This is Jack Verville. I want to put a version of his shorts into No Mercy.
This is the Crash 1 attire that I want to replace with Jack Verville’s shorts. When making any texture edits, I think it’s a good idea to take a look at how the original fits on the model.
The Crash 1 tights have four different parts to them. Two sides of the waist and two legs. Now, I want to say that I’m a novice when it comes to how the textures fit together. I can tell that the waists are either side because of how they come together in the front and butt, as well as the red semi-circle on the side.
You can see the left graphic has the SH in CRASH and the right side has a mirrored CR. If you have a graphic with two sides, one side will be automatically mirrored by the game. You’ll probably have to mess around with this later to get your texture right, but keep it in the back of your mind for now.
I’m going to use GIMP to create my textures. As a lifelong Photoshop user, I really dislike GIMP, but it’s the tool that works the best for this process.
So I’ve got a picture of Jack. What a handsome fella. The first thing I’m going to do is grab the front of his shorts. Now, I don’t have a picture of the back of his shorts, so I can’t do this perfectly, but that’s alright, I’m not going for perfect, yet.
I’m going to crop the area I want to work with both on the front of the trunks and on the leg, as well. I only have one side picture of Jack, and the legs are both different, so I’m just going to use the same leg texture for both.
I’ve got the entire waist, but I want them to be two halves, so I’m going to select one half and cut it. Paste into a new document. Then I have to go back and crop the original graphic.
Next, I’m going to open the textures that I’m replacing. If I had more reference pictures, I could be more precise, but that’s not happening today. These textures are either 32 x 64 pixels or 64 x 32 pixels. What I’ve isolated from my pictures of Jack, they’re way too big. I need to shrink them down.
Right click -> tools -> transform tools -> scale (or just shift+s) and then scale them to the template you have.
If you look at the original textures, there are transparent areas that we need to copy and set up for.
VPW Studio doesn’t handle PNG files with transparency. This is a hurdle that has taken me a long time to get over. But now, I know what I’m doing! So I’m going to pass the information on to you. Note, I would not have figured this out if it wasn’t for the gmspectre tutorial on textures and palettes. There’s a link in the video description.
These are shorts, so need transparency. I’m going to highlight the area that should be transparent and fill it in with solid red. I’m not using red in the graphic at all, so it will work fine. If I was using red, I’d find another unique color.
I scaled the leg to 32 pixels wide, which makes it 20 some pixels tall. Putting it in place, there’s a pixel row from the Crash 1 shorts showing. I want this to be a hem, so I need to draw over it with the color I want. There are a lot of extra clicks I need to do in order to do what I want. This is why I get frustrated with GIMP. Just let me draw on the layer!
We need to change the color mode to Indexed. I’m going to choose the picture with colors that I want in all of my different shorts pieces. The required number of colors is 16. I’m going to let the program choose the optimized colors. You can now find your colors in the palette. I want to rearrange them and can do that in the Colormap tab. Right click and choose Rearrange Colormap.
I try to clump them in logical groupings. First, I’m putting that red all the way at the end. Specifically, I want this texture to take advantage of the color sliders in the Smackdown Mall. I’m going to clump the blacks and grays together, as well as the browns. This might not work out the best in the end, but this is to show how it’s done.
Wait, all my colors changed around! It took me a minute, but because I had something selected, rearranging the color map rearranged the colors in the picture. I fixed it by deselecting any pixels and rearranging the map again. This worked as I intended. I’m going to save this palette now, because I’m going to need it in a little bit.
Now, when I go to index the other graphics, I can choose to use a custom palette and apply what I already made. This makes my life easier. Now, I’m going to save my files so I can edit them if need be. Then I’m going to Export them as PNG files. I’m going to uncheck all the boxes for safety sake. And as I export the others, I won’t have to again.
I’m going to take a look at the palette file that was generated. Hmmmm… the color codes are in hex. This isn’t going to work for VPW Studio, so I’m going to have to convert them to RGB code. I found a batch converter at zonums.com, link in the description, copied the codes and hit convert.
I’m going to take the RGB output and paste them into the text file I got from GIMP. The numbers are separated by tabs, but I need spaces, so I highlighted a tab, went to the replace option, and replaced them with spaces. One last important step is to add a space and 255 to the end of each line. If you don’t have this, you’ll get an error if you try to use them in VPW Studio.
My next step is to get a palette file from VPW Studio that I can edit. Any Ci4Palette should work, but I’ll pick one of the Crash 1 palettes.
Taking a look at the original palette, the top row are the colors you see, and the bottom row designates the colors that are affected by the sliders and which ones aren’t. Next, we have to Export it as a .vpwspal file. When I open that up, the first three lines give the program important information. Then it’s color data.
Take the 16 lines you copied from the RGB converter and paste them over the top 16 color lines. If you want, you can save and import this into VPW Studio and see how the colors look. Then go back to the palette and work on the bottom 16 colors. Remember that I grouped the colors based on what I wanted the sliders to affect. Any color that is a shade of pure green or pure blue will change with the sliders.
Knowing the first number is red, second is green, and third is blue, this becomes easy. I just make the colors I want gone zeroes and that’s that. Now it gets another save and I make sure to import this palette in.
Now is the tricky part. I don’t want the red to show. So I need to open the palette in VPW Studio, go to my red color, click transparent, and change the numbers all to 0. Export the palette. On the main file table, right click the palette you want to replace and find the file you just exported.
Replace all the palettes and textures with what you want them to be and build the ROM. Let’s see how it looks. If you go in and parts of your guy is invisible, you didn’t turn your numbers to zero when you clicked transparent. It took me a long time to figure this out. Like a dozen hours. But thanks to Freem and Ragdas, I got it going.
Let’s take a look at Jack Verville! He now has shorts! They aren’t perfect, in fact I’m going to have to play around with the textures, but at least now I know how to make them work properly! And hopefully you do too.
Thanks for giving this a look and hopefully I’ll have other helpful VPW Studio tutorials (the easy stuff, at least) in the future. And one of these days I’ll have the American Lucha Libre mod completed… because it is my Destiny…