woodahs

Hi, I hope someone here can help make this easy for me. The pic on the right shows what I'd like to change. Problem is the borders can be tedious to do one line at a time. That is brush set at 1 pixel wide-dark gray. Then draw one map line. Then change to light gray to do center of line then draw right next to other line without messing alignment up. Then finally going back to dark gray to draw once again to other side of border line. What would take a pro 5 minutes because he would know the shortcuts would take me hours to do these map changes. So could anyone tell me how to create a custom brush 3 pixels wide that would have the center pixel be lighter gray while the outer 2 pixels of line would be darker. I know how to use color picker to match with what's already in the game so you could skip that. I would just like to know how to create a custom brush that could do multiple colors in one stroke. I'm using XP and CS2 BTW. If anyone would like the targa files that make up these 3 regions in the game to mess around with I will send them. Thanks for any help.

retired_paddza

Why not just make the detail with one brush then use the "emboss" feature to do the effect?

woodahs

OK I clicked on help and used emboss as search term. That really didn't help me. None of the topics seemed to cover what I was looking for. Let me put the question to you guys another way. Lets say you were givin the images below without the borders lines added yet. Clean slate.

What method would you use to do what the professional game artist did here to create borders?

Also take a close look at the two images. Notice the difference in shading along the borders? One uses a plain blur like effect, the other uses hash makings under the borders. I prefer the regular blur the first game used rather than the hash marking used in the sequel. So my second question is how do I make these too? Should it be done as two separate brush strokes, or would it be best to create a custom brush to include both the 3 pixel wide border and background blur all in one complex brush? Answers that tell me "Ya, do it that way" will not be helpful at all because I'm a newbie. I would need some detailed instructions, or perhaps suggestions on what to read up on in CS2 "help"

woodahs

Here are two sample targa files from the game so you can see them first hand. I changed the .tga extension to .txt to post here so just change them back to tga. They fit together like a puzzle with 41 on left 43 on right. When they are together in game the half borders from each targa image with complete the other to make a complete border. You will see what I mean when you paste them together. So I ask you guys can any of you duplicate these borders?

woodahs

This one was to big for the 100kb limit. I zipped it. Once unzipped remember to change the extension too.

BTW, how do you guys live with these limits? I find it rather strange that a forum about graphics gives users little to post decent pics. The old saying a picture is worth a thousand words comes to mind.

Gaussian

Changing an extension of a file to TXT doesn't make it compress better, unless the program used isn't all that smart.


I don't want to get into this, but trust me, there is a good reason for that.
On the other hand, the image that you posted (zipped) is only 250x250 pixels, yet it's over 100KB big, saved in Jpeg 70% it would have been only 9 KB...

As for your question: I've tried to reconstruct your image (see screenshot).
You can find the original PSD here: http://www.photoshopgurus.com/forum/...nstruction.psd
Basically it's about drawing a 1 pixel line with the proper layer style settings. Notice that the fill is set to 0 %, since we don't want to see the line, only the strokes, blur and bevel. It's not an exact 1:1 copy (some anti-alias issues), but in my view it should help you in the right direction.

Good luck and welcome to PSG.

woodahs

That reconstruction file was very helpful. Thank you. I should mention however that I almost missed your intention for me to use that layer setup as a base example. I didn't know at first that I could use your file to manipulate your example. At first I was thinking, OK he showed me that he could make something similar but he didn't explain how he did it. Just trying to point out for your future reference so you would mention this to newbies.

woodahs

Now I would like to change the sea zones color to a darker shade of blue. The current seas look to white in the game. The white in lower right corner is the shoreline FYI. That's OK to leave in. I just wish to make it darker blue all around including affecting the shoreline a little. I did about 20 out of 200 so far using a very tedious process. I'm sure you guys might know an easy way to do this and perhaps create a saved method so that I could load, apply, and save very quickly so it won't take several hours to do 200 files. I will place targa file into next post. Thanks.

woodahs

Here's the file

ronmatt

I've never done anything for gaming but...here goes with the color edit problem. select what you want to change then make the color corex with 'channel mixer' When you've got what you want, re-do it and record an action for it, then you can zip through all of them