Programs for making Civ III graphics

Balthasar said:
There is a plug-in for GIMP called Gflic that allows you to edit flc files in a GIMP program, but I've been completely unable to find it online. If anyone here has it, contact me immediately.
Click to expand...

I would be very interested in that too if anyone finds it. I use GIMP a lot for static graphics. Would be great if I could edit flics with GIMP too.
 
Balthasar said:
There is a plug-in for GIMP called Gflic that allows you to edit flc files in a GIMP program, but I've been completely unable to find it online. If anyone here has it, contact me immediately.
Click to expand...
I have a "gfli.exe" as part of the GIMP Animation Package (GAP), perhaps that is what you're looking for.
 
Unfortunately, I checked far and low, close and high, and everywhere inbetween for a free Poser of any version.. and have found none. Seems that Poser is made free on occasion by smithmicro as a promotion type deal, since much of their income is also made from selling models and props, etc. I don't really feel like waiting for what could seem like an eternity for a free version to be released, so I'll likely buy a version sometime soon (I think 5 goes for $80 or lower) and start making the units I need for CoMM3. Then after that, perhaps if all goes well, I can make other human/fantasy/animal units as well.

I thought someone posted a big ole list of sites that provided free props somewhere just recently, but now can't find it... Searching google is easy enough, but gets somewhat annoying rather quickly :)

Tom
 
Plotinus said:
There is also POV-Ray, which aaglo and Orthanc use, which is free but has a steep learning curve.
Click to expand...

I've used POV-Ray before. It's nice because it's free. :D

However it can indeed have a steep learning curve. If you have any experience with programming in C/C++, PHP, Java/Javascript you will find it A LOT easier to grasp because you basically describe the scene programatically through code rather than a GUI. It sounds hopelessly complicated, but sometimes the programatic approach can make things a lot easier, because you can create custom objects by using for{} loops to make the calculations on vertices rather than doing them by hand. ;)

@Weasel Op: Thanks for that tip, I didn't even know that existed for GIMP! I use GIMP almost exclusively, but it can be a pain when working with palettes because all you can do is drag colours around, you can't edit the colours manually (AFAIK). >:/
 
I'm not sure what you mean about the palettes, editing colors manually is about the only thing I've been able to do with it. For static graphics, all I do is convert a RGB image to indexed with 254 colors, then add 2 more for the transparent colors. If the transparent colors are preset in the image, I then do some manual swapping to fill in those colors with what is now the last 2 colors in the palette. It's a hack, but it works.
 
Thank you Weasel Op! The GAP installed on my windows without problem, and now I'm planning new and amazing flc presentations. The only problem is that each individual frame has to be done individually, unless I can figure out a way to make this thing do batch processing...

Those links should be in the Wiki. Definitely.

By the way, Weasel Op, you do know that if you save the image before you index it, you can paste it back on after you've indexed and (the way I do it) changing the last two colors of the palette on the colormap and adding in the magneta last (hopefully you had no magneta in the image you indexed). Then you paste the copy you originally made back on, and the colors all return to normal. But, as I said, you know all that already...


Re Da3dalus: You need to learn to use the colormap, and other color-processors available in Gimp. With Gimp, it helps to work with a copy (in RGB) rather than the original, so that you can erase the background entirely, which makes it easier to manipulate the image in layers on transparencies....
 
@Weasel Op and Balthasar: I'm not sure, but I think you guys might have misunderstood what I mean. I always convert to RGB before I edit the image, but after you convert it to indexed the only editing to the colours you can do is to re-arrange the colours. GIMP doesn't know that the magenta and the green are supposed to be at 255 and 254 respectively, and places them randomly somewhere in the palette. So you have to rearrange the colourmap and manually put them in that position.

AFAIK it's not possible to change a colour after it's been indexed. By this I mean that if I had a palette of 256 colours, and colour #45 was 0xff0000 (red), but I wanted to change it to 0x0000ff (blue), the only way to do this is by converting the image to RGB, change my selected colour to 0x0000ff, place a pixel of that colour on the canvas, convert the image back to indexed and then rearrange the palette, moving my blue colour to position #45.

That's a pretty convoluted way of adding a colour. I want to be able to manually add 0x0000ff while still in indexed mode, and then drag it to position #45.

Something else I noticed with GIMP is that even if you specify you want an indexed palette of 256 colours, it will only create a palette with at most the number of colours on the canvas. So if you have only used 25 colours to create your sprite, the palette GIMP will create is going to be 25 colours. The workaround I've been using thus far is to paint a gradient on the canvas somewhere before converting to indexed so that GIMP will fill in the other 231 colour slots with dummy colours. I also have to place a 0x00ff00 pixel and a 0xff00ff pixel somewhere on the canvas so that GIMP will create those colours in the palette, and then rearrange the palette after it's indexed to make sure that the transparent colours are added properly.

In short, all of this is a huge pain in the...well you know. ^_^

Please tell me, guys, that the way I'm doing it is not the easiest way to do this in GIMP!!!
 
POV-Ray (which I just started getting into), has the Moray 3d modeller available for no charge (it's actually a shareware version, but provides user registration and code so it's free), since it brought the rights to Moray.

Dunno how good it is, but it doesn't look quite so complicated as Blender, which was a PITA to me.
 
Bryce is a great software program for making animated units, but only very limited for making models.
 
da3dalus said:
@Weasel Op and Balthasar: I'm not sure, but I think you guys might have misunderstood what I mean. I always convert to RGB before I edit the image, but after you convert it to indexed the only editing to the colours you can do is to re-arrange the colours. GIMP doesn't know that the magenta and the green are supposed to be at 255 and 254 respectively, and places them randomly somewhere in the palette. So you have to rearrange the colourmap and manually put them in that position.

AFAIK it's not possible to change a colour after it's been indexed. By this I mean that if I had a palette of 256 colours, and colour #45 was 0xff0000 (red), but I wanted to change it to 0x0000ff (blue), the only way to do this is by converting the image to RGB, change my selected colour to 0x0000ff, place a pixel of that colour on the canvas, convert the image back to indexed and then rearrange the palette, moving my blue colour to position #45.

That's a pretty convoluted way of adding a colour. I want to be able to manually add 0x0000ff while still in indexed mode, and then drag it to position #45.

Something else I noticed with GIMP is that even if you specify you want an indexed palette of 256 colours, it will only create a palette with at most the number of colours on the canvas. So if you have only used 25 colours to create your sprite, the palette GIMP will create is going to be 25 colours. The workaround I've been using thus far is to paint a gradient on the canvas somewhere before converting to indexed so that GIMP will fill in the other 231 colour slots with dummy colours. I also have to place a 0x00ff00 pixel and a 0xff00ff pixel somewhere on the canvas so that GIMP will create those colours in the palette, and then rearrange the palette after it's indexed to make sure that the transparent colours are added properly.

In short, all of this is a huge pain in the...well you know. ^_^

Please tell me, guys, that the way I'm doing it is not the easiest way to do this in GIMP!!!
Click to expand...

Well, yeah, you're doing it the hard way. At the risk of repeating myself, the steps to take when using GIMP (as I do it; I'm always looking for something even easier) are:

1. Original image - select all - copy - create new image from clipboard (default mode is RGB)
2. Using the Select by color tool, Remove all magneta and neon green (the transparent colors) from the image. Sometimes you have to do this a few times as there are sometimes some near-magneta stragglers. You should have now an image with a transparent background. If your background isn't transparent, you have to go back and repeat step one, making sure to Edit -select all before copying...
3. Now you can do anything you want with your image, even add layers (being sure to use transparent background) Remember that you can use the (control-Z) key to go back to the previous step, or even several steps back at any point, so if you get almost finished and decide you want to add something, you can step back to this point to change it. You can also save a work copy of this as an .xcf (Gimp) image at this point in case major changes are necessary later... Image - merge visible layers at the end of the process, before going to the next step.
4. Select all - copy (afterwards, I have to click the cursor off-screen to make the highlight go off)
5. Image - mode - indexed Civ requires 256 colors, mine gives me 255
6. Dockable Dialogs - colormap at this point I click on the last color on the colormap then click the "+" (add) sign to make it 256 colors. If the colormap has too few colors on it, then I click the "+" button as many times as it takes to get to 256 colors. Then I right-click on the second to last color and select edit and I get a dialogue box:
Colormap dialogue.jpg
notice that the magneta (00ff00) and neon green (ff00ff) colors were saved in this dialogue along with my other most recently used colors. This helps, because I can just click on the green one before moving on and editing the last color on the colormap the same way.
7. Before I close the colormap, I click again on the last color (now magneta) to establish it as the foreground color; now I use my Select by color tool again to highlight the transparent areas in the picture and Edit - fill with foreground color (I use the hotkey: Ctrl -"," these days)
8. Now remember the copy of the image we made in step 4? That's still on the clipboard, so we can go Edit - paste to ensure that all colors are as we want them (this will convert any neon green straggler back to its proper color)
9. Now save as Image name.pcx and you're done.

If you follow those steps, there's no reason you should have to move colors around on the colormap ever, that I can think of.... Sorry if I've repeated alot that you already know, I'm just trying to help you get away from what you describe as a hellish way of doing the same thing....

For the noobs who may have tripped over this: there is a much clearer tutorial for this that Varwnos wrote >here<
 
lord drake said:
Huayna> Oh.. i knew that, really. :p

nick> opps. O.o

thanks. :)

trying too, looking for programs that i can use that are free and won't take me a year to learn. >.<

when i look that stuff up i get dragged to civ IV, find stuff not related or get pulled back to this post. :/
Click to expand...

Um...how am I related to this?
 
Hmmm, I took another look at GIMP this weekend, and it doesn't seem to be set up that way for me. What version of GIMP are you running? I have 2.6 (not sure which minor release of 2.6 it is...) and my colourmap dialogue box is very different. Basically I only have the option to rearrange the colourmap and not to add or edit colours. I'll be very disappointed if you are using an older version they removed that functionality in subsequent releases...
 
Hmmm, I took another look at GIMP this weekend, and it doesn't seem to be set up that way for me. What version of GIMP are you running? I have 2.6 (not sure which minor release of 2.6 it is...) and my colourmap dialogue box is very different. Basically I only have the option to rearrange the colourmap and not to add or edit colours. I'll be very disappointed if you are using an older version they removed that functionality in subsequent releases...
Click to expand...

I'm using GIMP 2.6 and my colour map looks just like Balthasar's and I can both edit colours and add new ones. I'm still learning to use GIMP myself but just double click on a colour in the colourmap and it will bring up a new box to change the colour as you please. The plus sign at the bottom of the colour map should add a new colour unless you have reached the indexed limit in which case it will be greyed out. Hope that helped and made sense.

EDIT: Are you doing this?
Image --> Mode --> Indexed
Windows --> Docable Dialogues --> Colormap
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

K
[C3C] Creating Unit Animations in Civ 3 Conquests
Replies
7
Views
921
ruby_sauce
ruby_sauce
Brenshar
Using Internet images for graphics creations
Replies
14
Views
870
need my speed
need my speed
F
Using Stable Diffusion to make graphics for Civ 3
Replies
8
Views
1K
Kyriakos
Kyriakos
Mithadan
Is there an Open Source Civ III Clone?
Replies
12
Views
3K
Mithadan
Mithadan
Gary Childress
Graphics compatible with original Civ 2
Replies
3
Views
889
Blake00
Blake00
Top Bottom