Need help learning to recolor units

[Aethelend]

Please forgive me if this is the wrong place to post this.

I recently got back into Civ 3 for the nostalgia, and decided I'd try a more serious attempt at learning how to mod this time.
I'm trying to make my own fantasy mod based on Dungeons & Dragons, my other great love besides civ.
To complete my mod, though, I need to learn how to do two things:

1. Recolor existing units. I tried following Gary Childress' tutorial, but I couldn't figure out how to recolor just parts of a unit, not the whole unit. For example, I want to take some existing elf units, such as aaglo's Warhammer elves, and turn their skin a coal black color to make them D&D drow.

2. Convert unit graphics from other games. Specifically in this case, Age of Wonders 2. That game has a race of cat people called the Tigrans, and I want to use them as tabaxi, a race of cat people in Dungeons & Dragons.

If anyone can point me in the right direction to learn to do these two things, I would be very grateful, and would of course share everything I create with this community.

-Aethelend

 

[Blue Monkey]

1. to recolor parts of a unit - such as the skin tones - the most direct way is probably to edit the palette. I'd recommend tracking down what Vuldacon has written on the topic of unit palettes.

2. converting units from other games can mean doing anything from re-rigging, animating and rendering a 3D model at one end of the spectrum, to converting an existing gif or flc to match Civ3's files. The conversions involve quite different skills depending on what sort of files they are. Do you know what file formats Age of Wonders 2 uses?

 

[Civinator]

As far as I remember, AOW2 unit images were extracted with the ILB-Converter. Unfortunately this program seems no longer be working with 64 bit systems.

 

[nick0515]

Welcome back, Aethelend

If the game uses sprites rather than 3D graphics, tom2050 did a tutorial to convert them from a different game including automating some of it. I did it a couple of times but the resulting units were not good enough to release. One could be I think but it's not centred and I never got round to fixing it. I forget what game it was. If that thread could be located it might help.

 

[Civinator]

Aethelend, I found an ILB-editor that is working with 64 bit systems and I made two BMP unit folders of the Tigrans with that editor.



Edit: As it could be done really fast, here are the other Tigrans in that post, too.

 

[Aethelend]

Thank you so much, that's awesome! Do you have a link to that editor?

 

[Civinator]

Thank you so much, that's awesome! Do you have a link to that editor?

Aethelend, the complete editor is in the first zip-file of my last post.

 

[Aethelend]

Duh. Thanks! I'll give that a try.