How to create images to use for bams

[Sir-Kill]

There are many ways to do this but this how I do them.

 

You need a good image manipulator program paintshop, photoshop, or (free) the gimp.

I use paintshop pro8 I have used the others but this is written from memory of the program I am most familiar.

 

Personally I am no artist so I ether use an image from the net or create an image in 3dsmax.

 

However once you have an image you want to use, you have to remove all the background.

1. promote your background image to raster

          This will allow you to work with a transparent background

2. Use one of the selection tools to single out just he parts you want.

          You can invert selection (ctrl+shift+I in psp8)

 

          This part will add the drop-shadow look to the larger moving frame0

 

3. Copy the image and paste as a new layer (in psp Ctrl+C , Ctrl+L)

4. Adjust the brightness and contrast to get a near black RBG<15 >5each makes a nice shadow.

5. Lower that new layer below your image layer by dragging one over or under the other.

          There should be layers toolbar somewhere either floating or docked if not go to customize or options or look for help file or online.

6. (Optional) click the eyeball next to your layer to make your color image disappear so you can more easily move your shadow layer around.

          You only want to move the shadow a 2-5 pixels away, to the right and a few down.

          Then un-click eyeball to see your color image

7. Create a new raster layer

8. Drag this layer down to the bottom of the stack. Make sure this layer is selected for the next step.

9. Color dump/fill with solid black rbg000

          Now if the image is bigger than 64x64 max you will need to resize it.

          Psp has resampling smart size the has the least degradation.

          The image will loose vibrancy and detail so you might want to play around with brightness and contrast for detail and hue and saturation

          vibrancy, before resizing.

10. Once that is good flatten your image and save xxxx_L.bmp (So you know which is which)

 

          Now for the small frame1

 

11. Undo the 2 steps that flattened and resized

12. Hide or delete the drop-shadow layer

          Do the hue and contrast thing if needed

13. Re-resize your image to a max of 32x32

          Keep in mind what you are making armor and weapons could get the max size but bottles and others will look out of place if too big

14. Flatten image

15. Save as xxxx_S

16. import images into bamworkshop2