Modding Sprites: Getting the background to disappear

[EternalSpearman]

In Adobe Photoshop Elements, how do I get the background around the sprite to disappear? For instance, I cut and paste an image from the game into Photoshop, and modify it. However, a backgrond is still left over around the sprite, which makes the sprite look strange in battle, recruitment, etc screens. How do I get background to disappear? I've tried making the surroundings of the sprite transparent, but targa format doesn't support transparency.

[Gateway103]

The background needs to be, IIRC, Pure Black, which will be treated as Transparent by the game. So you can say magnetic select the sprite, do reverse selection, and fill in the background with Pure Black.

-Gateway103

[Wauthan]

Or, if you have selected pure black as the default background color, you can just cut away the portions of the sprite you don't want. This means that you can do a "Select Color Range" and cut away all pixels with the same color. This helps a ton when editing sprites from games, and speeds things up quite a lot. Just remember that this method might accidently remove pixels you want.

[EternalSpearman]

Thanks for the information. I had tried Pure White, but that didn't work either. After that, I didn't think of using Pure Black.

[Gandalf Parker]

You might also find it easier to grab the sprite with less background and very sharp edges. Set the games graphic setting to the lowest, and the opague to zero. The images look ugly but you will be grabbing them in their cleanest form (I think, I havent actually tested this theory).

Then you can just paint-drop pure black (0,0,0) into the background. Dont worry about how ugly the sprite is when you edit it. When its put back in the game on normal settings it will do lots of bit-smoothing to make it look like the ones you are used to. Butif you grab the image of one being all bit-smoothed then the editing takes on alot of extra work.

[ May 12, 2004, 12:41: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]