DF-21 Forums

[Nikana]

Considering the large amount of waxes, fmes, bms, etc. that have been uploaded to this site and been used in custom levels, my question is basically how do some of you go about creating these?

I made a few for my projectiles and pickups download, but as projectiles they felt fairly simple to me. But say, creating a wax of a different colored officer or some other enemy where there is a LOT of variations to work on to ultimately create a new wax seems like another story entirely.

I'm just curious as to what the best ways to do this are. Are there any more efficient ways to go about something like this other than shading and coloring every little pixel? (for example, I converted a dark trooper wax to a bmp, and considered making a different colored version....until I saw that there are 65 different poses to recolor...yikes!)
Surely there are some tricks or something. Either way, given the amount of work done over the years, I must complement all you custom component makers on some great work.
Any tips?

[Barry Brien]

Not that I can think of. It's a long, tedious process unfortunately, with no short cuts, as far as I'm aware.

[Tom Manning]

for recoloring officers, what I did once was to open the PICT in photoshop, lasso his face and colored badge, copied it, converted the file to black and white and back to color so the officer was still black and white, but I could now use color again. Then, I pasted his face and badge back, so I had a black and white officer with a colored face. Then I created a new layer, and painted over the officers uniform and hat. Then I lowered to the transparncy of the layer that was solid color. When you do that, its like holding celophane over your eyes, everything you see takes on that color. The black in white of the original layer was visible, so you could see the texture, but the colored layer changed the black in white texture to what ever color I had placed over it.

At that point I merged the layers and saved it as a simple PICT file and it was ready to go back to DF.

If any of those steps don't make sense, I could detail it a little more. For a dark Trooper, you could probably eliminate the black and white converting since they are greytoned to begin with.

_________________
Tom Manning
For all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you, Stand, Men of the West!
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