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[Custom Art] Reverse engineering art

otimpyre

Sorceror
T
Reverse engineering art tutorial By:Otim Pyre 3/09/2011

Forward: in this tutorial I will be showing you how to create new art from inside the game itself. I am talking about actually designing images inside Ultima before, you ever even create them.

There are many applications for this tutorial. But, for this project I have chosen a popular script "Daat99 Custom OWLTR" The object is "Raalis TokenVendor Stone" Have you ever noticed all the stones in RunUO ? Gambling stone, ingotstone, tons of these things are scripted by everyone. And they all use a gravestone as the base image. Why? Because, they are destined to die. And I am going to show you how to lay them to rest! No offense to the scripters. I've used stones for years. They serve their purpose. But, lets enhance our stone shall we. Now we could script tons of new vendors to sell or distribute our items. But, that little clicky stone is handy. And those gumps are so pretty. So lets make a custom Vendor Stone.

You start by going to green acres and [tile static 2760 set hue 1
The size of the area needs to be big enough to encompass what you will be building.
This will be the background for our canvas.
Now imagine what you want your token vendor to look like. Dress yourself up, fix your hair and hue your clothes, skin what ever customization you want. Here is what the project looks like after you get everything I said done. Below you have me dressed up as my new fancy vendor stone. And mock up version of a Raalis token vendor stone.
Begin.png

Now for the next part you will need a screen shot utility. I've never used Ultimas but, Im sure it would work too.
Take a sceenshot of the project. Save the file and open it with your graphics software. You then want to crop your image down to just the vendor. Giving your self a canvas that looks like this.
Crop.png
Once you have it to this point you can zoom in and tweak the pixels of Ultima art. If you look hard at his left toe you will see a blue pixel. This is ultimas doing not mine. I left it to show you how somethings are never perfect. If you want to tweak your images refer to my Reguarding missing pixels tutorial.
Now my canvas isn't truly black it may appear that it is but, it's not.We have to fix that before we finalize this image. We do that with the magic wand tool. And playing with the tolerance levels until it selects all the color around our new image. Now the reason I told you to hue your carpet 1 is so you can easily extract your image from the canvas. With the magic wand select the black area it should draw white marching ants as they are called all the way around the canvas and your new vendor. Go to select> and hit Invert Select> You will need to prepare a new canvas for your image. You can use my template below. On the template create a new layer.

Template.png Now if you have inverted selection on your vendor you can copy him and paste him as new selection, or just paste and move him around on the blue tile till hes centered. Like so.
Centered.png
Now hes on the new layer so click the layer behind him on your layers palette and fill the back area with either absolute white, or absolute black.
CenteredBG.png Now hes ready to be installed if you want multiple directions you can create a mirror image Mirror.png
Or repeat the process for up, down, NE, NW, SE, SW, Ect..

Now in your tokenvendorstone.cs script you would look for the itemid# in the [Contructable] section of the script And change it to your custom graphics itemid #
Here are some examples of images I've used to replace stones. Getting ideas? Quest stone perhaps?
NeverKnight2.png SkeletonStone.png

This technique can be used to import images from other isometric games that look similar to UO such as diablo, planescape torment, ect...
Female_Static_6.png
Enjoy! I hope eventually the tombstone image will go back to the graveyards.
 
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