Making Unit Cards with Gimp
Making Unit Cards with Gimp
First off, thanks go out to Publius for teaching me this stuff. You were a great help man! Thanks!
Preparation- First you will need Gimp, of course, my tutorial may work with other image editing programs but don’t take my word for it. You will also need a picture of the unit in any pose you like, take this unit for example.
Usually what I do to get a good picture is set a unit in loose formation (makes it easier to make card later on) and make them perform some sort of action, like just running to a location or attacking a unit. If you want a great angle, use the movie cam.
Step 1- Open the image in Gimp and click the “Select Hand Drawn Regions” button in the toolbar. See below if you do not get it.
Step 2- Next you need to set the alpha channel. Go to Layers, Transparency, then click Add Alpha Channel.
Step 3- You are now ready to begin outlining the unit. This is the most annoying, frustrating part of this whole process. It takes a lot of time, trust me, but it is worth the great card quality in the end.
To outline the unit, you need to zoom in very close so you can get a precise measure around the units picture. Usually you should zoom to about 800% on any original image, but on cropped ones it might be more like 400%.
For this tutorial I will use 400% so as to easily see what I am doing.
After you zoom, begin tracing around one part of the unit, like this. You see the line up against his head? You should be tracing like that.
After tracing one part of the unit, begin tracing outside into area not part of the actual guy, like this.
Then you can either connect with the start point or just release the mouse button and you will see this.
After you see the flashing dotted line around the area you just selected, go to Layers, Transparency, then click Threshold Alpha.
A box will come up with a sliding bar like the one shown below.
Slide the bar all the way over to the right and click OK. You will see the checkerboard come up in the area you selected. After this click any where on screen to erase the dotted line still around the selected area.
Repeat these easy steps and this time go around the entire unit, make sure you get only parts of that unit in. After a few more times it should look something like this.
Remember you are basically just getting out that negative space (not part of the unit) so all you can really see is the unit itself. In the end you should have checkerboard all around the unit so you can distinctly tell the shape of the unit.
Once you have made everything around the unit an alpha, click the “Select Rectangular Regions” button on the Gimp main window. It is very near the “Select Hand Drawn Regions” button. With this tool selected, just lasso the unit like so.
-As you can see I have not done the entire unit, but you should have.
Scale the image down to a good size before the next step, that way it fits onto the card good. To do this go to Image on the toolbar and click Scale Image. Note that you may have to experiment with different sizes to see what you like the best.
Now that it is selected Copy it (Edit, Copy or CTRL+C) and then Paste it onto the card template. The below template is just an example, I do not yet know where to find the vanilla template yet. I will edit as soon as I do though.
As you can see the area behind our unit is visible, note that it will not be visible when you have selected it as an alpha channel. You should only see the unit itself and the background of the card template, nothing else.
Well you are done! Save the image, both the card and the unit's whole image with the alpha layer, first as a tga file so you can come back to his card and edit it later and then as a .jpg for a finalized card. I do not know how to implement these cards into the game though, I can only take you so far at this time.
So, this is how to save:
1) Save the original image, probably already saved somewhere else, but make sure you have it.
2) Save the edited alpha as a .tgas somewhere else as to come back and edit it in the future
3) Save the unit on the card template as a tgas file to make it able to implement into the game.
Credits: Me, Hader, for making this tutorial; I would also like to give a big thanks to Publius who taught me this, he deserves credit too. Thanks for everything man.
This is my work so please respect it, nothing over the top. Thanks for choosing my tutorial.
Open to all comments, go ahead and post. Rep points wouldn't be bad either... but no really, what do you think? I would like some positive feedback so I can improve. Thank you.
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Originally Posted by CrayonVonCaesar
