Art Editing for Dummies (tutorial) :D

FrostyBoy · November 12, 2001, 05:04

http://www.civer.f2s.com/howtomod.shtml

I whipped this up, so don't expect a flash site with spell checking. hope its useful

Heed · November 12, 2001, 05:24

For those using PSP just increase colour depth to 16 million (instead of the photoshop conversion to RGB) and then reduce back down to 256 when you're done editing. In PSP, the green and purple are the _last_ two colours in the colour palette (colours--> edit palette)-- index value 254 for the green and index value 255 for the purple.

Heed.

FrostyBoy · November 12, 2001, 08:36

thanks heed

Qnuc.dk · November 12, 2001, 08:59

Thx Sn00py

I'll read and edit some art

Heed · November 12, 2001, 09:10

np, snoop. I'm downloading your completed mod pack now-- screenshots look really sweet. One thing: the irrigation, I'm using your mod and I like it better than Firaxis' effort, but it would be nice to see farms. I've taken a crack at this myself without much luck. Would it be possible to do lush green land; rather than a "ricepaddyish" look?

Kind of something like this:

Thanks,

Heed.

FrostyBoy · November 12, 2001, 19:40

That image is not loading, i'd be interested to see it

Irrigation is so hard

Heed · November 13, 2001, 05:44

Hmm, not sure why it's not showing up, it loads fine for me. It's a small cutout of a fairly high res aerial shot of some farmland in Canada. I know what your'e saying about the difficulty involved with irrigation-- as I said, I tried myself, and had some decent results in some areas, but others looked simply bad.

I'll upload a small zip with the pics if you want to check them out:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/kbyiers/FarmPics.zip

Heed.

Qnuc.dk · November 13, 2001, 15:56

Somebody who would share some art making knowledge?

what program you use or where you can DL small art images
or what program to make flc animations

paint shop pro 7 or photoshop 6 and animatio shop 3 can be used for editing

But how to make art or animation? or where to DL images and animations

I (we) want
- what software program to use for making
- where to get art software files to edit

FrostyBoy · November 14, 2001, 23:07

I use Photoshop 6, and an artist doesn't find images, he/she draws them, except for when he/she needs to know what something looks like.

I'm not sure of all the programs that support FLC files, I remember one old program that I used to use in High School called...Animator, I think thats what it was called, and it supported FLC.

Heed, I've been trying to find an image like that, thanks!
But now that I look at it, I see that there is little detail in the farms, and I wonder if it will look good on civ3

i guess I will have to try it

Bubba_B · November 15, 2001, 03:28

Thanks Snoopy,

Not many people will share this kind of info freely.

Can't wait to edit my own graphics.

Again ty

ancient · November 16, 2001, 17:49

umm can you edit the art in the game with Paint?

Plumbean · November 18, 2001, 04:56

Thanks snoopy

There are alot of us that dont have this info

FrostyBoy · November 18, 2001, 06:14

ancient, you could draw it, but you wouldn't be able to get Civ3 to load it properly.

I've changed the location of the tutorial

http://www.civer.f2s.com/howtomod.shtml

ancient · November 18, 2001, 11:41

thats too bad i want to make all off the land/units look like cartoony..

Make the units simple icons, not actually what they are..

C Chulainn · November 22, 2001, 17:34

This URL seems to be bad... I try to connect and get "Cannot Find Server"

C Chulainn · November 23, 2001, 16:45

Ah, sorry - temporary fault. I can get there now.

Skanky Burns · November 26, 2001, 18:40

For everyone using Paint Shop Pro:

The 'invisible' colours in the colour palette arent the first 2 as with Photoshop, they are instead the last two entries. So, if you are following Sn00py's tutorial, just use the last 2 entries instead of the first. Here's an example. The green and purple wont be seen in the game:

BeBro · December 2, 2001, 07:11

Unfortunately I can´t load the tuorial (is the link still valid?)

I can´t get the transparency colors to work

I tried to change parts of the roman palace, changed the pcx to 24bit, then reconverted it to 8bit. Then I had to change the first color (blue rgb 0 0 255), and the last two (green 0 255 0) and magenta (255 0 255), but everytime I test this, the background shows up in magenta, instead of being invisible

I also tried to move magenta to the first place in the palette, but this doesn´t help...has someone an idea how to solve it?

I use Corel´s PhotoPaint, btw...

Skanky Burns · December 7, 2001, 09:29

Frustrating isnt it. Unfortunately i dont have that program, but i can tell you how to find out what its transparency numbers are.

Load up an UNMODIFIED .pcx file in PhotoPaint, and before doing ANYTHING at all, open up the colour. Just see where the green and magenta colours are, and use those exact spots in the file you are editing. Hope that helps.

Good luck.

Dom Pedro II · December 7, 2001, 11:03

Well, after several days of agony, I finally managed to solve my problem. I used PhotoShop 6 that I just got rather than Photo Suite, and I opened the original art file for the natural resources. Then I just cut and pasted the changes in. Since it was the original file, the palette was already set on the right colors. With Photo Suite, when I opened the original, it always loaded its own color table, and then it just wouldn't work. So I figured it out, I hope it helps somebody out.

:) Smiley · December 9, 2001, 11:44

Can I change the colors in palette? Or is it fixed, like in Civ II? I noticed that a lot of the files have different palettes.

Pythagoras · December 12, 2001, 13:42

The link appears not to be working... hmm...

catvargas · December 22, 2001, 23:37

I saw someone earlier had questions about .flc files (used for the animations). I was similarly unfamiliar with them so I did a bit of research and found that .flc is the autodesk animation format. It apparently has some advantages over mpeg upder certain conditions, but I really don't know that much about it.

Anyway, you could use autodesk or another specialty program to create the files, but in case you don't have that handy (I know I don't), I'd suggest just creating it as an animated gif (since there are a lot of programs that create in gif format) and then converting to .flc. Just do a search on download.com or somewhere - there are a number of freeware programs that convert .gif to .flc.

Good Luck. I haven't created .flc animations yet (I'm working on Velociryx's mod and focusing first on adding new icons) but as I get around to them I'll post here if I find anything unusual in the process.

Hueij · January 13, 2002, 20:17

Okay, nothing happened in this thread for almost a month now and I don't want to wait forever, so I want to ask snOOpy if there is any chance your site will come back on line? Maybe some place else? I browsed thru your site and put it in my favorite-list but when I tried to go back when I needed it it was gone... Please?...

exsanguination · January 20, 2002, 13:12

im getting a cannot find file server thing as well

Solomyr · February 1, 2002, 15:31

as am i...and i would love to start making some mods...with all the extra time i have inbetween midterms

godinex · February 6, 2002, 14:29

I love this game!

godinex · February 6, 2002, 14:32

Quote:

Originally posted by Heed
For those using PSP just increase colour depth to 16 million (instead of the photoshop conversion to RGB) and then reduce back down to 256 when you're done editing. In PSP, the green and purple are the _last_ two colours in the colour palette (colours--> edit palette)-- index value 254 for the green and index value 255 for the purple.

Heed.

Thanks!

MonsterMan · February 21, 2002, 19:32

This thread doesn't deserve to be at the top, if it deserves to be kept at all. I've never been able to see the site that is linked and the info posted in the responses in this thread are of dubious usefulness.