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Question: modifications to infantry sprites


Captain_Colossus

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I planned to create a batch of 'militant' sprites with several verisions of uniform color and headgear; after painting about 60 frames of animation over pre-existing sprite templates, I noticed that the program drew the new sprites with large gray boxes surrounding them, which appears to be cut from the gray background of the sprite templates.

Is it the case that if one draws details or colors outside of the lines of the infantry sprites, the program adds some of the gray background with them? If that is the case, I'm going to call it quits before I put any more time and effort into this.

Tanks...

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I don't think it's going to work- adding alpha channel seems to leave the solid gray between legs and arms. For example, the 'shadows' underneath each infantry sprite connects each leg and closes off the air gap between, and closes it off from the magic wand.

I don't get it- why do the original sprites work without any transparency to the background?

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I think the problem may have something to do with the way Photoshop converts the files back to .dds format- even the frames of animation which have not been altered are drawn with the gray boxes around them. If so, the solution might be a bit beyond me. I'm not technically very sophisticated with Photoshop or computer software.

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I think the problem may have something to do with the way Photoshop converts the files back to .dds format- even the frames of animation which have not been altered are drawn with the gray boxes around them. If so, the solution might be a bit beyond me. I'm not technically very sophisticated with Photoshop or computer software.

  1. Make a copy of your final image and use it for these next couple of steps
  2. Select all the background area that you want to be transparent using the magic wand tool (Shift-W x 1 or 2 times)
  3. Use the flood tool, paint all the selected area black (I forget the shortcut)
  4. Copy that selected area (Ctrl C)
  5. Go back to the original final image
  6. On the right side menus you should see a tab called Channels, click it and then click on the "Alpha 1" channel so that its highlighted
  7. Back to the image and select everything in the alpha channel (Ctrl A)
  8. Delete (everything should be black)
  9. Now paste your new alpha channel into there (Ctrl V)
  10. You should now see a black image with white silhouettes of your new soldiers
  11. Save to DTX1 or 3 format with no mipmaps (.dds) <--- there's a plugin at the nVidia site

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I just realized that you might not even have an alpha channel from what you described. It depends on how you did your editing.

On step 6, if you don't see an alpha channel in the channels tab, you must create one. On older versions of Photoshop, you right click on the channels area, or if you have one of the newer versions, click a little drop down menu icon. Select New Channel and name it "Alpha 1". Continue onto step 9.

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