Skip to main content

Clean up in GIMP

Image
By
Some of you may think, "Dang, that's a clean looking tree."  And in fact, like this, it looks pretty clean. And some of you if you drew a tree like this would sign it off as done and ready for some game action.  However, if you take a closer look (About 200%)
Oh wait, those colors are still inside the lines!  I guess it really is read-
WAIT.  LOOK CLOSER.  (In other words, add a black background)


Filthy, filthy tree.  Tree is not ready for the game.  So, now that you can see where all your little pesky errors are, you can whip that tree into shape
Which means you need your handy dandy eraser.

HOWEVER!
Before we start erasing, we are first going to select the black outline and copy it, and for those who don't know how to do so, this is how:
That is your magic wand, you want to select it.
Then you click on the black outline (note: this is for if your outline and and colors are on the same layer, if they are not (e.g. your outline is on one layer) then you go to that layer, hit CTRL + A to select, then CTRL + C to copy, and then CTRL + A to deselect.)
After you have the outline selected, hit CTRL + C to copy and then CTRL+ A to deselect.
Turn the black back on so that it is easier to see the mistakes while you erase.
Bam! Cleanliness.  Now you can turn off the black layer or delete it all together.  Once you do that, you are left with...
Ugh, those lines.  Chances are that you erased some of your lines while you were trying to clean up what was outside of them.  But fret not, for you copied your line art!  
Simply hit CTRL + V
(If you had to use the magic wand tool, you may have to realign the lines a bit, but nothing too difficult.)
Hit that little anchor button to anchor the layer to the layer you were pasting to.

And NOW your pretty little tree is ready for your game.  However, how do you keep a transparent background is something you may ask.  There are two options to really choose from.  Either a .PSD file type (Photoshop image) or a .PNG, both which save your image with a transparent background.  I am going to save it as a .PNG because the file is smaller.  When you save it as a .PNG, however, do not rush to just hit the 'export' and 'save' button.  Take a look.
You're going to want to make sure that the bubble saying 'Merge Visible Layers' is marked rather than 'Flatten Image'.  Flattening the image will give it a background, which is the opposite of what you (may) want.
The next window will look like this:
 
Make sure that the 'Save background color' box isn't checked.  Once you have that done, go ahead and click that save button, you now have a proper, clean transparent image ready for your game!


By the way, be sure to check out our game at IndieDB and look at our dirty, dirty assets that I need to go back and clean up.
Treva's Adventure Web game








Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How To Make a Hellish Looking Sky Box

By
I came across this problem while constructing my scene of Hell in a little project I've been working on, and could not find a reasonable sky box on the web for what I want. Maybe I was not looking hard enough, but I ended up making nice substitute. If you think the sky box looks familiar, then your right. The Sky box I'm using is already packaged with Unity3D! To import the sky boxes Unity has made for you,  simply go to Assets>Import Package>Skyboxes.  The sky boxes will appear in your projects tab under a folder named "Standard Assets". To make this sky box, first you must find the folder containing all the sky box materials and open it up. In it will be a list of sky boxes for your disposal. To get this skybox, I decided to tweak the "StarryNight Skybox" (But the "MoonShine Skybox" looks pretty cool also!).  Select the sky box and view it under the inspector tab. Underneath the properties there will be a tint color variable allowin...
Post a Comment
Read more

How To Make A Gun Shot Sound (SFX On Unity 3D)

By
When it comes to audio in Unity, there are four components: Audio Clip , Audio Source , Audio Listener , and Audio Re-verb Zone . Audio Clips are the actual audio file imported into your game. Unity supports file formats: .aif, .wav, .mp3, and .ogg. When imported, you can compress them greatly, with the price of loosing some quality. You can do this by first selecting the audio clip, view it in the inspector. Under the Audio Importer component, you can switch the audio format from Native to the audio clip, to a compressed format applied by Unity. You can change how compressed the file is by dragging the bar at the bottom, then hitting apply. You can get plenty of free good SFX from a site called  freesound.org . All you have to do is create an account for free , and download all the sounds you want. I found a nice gun shot sound here . Simply download and load into your Project. Audio Source actually plays the audio clip in your scen...
Post a Comment
Read more

Handling Music and Sound Effects In Your Games

By
Initiative  While developing Treva's Adventure I had to figure out a way to handle multiple music tracks and sound effects in a clean manner or suffer horribly.  What was going to help me achieve a simple solution was taking all the different sounds and centralizing them in a single class in order to black box them.   Any other code trying to play a sound wouldn't even know the sound file's name.   All code trying to play a music track would reference a enum that defines all the track names. Defining The Class Creating The Enum When I first started defining types in my enumeration,  I was naming the types to be exactly like the file name.  For a scary sound effect I had found a file named "ghost breath".  So around my code would be scattered lines like SoundManager.Play(SoundEffectType.GhostBreath);  This was fine until I found a sound that better fit the situation it was being used in,  and decided to use "ghost breath" for a...
1 comment
Read more