BG paperdoll accessories

[Oblivious]

Okay, as I said before, I am working on some more renders, for the time being mostly palette swaps (manual palette swaps, that is.) Here's what I have either finished or close to finished:

*wooden shield (w/out metal bolt thing in the middle)
*lightning whip (I have both frames done, but I don't know if you have to do anything else for the flashing crap.)

Working on:

*throwing axe (GWAAAAARRRGGHHH!!! dammit, this thing is giving me a hard time!)
*firesword (half done.... actually, more than half done, just got to do the other frame.)
*platemail (got a long ways to go with this thing...)
*leather armor
*I can't remember what else.


Ones I'm not working on yet due to needing to make prerenders:
*top
*fancy top
*tunic
*hood
*cloaks
*shoes
Of course, I don't know when I'm going to do those because it's such a tough choice. How do I make the dress designs? Should I make them robes instead? If I make them dresses, how do I go about with the males wearing them? What about the hoods, they're about the same color, how boring!

Anyhow, If I were to do the death scythe, what are exult's capabilities as far as making glowing auras and such from scratch?

[drcode]

I don't know the exact details, but there are groups of colour values at the high end of U7's palette which undergo 'palette rotation'. Let's see.... Here are the groups with the pixel value in hex:

Start of group. # colors
0xf8 4
0xf4 4
0xf0 4
0xe8 8
0xe0 8

So if you use a pixel from one of the above groups, Exult will rotate through all the colours of that group, giving a glowing/flickering effect.

[Max aka Moscow Dragon]

Yes, also this palette-based animation works always even if the time is stopped by opening a bag.

[Oblivious]

Hmm.... sounds a bit complicated for me... Maybe the firesword and lightning whip I redid won't work after all, then... Too bad, that firesword looks coll, though I did use most of the colors used for the torch...

[Oblivious]

SO, can someone explain to me what this means (as in whether a palette swap will work. Becuase if it doesn't, I have no idea how you guys got that firedoom staff to work using photoshop, since the colors could not possibly all be ones that are flashables...)

[nadir]

It means that for the "glowing bits" you should use colours with palette indices in the ranges DrCode specified. He has specified the starting colour cell (in hexadecimal - use windows calculator in scientific mode to convert to decimal if needed) and the number of colours Exult cycles from that range (4 or 8 mainly).
So, summing it all up, use the following colour ranges for "glows"

224-231 blue
232-239 red
240-243 green
244-247 pink
248-251 orange

[Oblivious]

Um... this I'm sure comes as no surprise to you, but I still don't get it... What are the ranges 244-248 etc? Using what program? Photoshop (to my knowledge at least) doesn't assign numbers to colors and MS paint assigns 3-6 numers to a color.....

And there's no glowing for yellows? THen how do the yellow jewels glow, in that case..?

[wjp]

These ranges are ranges in the 256 colour palette used by U7.

The yellow glow is probably the orange one, although I'd have to check.

[nadir]

You have to set your paint program to Indexed mode (using a fixed 256 colour palette) instead of RGB mode (where each pixel may be any colour).
Under the GIMP, the SHP plugin automatically sets that mode for the image when loading a shape, under lesser apps such as PhotoShop and PaintShopPro I have no idea.
Actually, is someone willing to compile u7shp for GIMP/Win32 ?

[wjp]

the photoshop plugin automatically loads .shp files in indexed mode too.

[Oblivious]

"the photoshop plugin automatically loads .shp files in indexed mode too."

Funny, I didn't notice that when I loaded a SHP and went to the colorchange/pick a color menu.

[wjp]

I don't have photoshop nearby to check, but isn't there a special 'palette' window that you can open?

[artaxerxes]

"Funny, I didn't notice that when I loaded a SHP and went to the colorchange/pick a color menu."

if it is the same as the Gimp, although you can "choose" a color as if it was RGB, once your actually have picked the color it will automatically change to the closest color available in your palette.

To give a try, create an image and index it to use only 2 colors. Now choose a color in your color picker and see whether it is the actual color you picked or rather one the 2 colors used for indexing.

artaxerxes

[nadir]

artaxerxes, that is fine if you're using few colours, but when working with 256 colours you have to know EXACTLY which one you need.

[artaxerxes]

and I agree with you! I said this so that Oblivious would see that even if the image is indexed and even if she can pick a color among 2^32 other colors, the color she would pick would be the closest one to the index for this picture.

I don't know if Photo$hop is the same as the Gimp, but that's what the Gimp does.

Artaxerxes

[Max aka Moscow Dragon]

>"under lesser apps such as PhotoShop "

Photoshop is a LESSER app???

[artaxerxes]

you didn't know ?



artaxerxes

[Max aka Moscow Dragon]

Just told "Photoshop is a minor app" to a professional artist.
The girl had really lots of fun

[nadir]

Food for thought: the GIMP had multi-undos eons before Photoshop...

[Dominus]

Food for thought: GIMP is free and has the same functionality as Photoshop which costs heaps of money.
But then again GIMP is not that great on Win32 machine. The one porting it to Win32 doesn't seem to care much if it works or not

[Dominus]

Not to mention the fact that Exult first had a GIMP plugin and only then months later a photoshop plugin!

[Oblivious]

Okay, how do I index something to only use a certain number of colors in Photoshop?

I was going to just change what I had to 256 color mode via MS paint, but that alters the colors even if they're within the 256 color range....

And I don't have GIMP nor do I know how to use it....

[nadir]

Dominus: also, the GIMP plugin can load multiple frames as layers, whereas I believe the PS plugin cannot due to some limitations with Photoshop (i.e. it cannot handle Indexed images with Alpha)

[Oblivious]

I have the Photoshop Business Edition....

[nadir]

Isn't there a swatch with the indexed palette in PS ?
Edition shouldn't matter.

[Oblivious]

Okay, how do you do the swatch? Oh, and don't say 'color change', that's not it, and it makes a mess.

[Oblivious]

And how do I know if it's the right BG color I'm looking for?

[Stephan]

"This is not the BG color you're looking for."

[Oblivious]

I don't get it, Stephen....

[XxVenomxX]

Not a Star Wars fan, eh?

[Oblivious]

SO... can anyone help me...?

[Colourless]

1) Load a shape in Photoshop.

2) In the "Image" menu, choose "Mode->Color Table"

3) Save the Color Table as a ACT file

4) Close the Color Table window

5) In the "Swatches" window, bring up the menu (the arrow for me in Photoshop 5.5)

6) Choose "Replace Swatches"

7) Change the mode to "Color Table (*.ACT)"

8) Load the file saved in Step 2.

The swatches window will now have all of, and only, the U7 Colours in it.

There may be a simpler way to do things, but that will work.

-Colourless Dragon