Re-Entering the OpenBor Community!

DCurrent said:
Just ran into this thread and thought I'd give it a bump. Are you still with us @gameinvite? It's sad to see someone show up after so long just to disappear again.

DC
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Good morning DC,

I appreciate your support! I have been working on my mod from time to time(mainly character sprites). It's very tedious work to make the background perfectly transparent for each sprite. I'm manually going into each individual image, zooming in & attempting to not miss any parts of the background. It's very hard because the images are much bigger and higher quality than my previous mod. Maybe I'm doing this the wrong way? One of my first post in this thread shows the GIF of a character as an example. Thanks.
 
@gameinvite
If you are emulating the game and ripping the sprites this will take a very long time i suggest to see if they have already been ripped for mugen or spriters resource if not i strongly suggest rom hacking the game to make one of the backgrounds blank this will save you weeks of your life.
 
@gameinvite,

@msmalik681 ninja'd me... and he's right. Cleaning sprites by hand is just this side of clinically insane. :p

If ROM hacking or searching for rips comes up empty, you can still speed up the process with a powerful editor like Gimp or Photoshop. I used a technique where I would always be in a given stage. Then, I'd crop an area around the sprite and use the color fill tool to replace unwanted background colors with my transparency color. I recorded all the color fill runs as an action. Just for convenience, I also recorded selecting the non-transparent areas only of the newly cleaned image, copying to clipboard and then closing.

Once all that was done, I could repeat the process, only this time I'd just play the recorded action back on the cropped area and I had an instant copy to paste as a layer and align into my master sprite file. Cumbersome to set up, but easily saved me weeks of time.


DC
 
@msmalik681 @DCurrent
I have all of the sprite sheets but when I use the color fill tool for the background via Gimp, it misses certain areas that are blocked off especially around the characters hair. Maybe photoshop will do a better job with getting unwanted background colors? Here's a great example of the color fill tool missing an area by the characters head which was left as the original background color green:

broly.png
I thought I was doing a great job at correcting the images until I tested the characters out in my mod. Running OpenBOR at a higher resolution helped me notice any missed areas as I play as the character.
 
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In my openbor beginner tutorial i explaint how to use the colour picker so you dont miss isolated areas like that.

 
@gameinvite

I don't know the specifics of Gimp because I don't use it. I may not have explained myself well in my previous post. The action I recorded was multiple uses of color fill, each one removing an individual unwanted color. This is obviously tedious, but Photoshop allows you to record everything you do and then play it back as an action. So once you do all the fills one time, you can just play them back on subsequent sprites and it's done instantly.

You can in theory target multiple colors at once to fill in with the selection tool, but in practice that won't always work. In fact it rarely does. As the name implies, Photoshop is mainly designed for lossy compression photos. When you try to add another color to an existing selection, Adobe decides it knows more than you and selects extra colors/areas you don't want, no matter what settings are in place. That's why it is best to fill one at a time and record as an action.

FTR it's possible I am missing something somewhere. If there is, I can't find it and I'm by no means a Photoshop newbie.

DC
 
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