[tutorial] Gimping for Dummys

[Canderis]

Well as I was searching through the skinning tutorials and there seemed to be none on how to make a good looking texture with gimp, there was a lot on photoshop but not gimp so I decided to share my knowledge of it with the community.

 

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Basics

Basics part 1: Selecting an area

To make good skins you would need to select a precise area to make it look nice. To do this you click on the drop down menu at the bottom. Usually this has 100% in it as a default.

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Set this to anything you wish. you should be able to distinctly see the area you wish to select now.

Now to select the area you click on this icon and then click on each "bend point" on the area you want. A bend point is wherever the texture bends away from a straight line.

 

Basics part 2: Re-coloring

To change the color of a Jedi Robe some beginners use the paintbrush tool. In some cases this might work, but not if you want to make the robes look natural. For a natural look you first select the area you want to change by using the free select tool, if you want to modify the whole texture's color at once you go into "Edit" and then "Select all". Next you go into the "Colors" tab at the top of the page and click on desaturate. Note only do the desaturate step if you want to compleatly change the color, if you don't and you just want a hint of the color in the already existing texture you skip that step.

To change the color you go into the "colors" tab again and click on "Color Balance".

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A menu like this should open.

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In that menu you drag the bars around till you get the shade you want. This part should be pretty self explanatory as the bars are clearly labeled. If green was your desire, your outcome should be something like this:

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If you want a more direct color you go into the "color" tab again and go to colorize. This can give you a quick and effective color but might not retain as much detail.

Basics part 3- Repair

When you select an area and re-color it sometimes you see a tiny bit you wanted that color. To fix this you use the blur function

adjust the size to around .15 then zoom in to 800% and take the re-colored pixal section and hold down the blur and "push them" on top of the other area.

Advanced

This section is for people who know the basic functions of gimp and successfully make a descent re-skin

 

Advanced Part 1- Overlay

Overlay is basically changing the way the new layers interact with each other when you paste in another texture. In the "layers, channels, paths" toolbar:

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There is a dropdown menu here:

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in there there will be a bunch of options you select and they make the picture somewhat transparent and molds it to the texture. Click on them all till you get the look you want. Note you must have pasted a new layer into it and NOT merged it down.

Advanced Part 2- Enhance filter

Up in the "filters" toolbar menu there is a section called enhance go into it and select sharpen. Drag the bar in the menu till you get a good look, it really adds to the overall appearance.

 

I will add some more tips when I find them but here they are for now.

 

Enjoy~

[Marius Fett]

Nice. I've added this to the tutorial section.

 

Edit: @Below:

 

No problem.

[Canderis]

Nice. I've added this to the tutorial section.

 

Thanks Marius

[Darth Avlectus]

Wow. Even though J7 has shown me to some Photoshop stuffs, I do like the idea of GIMP for free. Let me be one of the first in line to thank you for going to this effort to give a K1&2 modding-specific tutorial. It's contribtions like this that make our community great. I even told Totenkopf about this.

 

Could I vote you a nomiation for a continual contribution patch? (you already have the helpful and notable contributor patches)

(HINT HINT LF staff! You're gonna need more, for guys like marius!)

[Canderis]

Wow. Even though J7 has shown me to some Photoshop stuffs, I do like the idea of GIMP for free. Let me be one of the first in line to thank you for going to this effort to give a K1&2 modding-specific tutorial. It's contribtions like this that make our community great. I even told Totenkopf about this.

Thanks! Good to finaly get feedback on this. Glad you like it. After my b-day is over I will add on to this withan indepth on filters and how to make " nice looking area textures.

I will also be starting a new tut called "module building and beyond" it will cover everything from basic placing to adding touches such as snow and fog.

 

Could I vote you a nomiation for a continual contribution patch? (you already have the helpful and notable contributor patches)

(HINT HINT LF staff! You're gonna need more, for guys like marius!)

 

I'm not really sure what you mean by this but it sounds like a complement, so thanks!

[vanir]

Hello...I need some help for making a small section of an existing tga (a robe model with armour on it) to be shiny.

 

I am the King of Gimping Dummies, I've done no graphics work ever but have gimp installed.

 

Judging from the "glowing eyes" thread, from what I've been able to figure out you just open the tga in gimp and make a new layer, then cut and paste the bit you want shiny onto the new layer, then combine layers, save as tga and make a txi with CM_Bright or CM_Baremetal or whatever (are there other CM_* parameters to use?).

 

Is it that easy?

 

If not, is a superstupid walkthrough of how to do it out of the question?

 

 

 

 

lolol I didn't even know about the bendy-select tool in gimp until I read about it in this thread XD

man it was hard trying to freehand shapes with the mouse

[Canderis]

What I do for shiny is select the area I want shiny, and click on the erasor tool and change the opacity to 15 or .15 ( not at home so I don't remember what one) I then erase the area I want once or twice ( it does not erase much when the opacity is so low) then save it and test it. If it's too much I undo one of the erases. if it's not enough, i erace it again till it's right.

 

Hope this helps!

[TriggerGod]

Hello...I need some help for making a small section of an existing tga (a robe model with armour on it) to be shiny.

 

I am the King of Gimping Dummies, I've done no graphics work ever but have gimp installed.

 

Judging from the "glowing eyes" thread, from what I've been able to figure out you just open the tga in gimp and make a new layer, then cut and paste the bit you want shiny onto the new layer, then combine layers, save as tga and make a txi with CM_Bright or CM_Baremetal or whatever (are there other CM_* parameters to use?).

 

Is it that easy?

 

If not, is a superstupid walkthrough of how to do it out of the question?

 

 

 

 

lolol I didn't even know about the bendy-select tool in gimp until I read about it in this thread XD

man it was hard trying to freehand shapes with the mouse

 

Unfortunately, shiny robes are apparently not possible.

 

And just for the record, you should select the area you want to make shiny, make a copy of it, and desaturate it. If you want it REALLY shiny, make it dark. If you want it sort of shiny, make it light. You can do that using the Levels Adjustment (You can get to it through the same color dropdown menu you'd use for the color adjustment) and playing with the sliders.

 

After that, just merge your layer onto a blank white layer, and copy that to an alpha channel. Which Candy should really make a new section about, for the people who don't know how to.

[Canderis]

I have been needing to update this...

[Tangster]

I think you can make shiney robes, but you have to change all the character eviroment settings to CM_Baremetal in the appearance.2da, which probably screws up some other things.

[TriggerGod]

I think you can make shiney robes, but you have to change all the character eviroment settings to CM_Baremetal in the appearance.2da, which probably screws up some other things.

 

Yeah, it does. It makes everything with an alpha channel have that shader. Now, considering most stuff uses baremetal, it wouldn't be a problem, but there are some things that use alpha channels for things other than the baremetal, like some heads (Atton's head and one female head, PFHC05 i think) and those armors that glow blue slightly.

 

However, I think there is something in the actual robe model files, or in the game's code itself that disables the robe's ability to use shaders.

[vanir]

Well I don't even really know the step by step process of making an alpha channel in gimp for anything. I'm just trying to pick it up piecemeal as I go but it aint easy. No graphics experience.

[Canderis]

I'll write you a picture tutorial soon.

[vanir]

Halp!! Dude, Kreia's head went all funky!

 

I tried to make her hair ring thingies shiny. I tried every method I could find written out. I made an alpha channel. Then just selected the alpha channel, used the eraser with 50% opacity and faded out her hair rings. Saved it tga, it looked just like the original when saved, same file size and everything. Put it in override with a txi and her face was all messed up, nose where her mouth is, bits were all over the place. It's like the texture model mapping just went haywire.

 

I tried another method. Made an alpha channel. Cut and pasted the section I wanted shiny to a new layer, lowered the opacity of that layer. Merged the layers. Saved tga.

Same thing when put in override.

 

What am I doing wrong?

[Canderis]

Try extracting the file without editing it and put it in the override. If it still happens Check to see if kreia's model is in the override folder. If it is delete it.

[vanir]

I found the problem, there was some little popup box when you save (rlm compression and bottom left corner something-or-other), and I had to select one of the tickboxes. I've been going mad with baremetal txi's now, it's fun.

[Phildevil]

Hi there, basically, I experienced the same problem than vanir. I was doing a reskin of Bastila's hair with Photofiltre ( http://photofiltre.en.softonic.com/ ), trying to get her to be red headed. Then it all went very weird, Bastilla had her mouth texture stretched on her hairs and the such.

 

So I tried to use GIMP instead. It works, but there are strange results. For example, I tried to edit an underwear reskin of Bastila. It was already working, for I tested-it. The ".tga" weighted 1.0 MB. Then, after altering the color levels with GIMP, the resulting ".tga" weighted 730 KB's. Any idea why such a change? Not that it matters a lot, the reskin is still working, but hmm... I wonder.

[TriggerGod]

So I tried to use GIMP instead. It works, but there are strange results. For example, I tried to edit an underwear reskin of Bastila. It was already working, for I tested-it. The ".tga" weighted 1.0 MB. Then, after altering the color levels with GIMP, the resulting ".tga" weighted 730 KB's. Any idea why such a change? Not that it matters a lot, the reskin is still working, but hmm... I wonder.

 

You probably didn't save it as a 32 bit. It should give you the option when you save it as a tga.

[Phildevil]

Well, as GIMP auto-installed in french, I may have to re-install it in english to be sure, but as it is, I haven't seen a single option about 32 bit. The only "options" I had was those stated by vanir.

[TriggerGod]

Well, as GIMP auto-installed in french, I may have to re-install it in english to be sure, but as it is, I haven't seen a single option about 32 bit. The only "options" I had was those stated by vanir.

 

Perhaps there is an option to change to 32 bit in the Save As screen? I wouldn't really know, as I use Photoshop instead of GIMP.

[Phildevil]

Well, Adobe Photoshop is a little bit expensive for any non-professionnal use. I had college classes on how to use it and I know I would get the option you speak about in photoshop. However, GIMP is sometimes bugging me. Oh well, I may try this at college...