in I shouldn't have? I've been round all of them filling it in black, just incase but I really have no idea about this sort of thing, any help would be great, and chances are I'll be back tomorrow with a couple more crimes against good taste.