Graphics insight

[Sombre]

Hey all. As you probably know, or have noticed, I'm far from a talented or trained artist - I'm just someone who decided to have a go at making graphics for Dom3 monsters and found it relaxing and enjoyable.

With the release of a whole bunch of sprites by K O and the new techniques we have for extracting perfect sprites I thought I could share a little about the process I go through when making new graphics. It's sort of hard for me to describe it in detail, because I'm very sloppy at graphical work and my methods change quite a lot, but hopefully I can give you an idea and show you that doing graphics that fit fairly well within the game doesn't have to be that hard.

So my project today is going to be a fairly simple one - I'm going to make a giant rat for my Skaven mod.

Now the good thing about this is that I'm going to have plenty of material to work from. Indeed, after a little bit of searching, I find this page: http://oz.games-workshop.com/games/w...giant_rats.htm

Those miniature shots will from the basis of my graphic, but they are distinctly 'warhammer looking' and I don't want to copy them; I want a Dom3 giant rat to go with my Dom3 skaven. So next I need a size comparison. The descriptions I've found of the giant rats say they are nearly the size of wolves, so off I trot to get the sprite from the basic dom3 wolf. This is actually very easy to do - I just add #addrecunit "wolf" to one of my mods, fire up that nation and the wolf is setting there in my recruiting screen.

I go to video options and set the filter quality to 'off' and the screen resolution to 800x600 - necessary if I want to capture the sprite at the right size. I then right click on the wolf and take a screengrab of him by pressing ctrl-prnt Scrn. This takes a picture of what's on screen and sticks it in the clipboard.

Using Paint Shop Pro I then open up a random unit.tga and paste the wolf into PSP as another image. I crop around the wolf, getting rid of the rest of the screengrab. I then colour his ground shadow 255 0 255 pink manually (this is the default shadow colour for dom3) and fill in all the space around him with 0 0 0 black (the dom3 default transparent colour). So there we have the wolf sprite. This would be necessary if I wanted to alter his sprite (giving him an extra tail, or wings or something) and then use him in the game, but actually I only need him as a size/pose comparison for my rat.

I'll continue this 'guide' a bit later. Right now have to get some lunch :]

Oh and you can find a pic of the screengrabbed wolf (cropped down) and the version on black background with the correct shadow at this link.

http://www.mediafire.com/?cpg6ejxty1d

[Sombre]

I've decided against continuing this thread because it would really require step by step technical instructions, which are very time consuming, and I work with Paint Shop Pro, whereas most of the people here use GIMP.

[Gandalf Parker]

Quite abit can be done with the paint program that comes with the computer. For WinXP people that would be MSPaint.

I would recommend getting IrfanView which is a free viewer. It is willing to do a thumbnail view of the huge sprite library that Kristoffer has nicely provided us. It also allows you to save one of the images as a BMP so you can work it in MSPaint, and will convert your done BMP back to a TGA so the game can use it.

With MSPaint you have many of the tools you would need. Lets take the ratman thing. If you picked up one of the Ctis lizardmen for example then you could make a standing-up ratman thing by:

A)Choose the magnifying tool and set it to the max (8x) so you can see all the color dots (called pixels) that make the image

B) use the pencil tool that is already selected and set to black. Left click the mouse around his nose to shorten it abit.

C) use the freeform tool (like a dotted star) to draw a circle around his upper torso. Clicking on the colored boxes at the bottom of the tool thing helps since it makes it ignore the background. Now you can move his upper body down abit to make him shorter.

D) get the pencil tool and then go to the color pallete. Right click a brown and then left click a different brown. Now go to the image and left click on all of one of the green colors, and right click on another of the green colors.

Now you have a shorter unit with a shorter face that is brown instead of green. Ratman. Of course you can continue to touch him up. Dont bother getting too picky with individual dots. The detail that you are looking at disappears when you see it in the game. Use the magnifying glass to switch back to 1x mode once in awhile to see what it will look like in the game.

Of course this is very basic just for people who want to try it to see if they can do it. Once you find something that the paint program on your machine cant do, come and ask. We can often recommend you toward something fancier. Often free also. But no need to start with a fancy program until you know you want to do it and need something the program you have isnt doing. Jumping into the fancy guru stuff too soon can just blow you off the subject.

[lch]

Sombre said:
I've decided against continuing this thread because it would really require step by step technical instructions, which are very time consuming, and I work with Paint Shop Pro, whereas most of the people here use GIMP.

PSP is cool. When I was still using Windows, that was my favorite graphics editing program.

[Sombre]

It's the best one, in my humble opinion, for doing dom3 sprites. 50% of what I do just uses the retouch tool.

[lch]

Seems like you're onto something. Here is a page with more reference material that you might want to use, looks nice:
http://www.geocities.com/alexanderba...douchkine.html

More at http://www.flats-zinnfiguren.com/down1.html

[Sombre]

Wow, some of those are very nice and could be useful to a lot of people.

I think I'll get inspiration for some empire units from there, that's for sure.