Joined: 25 Sep 2006 Location: Teamblackistan Posts: Over 9000
Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2008 8:19 pm Post subject:
How to make half decent shps, in MS paint
Subject description: if you MUST use it..
I promised you guys this tutorial a long time ago, back when I made the laser reactor.
This tutorial assumes have at least somewhat of a skill in paint, although you might not necessarily have or know how to use advanced graphic programs.
I'd like to add however, it's better to just learn the advanced programs anyways
Create your building several times larger than you intend it to be ingame.
It helps to prnt scrn the TS pallette and use the eyedropper tool to select the colors from it, for your picture.
DO NOT USE THE DARKEST BLACK - IT WILL SHOW AS TRANSPARENT IN THE GAME!!!
When you resize your pic, you'll need to find a way to anti alias it (right), or else it'll look like complete garbage (left). Paint sucks at anti-aliasing.
If nothing else, you can select the file in preview mode, or open the pic in Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, and simply resize the window to scale the picture. When you have the desired size, take a prnt screen, and paste in a new MS paint window, and then crop out what you don't want.
This way, you can prnt screen each and every frame you make, and they will all be on the same scale. Make sure your background is the blackest black, as that is the transparent color ingame.
When you feel it's finally ready, import your frames into shp builder. Make edits as needed, then check it out to see how it looks ingame ( I found that I did just as much editing in shp builder as in paint). Chances are, you'll have bad remap, either it turned to the "brick" color or non-remap red. What you can do to see what is remap and what is not, is to use the color swap feature. Since I had no green on the shp, I converted all remap to green
(note that ingame my shp still has the NAPOWR animations.. I obviously didn't comment these out in art.ini when I took the pic)
After you change the remap to green, also make the conversions red > remap, and brick > remap. Of course, if you intend on having either brick or red on your shp, it would be best to edit these back in, after you have fixed the remap. depending on how much of these colors are on your shp.
Basically I wouldn't suggest that you use any of what I said here unless in dire need - but these techniques you can do on almost any computer even if it has crap for RAM and ROM. If you don't have photoshop or 3dsmax, or lack the skills to use them, this is a way you can work around, and still make something half decent, albeit it is still a bit time consuming.
Ultimately, these are just useful techniques and the real factor in how well it turns out it is your own skill and creativity, to be able to work with whatever you have. 2.5 years ago when I thought up this tutorial I was still modding off of my good old Windows 98.
Joined: 25 Sep 2006 Location: Teamblackistan Posts: Over 9000
Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2008 10:35 pm Post subject:
This tutorial isn't about the gimp, it's about paint
you're right though that I should have mentioned it somewhere in my post, as it's very useful to people who would otherwise consider using paint for their stuff. _________________ The Fall of Hammerfest - Epic Tiberian chain story
Tiberian Odyssey mapping department. Discord The Team Black Index QUICK_EDIT
I've been using Paint to edit SHPs quite a bit and the Vista version of MS Paint only improved (slightly) on previous versions of MS Paint IMO.
When using MS Paint to edit SHPs however, I always zoom in 8x and edit it on pixel level and also do a lot of copy/pasting.
If necessary I also take a screenshot of the palette in either OS SHP Builder or OS Palette Editor, crop it and paste it in the image I'm editing so I can select them with the eyedropper tool. Also, to assign a certain palette to a PNG (so no colors other than the ones from the palette will appear in the image), you can simply use XCC Mixer to convert any SHP to PNG while having the palette you want to assign to the PNG selected.
I'd also suggest to use a palette in which you replace the (black) background color with a color which isn't the same or similar to any of the other colors on the palette and to replace the remapable colors with purple rather than red. I got this idea from Nyerguds' purple C&C palettes and found it to be quite useful when converting PNGs to SHP (normally there'd often be conversion errors for the black and red colors). Nyerguds used pink as the background color and I decided to do the same for all of my own palettes.
Also, FYI, most of the terrain and pretty much all of the buildings that were edited/converted for DTA by me were done in MS Paint. I'd show you the buildup animations I did (in MS Paint) for the Civilian Armory and Civilian Array, but... Those were posted on TibWeb
Anyway, in the end it's best to mainly use MS Paint to edit SHPs, rather than creating SHPs from scratch. I did make a few SHPs from scratch in MS Paint, but even then I needed something to copy/paste/edit to create a decent texture, although for one SHP I made spraying several shades of gray over each other did the trick. _________________ QUICK_EDIT
my cameos that is is. It's a nice tool for quick editing, or for beginners, but 3d modeling is really the way to go. _________________ Please, read the signature rules of the forum. QUICK_EDIT
No editor without full 256-colour palette editing support should ever be used to make SHPs, imo.
By converting a random SHP to PNG while having the right palette selected and then pasting a screenshot of the palette into that PNG you basically have your full 256-color palette support in MS Paint _________________ QUICK_EDIT
Nice artwork, i wish you can make a tutorial how to draw one 'cuz i can't fix the right size for structures and the size of a unit(e.g infrantry, tanks) _________________ QUICK_EDIT
Joined: 25 Sep 2006 Location: Teamblackistan Posts: Over 9000
Posted: Tue Mar 15, 2011 12:04 pm Post subject:
Remember you can have more than 1 shp open in shp builder.
I'd recommend opening an existing shp that's about the size that you want, and work on yours side by side with it for scale reference. _________________ The Fall of Hammerfest - Epic Tiberian chain story
Tiberian Odyssey mapping department. Discord The Team Black Index QUICK_EDIT
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum You cannot attach files in this forum You can download files in this forum
How to make half decent shps, in MS paint
