Help with GIMP

[Prophet]

I recently downloaded GIMP ver2.6 and am trying to tile my pictures into a single image.


My pics are jpegs, rendered in blender.
the jpegs are all 64x64.

Any help would be appreciated, this is my last hurdle (hopefully) keeping me from producing graphics!

[Bobby]

first open a new image, 64 by 2560.

select image, configure grid, set it to 64 x 64

select view, and snap to grid, you may also want to make it visible, under the same menu.

now locate all your individual frames and drag them, one by one, onto the new image, and move each to where it belongs, allowing it to snap to the grid, be sure to use the move tool.

[Prophet]

thx Bobby, that worked great!

When I made the bitmask I used the Fuzzy Select (based on color) but it turned out fuzzy (duh). When i am over a planet/station there are black dots all around the ship. The ship itself is quite dark (purples and grays) would that be an issue? Should I just go in to the mask with a fat paintbrush and manually colour it all black?

[Dalva]

well, i dont know about GIMP, but if it have contrast adjuster and magic wand tool (like photoshop) to select a single color, use it. this is the step to make the alpha:

- open the ship image
- set it to max contrast without fading the black background
- use magic wand tool to select that black background. if the contrast is right you will select all background area.
- make another image with the same resolution with the ship image.
- paste the black background there
- save it as the ship mask


i can explain it in depth if you have photoshop though

[Bobby]

i always render my facings in .bmp, or sometimes .png, anything but .jpg, it gets fuzzy that way.

1 save the assembled image in gimp's native format before doing anything.
2 save the image as a .jpg for your ship image and reopen the original from 1
3 adjust brightness and contrast(color menu) until the ship is white, and the background is black, save as a monochrome bitmap for your mask, it should end up with a white ship on black, this may need multiple tries to get right.
4 be sure to never use anti-aliasing anywhere in the process or you will have fuzzy borders.

EDIT: the dark ship could be an issue with the contrast/color process, but assuming the background doesn't have fuzzy edges you could copy the background and paste it into a new image as Dalva said. you could do that instead of 3 too.

it may help to make the ship glow slightly in blender so it's not black at any point

[Atarlost]

When I had a dark ship problem I added scads of really bright lamps and did another set of renders. I didn't think of glow effects.

[digdug]

for the mask I do this:

replace textures with a black one.
Change background color to white.
Render frames
Make the frame images negative
Voila', perfect masks.

This has been suggested to me some time ago by Oddbob, I've always been doing my ships in this way.

[OddBob]

replace textures with a black one.
Change background color to white.
Render frames
Make the frame images negative
Voila', perfect masks.

For an more easily reversible method, I generally leave the textures and remove all the lights instead, depending on how many textures/lights there are (but lights are usually on their own layer to make it easy)

However, there is an even easier way, for single frames anyway (this is blender btw) once the render is done, press A. It will automatically make a perfect mask and all you have to do is save it. XD

[Dennis]

How do i make the 20 faces for the ship?
I'm using gimp please help me

[Aeonic]

I don't really understand your question. You mean you already have 20 individually rendered pictures and you want to form them together? If that's the case, find a program called Photoscape. If that's not what you're asking, you'll need to explain your question better.

[Dennis]

No i meant i have one picture i need to rotate to make the ship have 20 faces

[Aeonic]

Generally that's done in a 3D modeling program since Transcendence models aren't top-down, they're viewed at an angle, so you'd have to render the model at each stage of rotation to get the appropriate frame. You can't just take one picture and rotate it.

[digdug]

the best free image rotator (to my knowledge, at least) is EZ Image Rotator, that surfaced long time ago thanks to Bobby, and has been used by a number of modders since then (including me).

A quick link:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/720869/EZ.zip

[Aury]

wow, i sure was late to the party... heres what i do;
render 40 facings
use photoscape (thanks to aeonic for findinh this) to link them together (if the ship is at least 48x48, then i use all 40, otherwise 20 will suffice)
then save as a bmp still
then make the mask with gimp, pdn, pshop or whatever, then save the final mask as a bmp and the ship as a jpg at 100%

[PKodon]

Okay guys, I need some help, again...

I've made a new ship, some of you have it. The Falcon Concept Vehicle.

I've renamed it to the Triplex Industries FCV, it's found at

http://xelerus.de/index.php?s=mod&id=596

The problem I'm having is this: I finally created some new nozzle images to use with it that look more appropriate for this ship, however, no matter what I do, the when you fly over light-colored objects, the drive nozzle image has a lot of color artifacts in it.

I've tried everything I can do to fix it, can anyone with a better program than the Gimp figure out what the problem is?

The base image is a 24-bit BMP, and the mask is a 256-color grayscale bmp.

Note: I tried using a 2-color black and white mask, but then the nozzle image looks like it's painted on a piece of paper when you go over planets and stations.

I don't know what the difference is between my images and George's, but there must be some trick I'm missing.

Thanks ahead of time,

PK