Ok, here's my GIMP plug-in, which should help a lot on these matters.
python-fu-finish-csp.py
The way it works is like this: say you're at the stage of editing where you have your character with a transparent background, with no palette (RGBA), like this:
Notice that there's no shadow, only the characters. (You can ignore the black layers called "original", those aren't shadows, they're just part of my method for creating edges on a subject that are crisp yet aliased.)
So you click on the CSPs menu, as seen above, and then on Add Shadow and Save (you can also press ALT + P, and then A). You'll get a prompt so you can choose where to save it, and to set the file name. Or you can leave the fields blank if you don't want it to save. And there are toggles for whether you want it to do a "Reference" image (meaning regular transparent background, with a regular partially transparent black shadow), a TPL version of the image (using magenta & lime green replacement colors), or both.
When you click OK, if you have it set to do everything, it will do the following:
- Remove all unused/hidden layers (this is important if you're doing this manually too, btw)
- Create a partially transparent shadow background, offset 10px down and 10px to the left
- Save it as the "Reference" version (with "Ref-" prefixed to the filename.)
- Remove that shadow layer after it's done saving
- Create a palette for the image, with 254 colors
- Add magenta and lime green to the palette , so it now = 256 colors
- Create a new shadow layer that's lime green and offset like the first
- Create a magenta background
- Save the composite of these layers for your TPL version of the image
- Group all of the actions above into one undo state
If you have all of your different costumes saved as layers, like in my screenshot, then you can just hit CTRL + Z to undo all of what just happened, then make the next costume visible instead, and repeat. Super handy. All-in-all, this is even faster than if all you tried to do was use the Export function in gimp JUST to save it as a PNG!
Hahah yeah, sometimes I'm surprised by the things Wine can do without using actual emulation. What do you mean by running it with/without commands? I've only tried wimgt.exe by giving a PNG to the DAT wizard and by double-clicking on wimgt.exe itself.
It's normally run from command line with arguments. For example "wimgt.exe version" would give you the version of the program. Though even running it without arguments should work (it would just show you some info and not crash). When you were trying to run wimgt by itself were you running it from Terminal or Wine?
That's really interesting, I bet it's because I put in the magenta and lime before changing to indexed mode, and the algorithm to create an optimum palette probably chose colors that were just a little different. I did start with ff00ff and 00ff00. How can you tell that I didn't add magenta and lime to the palette (just curious)?
Yeah, that makes sense. I looked at the indexes of the colors in the colormap dialog; they were in arbitrary places rather than at the end.
Side note: DAT Texture Wizard searches for these colors in the palette backwards. So having these colors at the end of the table is the most efficient! ^_^ Haha, it's not like we'd ever notice such a performance difference though, of course. Just sayin'. lol
I think I did this one a little better, it should have the right colors and I put it in indexed mode with 254 colors then added magenta and lime to the palette. GIMP was being really annoying about adding the current FG color to the colormap though, is there any trick to it?
Yep. Looks good! The cut-off with the shadow isn't noticeable in this case because the name entry covers it up. In the future you can avoid it though by not clipping/cropping the edges of the layers (so only the canvas size is adjusted, if that makes sense). As for adding the FG color to the colormap, I think I remember sometimes I had to click the button twice, but that was about it. Using my plug-in makes it so you don't have to deal with that though.
Ive had problems with, idk if its the tpl to png converter or not but... Sometimes the shadows dont appear.
For example on falco, I get the original and green fine but there are no shadows oon red and blue. Same with the colored docs.
Pretty sure it's the images. The shadows on those are a little odd.
