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
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