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"Camouflaging" your character (SPRITING TUTORIAL)

Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2015 6:21 am
by Koto
Hello everyone, this is a basic tutorial for adding a good camouflage to your characters. It can be any image, but I will use camouflage because I have seen many sprites trying to recreate a soldier with a very poor camo or just with an military-ish shade of green or ocher.

This technique did before changing uniforms in Pro Evolution Soccer 6 (the principle is the same) and now put it into practice in pinochestein GL with the black beret and the MP.
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I will show this tutorial with Photoshop (what I have in Spanish but can be guided by the position of the options), but if you use Gimp should also work.

Well, let's start.

1- Looking for resources.

For this tutorial I'll see a sprite of Doomguy (you can choose any sprite).

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2- Separating colors.

For this technique, you must copy the sprite layer or sheet that will be used.

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and repaint every part of one color in this way (only green suit and boots will be repainted here).

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3- "Whitening" the area.

Now select the green area with the magic wand, go to the original layer and proceed to press Ctrl + U (Hue/saturation).

Mark Colorize and reduce the saturation to 0.

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But we are not yet ready. Now we must select "Image->Settings->Brightness/contrast" option.
Is required to extend the brightness (100 in this case).

The contrast can also be adjusted to taste, but for this exercise we will leave it to 0.

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4- Adding camouflage.

We can look for any image that has a camouflage texture (I chose this). When we have the image, we have 2 options

-Save The image in our PC.
-Copy The image from the browser.

This time we will do the second.

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(Example made in a 1024x768 workspace)

Oops, it's too big for our sprite, so I proceed to select and transform the image (Ctrl + T).

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Select the chain for an optimum adjustment, so the image is reduced uniformly. and set the interpolation in "Nearest Neighbor" to that note is a sprite or otherwise be blurred. Reduce its size to achieve the desired result.

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5- Camouflaging our hero.

Now select the area opposite the green area, select the camouflage layer and delete whatever is left.

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We position our camouflage behind the Doomguy, select the Doomguy layer and seek a suitable and user choice blend mode (Overlay in this example).

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6- Final Result.

When they select our blend mode, combine layers and have our result in sight.

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We can experiment with any texture and blend mode and have good, fast and effective results every time. Pick your flavor.

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(From left to right: Desert camo, Snow camo, Hexa camo, Black digital camo, Blue urban camo, Orange urban camo)

I hope you have served this tutorial, any question let me know here.

Re: "Camouflaging" your character (SPRITING TUTORIAL)

Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2015 9:41 am
by Devianteist
Using this tutorial, I decided to see what a camouflage Shyguy would look like.

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Not too shabby if I say so myself.

Re: "Camouflaging" your character (SPRITING TUTORIAL)

Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2015 10:41 am
by Enjay
Kotometal0041 wrote:I have seen many sprites trying to recreate a soldier with a very poor camo.
Indeed. There are certainly a few of them around and one or two seem to crop up in mods with quite high regularity despite looking really quite bad.

When I was playing Pinochestein, I did notice the cammo-wearing guys and I had also noticed that the quality of their cammo was better than usual.

Re: "Camouflaging" your character (SPRITING TUTORIAL)

Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2015 1:37 pm
by Galaxy_Stranger
These are amazing.

I want to apply this technique to the existing doom guy's colors so the players can still change colors and still have awesome looking camo.

Re: "Camouflaging" your character (SPRITING TUTORIAL)

Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2015 2:26 pm
by Koto
Devianteist wrote:Using this tutorial, I decided to see what a camouflage Shyguy would look like.

Image

Not too shabby if I say so myself.
It's good. It works with any sprite style. just about to try different blend modes.
Enjay wrote:
Kotometal0041 wrote:I have seen many sprites trying to recreate a soldier with a very poor camo.
Indeed. There are certainly a few of them around and one or two seem to crop up in mods with quite high regularity despite looking really quite bad.

When I was playing Pinochestein, I did notice the cammo-wearing guys and I had also noticed that the quality of their cammo was better than usual.
When I did this tutorial came to mind "Twilight warrior" and a sprite can not remember its origin but had a horrible arctic camouflage.

About pinochestein, thanks for noticing. Next week I'll upload a new version that fixes many known problems.
Galaxy_Stranger wrote:These are amazing.

I want to apply this technique to the existing doom guy's colors so the players can still change colors and still have awesome looking camo.
It sounds great, go ahead. Is always good to contribute to the community.

==End of quotes==

not necessarily have to be camouflage.

can be animal print.

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or any other (e.g., Bauhaus).

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and works perfectly with other sprite styles.

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Re: "Camouflaging" your character (SPRITING TUTORIAL)

Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2015 2:51 pm
by Devianteist
It is very versatile, and this tutorial also taught me how the Overlay function in GIMP/Photoshop works, so there's another plus.

Re: "Camouflaging" your character (SPRITING TUTORIAL)

Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2015 4:22 pm
by Blox
Well that's cool and all except that it breaks animation depth because the pattern is never distorted according to how the object moves.

although i guess it's better than schizophrenic animations

Re: "Camouflaging" your character (SPRITING TUTORIAL)

Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2015 4:29 pm
by Marinelol
Nice tutorial.

I think if you split the camo image with a red line as reference layer, you can print the camo a little bit aligned each time. So it doesn't look like the camo never moves\warps around.

Re: "Camouflaging" your character (SPRITING TUTORIAL)

Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2015 5:08 pm
by Galaxy_Stranger
Blox wrote:Well that's cool and all except that it breaks animation depth because the pattern is never distorted according to how the object moves.

although i guess it's better than schizophrenic animations
That's a good point, but easily fixable, I think.

Re: "Camouflaging" your character (SPRITING TUTORIAL)

Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2015 7:47 pm
by Snarboo
Oh hey, I see someone else stumbled upon displacement maps! If you want the texture to follow the sprite, there's an easy trick with that.

Edit:
Here's a quick and dirty example of what I mean:
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If you notice, the texture follows the contours of the rocket launcher!

Re: "Camouflaging" your character (SPRITING TUTORIAL)

Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2015 11:46 pm
by Galaxy_Stranger
what's the trick?

Re: "Camouflaging" your character (SPRITING TUTORIAL)

Posted: Mon Feb 16, 2015 12:14 am
by Snarboo
Basically, you need to create a separate, black and white version of the image you want to use as your displacement map (usually the sprite you're working with), blur it slightly with a Guassian blur, then save it. Afterwards, go to Filter -> Distort -> Displacement in Photoshop, then load the image you saved as your map with the default filter settings on top of the texture layer. The rest is very similar to the current tutorial, but I'll see if I can create a simple tutorial for this one!

Re: "Camouflaging" your character (SPRITING TUTORIAL)

Posted: Mon Feb 16, 2015 12:19 am
by Galaxy_Stranger
Very cool!

In GIMP:

Re: "Camouflaging" your character (SPRITING TUTORIAL)

Posted: Wed Mar 18, 2015 10:02 pm
by Zanieon
Hmm nice hint, lemme try...
Spoiler:

Re: "Camouflaging" your character (SPRITING TUTORIAL)

Posted: Fri Mar 20, 2015 6:25 am
by Koto
Revilution wrote:Hmm nice hint, lemme try...
Spoiler:
Oh jeez :lol:
You can get better results with Displacement maps explained above.