Unit creation

[Aezeal]

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?

[Endoperez]

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. Magenta 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"

[Aezeal]

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?

[Endoperez]

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.

[Aezeal]

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)

[HoneyBadger]

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.

[Aezeal]

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

[Edi]

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

[Ballbarian]

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.

[HoneyBadger]

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