Eleazar's simplified Photoshop process for Seamless Tiles

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What do you use to make terrain for Wesnoth

Photoshop
5
26%
GIMP
12
63%
Graphics Converter
0
No votes
MS Paint
1
5%
Photoshop Elements
0
No votes
Other
1
5%
 
Total votes: 19

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Eleazar
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Eleazar's simplified Photoshop process for Seamless Tiles

Post by Eleazar »

I know that everyone doesn't have Photoshop, but I thought it might be helpful to some to see the process I developed. Your mileage with other applications may vary...


1) Download the attached file in Fig. 1. It includes 3 "actions" for photoshop as well as a template (with guides to assist in aligning tiles).

2) Fig. 2 A blank slate.

3) Fig. 3 Lets say I went mad and wanted to add a Polka-dot terrain to the game. I'd begin like this: (Note: I have a layer that I constrain the drawing too so I don't have to worry about going outside the lines.) Warning if using my actions don't delete the "Master Shape" Layer. Otherwise it won't work.

4) Now I take advantage of the wonders of automation. I run the "Fix Edges" action. It duplicates the tile 3 times, rearranges them all so each duplicate takes up 1/3rd of the center and crops away the excess. See Fig. 4.

5) Yikes! My edges didn't line up. But now that the edges are on the
inside of the tile i can fix them up, knowing that the outside edges are seamless with each other. I patch it up as in Fig. 5.

6) Now I repeat steps 4 and 5 until there are no more edge glitches. Eventually i'm happy. Note: Running "Fix Edges" three times in a row will reassemble the tile to its original form.

7) Now the edges are smooth, but I want to see how this terrain looks in a big chunk. I could duplicate it 16 times and arrange each piece, or I could run the "Repeat it!" action and get Fig 6. Note: the tile layer must be selected.

8 ) Now to create the basic transitions, I can chop up the "many tiles" layer and send them off to separate files, confident that they will line up with the main tile. As I'm doing this demo, I find I can't get the third action "Trans chop-up" to work. It's been a while since I last did this.

9) And so after all this hard work you get Fig. 7, a beautiful seamless polka-dot terrain.
Attachments
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Fig-3.png (10.86 KiB) Viewed 8670 times
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Fig-2.png (1.26 KiB) Viewed 8673 times
hex actions & template.zip
Fig. 1
(6.54 KiB) Downloaded 1568 times
Last edited by Eleazar on October 7th, 2005, 4:51 am, edited 1 time in total.
Feel free to PM me if you start a new terrain oriented thread. It's easy for me to miss them among all the other art threads.
-> What i might be working on
Attempting Lucidity
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Eleazar
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Post by Eleazar »

more figures:
Attachments
Fig. 6
Fig. 6
Fig-6.png (11.61 KiB) Viewed 8668 times
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
Fig-5.png (15.22 KiB) Viewed 8662 times
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Fig-4.png (16.18 KiB) Viewed 8669 times
Feel free to PM me if you start a new terrain oriented thread. It's easy for me to miss them among all the other art threads.
-> What i might be working on
Attempting Lucidity
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Eleazar
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Post by Eleazar »

The grand finale:

Hope this is helpful...
Attachments
Fig. 7
Fig. 7
Fig-7-PolkaDot.png (6.66 KiB) Viewed 8646 times
Feel free to PM me if you start a new terrain oriented thread. It's easy for me to miss them among all the other art threads.
-> What i might be working on
Attempting Lucidity
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Jetrel
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Post by Jetrel »

Don't hope - it is. :) Thanks a bunch - I'll try and toss this onto the wiki, sometime soon.
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turin
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Post by turin »

Cool.

How easy would it be to port these tools for use in the Gimp?

BTW: Welcome back.
For I am Turin Turambar - Master of Doom, by doom mastered. On permanent Wesbreak. Will not respond to private messages. Sorry!
And I hate stupid people.
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xtifr
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Post by xtifr »

turin wrote:How easy would it be to port these tools for use in the Gimp?
Pretty easy. It's basically a hexagonal variant of the standard technique used for making tilable rectangles. It's about as straightforward as you can get.
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fmunoz
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Post by fmunoz »

I did this by hand in the 1st forest tiles... takes a bit of time but doable :-)
You can create a fast Gimp-Fu or Gimp-perl script to do it.
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allefant
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Post by allefant »

You can create a fast Gimp-Fu or Gimp-perl script to do it.
Even faster would be to do it in Gimp-python :)
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Post by fmunoz »

Python is for weak noob coders...
on the old times we have to use LISP just to be able to code a () parser...
... writing in the disks with magnets and switchets
... on the snow uphill
... both ways
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allefant
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Post by allefant »

Yes, luckily, those times are gone. Nobody has to code in LISP or perl anymore :)

Attached is a gimp plugin which does something similiar to the photoshop one. To install, simply unzip into your gimp plugins folder. After that, Gimp should get a "Wesnoth" menu with two commands: "hex wrap", and "hex preview", which are to be applied on a 72x72 terrain image.
Attachments
gimp-python-hex.zip
(1.79 KiB) Downloaded 540 times
yobbo
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Post by yobbo »

Did this ever make it into the wiki?

The gimp python script didn't work for me under linux - it wouldn't find the alphamask.png file. So I modified hexwrap.py to construct the mask in python.

I don't have Photoshop so I can't comment on that script, but the gimp one is quite useful.

As before, these just go in your gimp plug-ins directory.
Attachments
gimp-python-hex-tools.zip
modified gimp-python hex-wrap and hex-preview
(1.23 KiB) Downloaded 1424 times
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Jetrel
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Post by Jetrel »

yobbo wrote:Did this ever make it into the wiki?
No - if someone wants to do it for me, put it right next to Freim's tutorial:
http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/Art_Tutorials with a name like: How To Make Seamless Tiles.

you can do this by going here:
http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/How_To_Make_Seamless_Tiles

And I can clean things up later - even just pasting the majority of the text into there with save me /mad/ time.
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Eleazar
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Post by Eleazar »

I patially put in on the wiki. I don't have the knack of all this wiki stuff yet.

1) I try to upload the graphics files:
2) it askes me to log in.
3) I log in.
4) goto step 1

I suppose it really means i don't have rights to upload images, or it could be because i'm behind a serious proxy.
Feel free to PM me if you start a new terrain oriented thread. It's easy for me to miss them among all the other art threads.
-> What i might be working on
Attempting Lucidity
yobbo
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Post by yobbo »

I had the same problem, so I just linked the images from the forum :). This wiki page should be mainly complete now.
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Jetrel
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Post by Jetrel »

Eleazar wrote:I patially put in on the wiki. I don't have the knack of all this wiki stuff yet.

1) I try to upload the graphics files:
2) it askes me to log in.
3) I log in.
4) goto step 1

I suppose it really means i don't have rights to upload images, or it could be because i'm behind a serious proxy.
no....actually it turns out that we're not allowed to upload images onto the wiki. I asked The Manâ„¢ (ettin), himself, and that is what he said. We can post 'em on the forum, and link them from there, but not onto the wiki. What you are getting is a bug where it pretends you can, but you really still can't.

Given that he gives us free bandwidth, I'm cool with that policy.
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