Unit creation
 

I need to know the details on unit sprite making, a quick guide would be nice.

major questions:
where are dom 3 vanilla unit pics? (I might want to start with editing some first)
what format do pics need to be?
what program can be used for that?
I know there was something with the shade needing to be a specific color, which one?
Where do you need to save sprites?

Re: Unit creation
 

3.14


3.10

Those pics are already in .tga (targa) format. Photoshop, Gimp and similar programs can save on that format, or you can use small image viewer such as IrfanView to transform between types your preferred editor can read. Don't use jpg or gif, because they approximate some of the data and that breaks shadow and other special colors.

Pure black (0, 0, 0 in RGB) is totally transparent, magenta (angry pink) is unit's shadow. <font color="magenta">Magenta </font> has two numeric values all the way to the top, it's (255, 0, 255) IIRC.

The sprites go into \dominions 3\mods if you link to them as #spr1 "monster.tga" or into \dominions 3\mods\urquan if you link to them as #spr1 ".\urquan\spathi.tga"

Re: Unit creation
 

Thanks for all the other info that should get me going if I ever get a good enough artist

PS where did you get the sprites, did I just miss them?

Re: Unit creation
 

I don't know how EricM got them, but I guess he asked Illwinter for a permission and perhaps a few pointers and went on from there. The best I could do was fiddle with the settings until you can screencapture the first sprite from the description, but that was pretty tedious process.

Re: Unit creation
 

OK I'm having problems with the shadows again.

I try to mod some units from that DB with all the sprites and I try to get shadow in other pics.. but the magenta just shows as magenta.. I THINK it might have to do with transperancy or something but I cant get it right

255,0,255 = rgb I've got that in GIMP.. but I also see
K=300
V=100
W=100

what do I need to change to get the dominions 3 shadows (else I'll have to keep using black (which also doesn't appear as transparant in dom 3000 but as pure black)

Re: Unit creation
 

One of the colors is shadow, and another is translucency. I'm pretty certain that Endoperez is correct about the magenta, but I'm not sure what color represents translucency.

Re: Unit creation
 

I know the magenta is correct because I've gotten it to work in the past (when I started this thread.) but I don't know what I changed

Re: Unit creation
 

All of the various sprite threads are linked from the FAQ. There's also a thread for the 3.17 sprites.

Re: Unit creation
 

Transparency is true black: RGB(0,0,0)
Shadow is magenta: RGB(255,0,255)

If you are working on a tga or rgb file and then save as jpg or other file type that uses compression, your colors may be corrupted. Opening that jpg file to continue working may have resulted in some of your pixel colors being slightly modified and therefore no longer giving the results desired.

Hope that helps. If not, it might help to zip your image and upload it here for review.

Re: Unit creation
 

I'm sure there's a third special non-shadow translucency color, though...maybe not, but I really thought there was?

Re: Unit creation
 

Well here is the sprite.. I checked.. the RGB thingies are good at least

Re: Unit creation
 

The cause of the problem is just a theory, but the solution works.
I removed the alpha channel from your image in GIMP and replaced the transparency with pure black RGB(0,0,0). Saved the image and tested it in game. Worked like a charm. I will upload the fixed version to this post.

I believe that if you want to use the transparency (alpha channel), then you have to manually create a darkened shadow for it to appear normally in game. If you remove the alpha channel then the black becomes transparent and the magenta becomes a shadow. You shouldn't have to use pure magenta, as I believe slight variations will work, but I see no reason to gamble or experiment with it.

It is also worth noting that removing the alpha channel reduces the file size considerably. (From 3kb to 2kb.)

Edit:
The image will need cleaned up as there were some pixels around the edges of the unit were not fully transparent and therefore were not turned pure black. Looks like maybe a spray or rounded tool was used to draw. An easy way to fix this would be to fill the pure black background with a lighter color and then user a color replace tool to get rid of the near black around the edges of the unit.

Hope this helped.

Re: Unit creation
 

If he uses GIMP, he must alter the drawing tool settings to have sharp edges, otherwise it gives a gradual fade with color variations, which produces that effect.

Re: Unit creation
 

Gimp never gave me good results. I don't get what people see in it, actually. Has anyone ever tried ImageForge? It works much better for me, and seems to require less resources.

Re: Unit creation
 

ok that alpha channel... how do I remove it (I want to thank ballbarian for his changed thingie but I've got quite some I need to edit I figure so I really need to know how to do it :D)

adn I dislike GIMP too takes a long time to load etc does image forge have the same options?

Re: Unit creation
 

I don't know anything about Image Forge, but in GIMP you go to Layer/Transparency/Remove Alpha Channel. If you do this it helps to be sure your base background color is already set to true black. Maybe it is a similar process in Image Forge.