Show me those .dats!

[Yugl]

Masked off the leg piece you mean?

[Stromgarde]

Not just the legs, but the other parts that are neither metal nor part of the normally-lavender inlay as well.

[Yugl]

http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/3972/bludrgbody.png

Masked out the non-armor parts.

[Stromgarde]

Colors still look a bit off. Try using the colors from Royal Knight's Chainmail for the darker parts and Adaman Breastplate for the lighter parts. Also, you switched secondary colors between the body (dark blue) and the rest (dark gray), it would look better if it was consistent all one or the other.

[Kohan]

Spoiler: show

http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/3972/bludrgbody.png

Masked out the non-armor parts.

I personally like where you're going with this, but as Stormgarde mentioned, the body being purely light and dark blue while the rest contains silver and grey makes it look awfully mismatched.

In my opinion, the body is the best part. If that's what you're going for, I recommend following through with that design on the rest of the armor. However, the bleeding pixels—at their worst on the cuisses and gauntlets—damage the appeal of the piece, highlighting that it's low-res and thereby damaging its appearance.

If you could define those lines more sharply—as in the breastplate, for example, which looks nice and sharp—I believe the armor would look much better.

[grevenilvec75]

Would anyone be interested in doing a custom .dat for me? Would be willing to pay some reasonable amount ($25?).

Would like a Guy Fawkes Mask, if possible. If anyone is interested, or anyone knows of one that exists, send me a forum PM.

[Guitarman]

Still waiting for a gobbue .dat to turn it into a Nu from Chrono trigger.

http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:A...epkXL76nd4XKVM

[Yugl]

I personally like where you're going with this, but as Stormgarde mentioned, the body being purely light and dark blue while the rest contains silver and grey makes it look awfully mismatched.

In my opinion, the body is the best part. If that's what you're going for, I recommend following through with that design on the rest of the armor. However, the bleeding pixels—at their worst on the cuisses and gauntlets—damage the appeal of the piece, highlighting that it's low-res and thereby damaging its appearance.

If you could define those lines more sharply—as in the breastplate, for example, which looks nice and sharp—I believe the armor would look much better.

I agree with your assessment entirely, but it's one of those "I lack the competency to fix it" issues. The way I've been going about it is . . .

Open Model Viewer
- MCQ Button (Select the armor)
- Use photoshop to color in layers Stromgarde pre-made
- Go through the process to convert the file and slab it on the MV file

I wasn't sure how to convert the metal on the other pieces because the pre-made file I got would cause me to make indentures colored as well (Like the holes in the armor).

[Stromgarde]

Ah, in that case my friend you need photoshop tutorials rather than modelling advice. Unfortunately, I am about the last person you should be talking to for ground-up texturing tips as my photoshop training was in high school over ten years ago. Kohan, from what I gather you have a fair amount of experience in this arena, any ideas?

[Kohan]

As it is pixel art, I treat it as such—whenever I work on something like that, I'll literally zoom in and personally fix the pixels. It takes a lot of time and perfectionism. A lot of reloading, too, since some textures will inevitably be stretched on certain models (e.g., neck textures on Elvaans, which is one huge stretch—really, the jokes tell themselves).

Coincidentally, I saved most of the WIP pictures of one of my more intricate works, which I present here to give you an idea of my personal process:

Spoiler: show

For comparison purposes, here is the original Igqira Weskit:

http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/6...raoriginal.jpg

To start with a clean slate, I dumped the textures, scoured the DATs out there for a nude one that had good textures already, and carefully combined the two:

http://img811.imageshack.us/img811/1...igqirawip1.jpg

To complete something that precise, I opened both of the textures—the naked torso and the Igqira Weskit—side-by-side in Photoshop. I copied the naked torso texture as a new layer onto the Weskit image, lowered the transparency severely, and zoomed in to carefully cut out the parts that weren't needed.

Sometimes, you can use a variation of this method to fix things like the pixel bleeding you're experiencing, and other problems, too, like color changing causing obvious over-saturation and making compression artifacts visible. Make a new layer, select the area over the mussed-up pixels, and create new content to replace it. You can then carefully adjust the transparency to ensure that it blends in with what's already there. Alternatively, you can change the entire shade of the piece to make pixel bleed less noticeable.

As for the next step:

http://img341.imageshack.us/img341/8...igqirawip2.jpg

This was the "first draft" of the tattoos. I didn't make the tattoos myself, but I used a variety of free sources on the Internet with no legal restrictions. They required modification to be used for my means, and considering how delicate the textures were, this was a lot of pixel tweaking.

However, those ones just didn't work. They, like the Dragoon-related criticism I mentioned earlier, emphasized that the textures were low-res. They were too delicate, and it showed. I needed something bolder that would provide a cleaner look.

http://img850.imageshack.us/img850/1...igqirawip3.jpg

As you can see in the picture above, in addition to the new tattoo texture, I removed almost everything on the back, including the strings and the feathers I'd put in. I knew it'd be better to start with a clean slate. This required much more pixel-precise work, since I had to redraw the leather to compensate for the loss of the holes.

There's a reason the tattoos end at the shoulders, too—that's where the arm texture ends, and the torso texture begins. It took a whole lot of work to get that and the back tattoos to not only connect, but animate smoothly when the character moved. That final product is here:

http://img197.imageshack.us/img197/7...igqirawip4.jpg

This version doesn't just include the finalized tattoos on the back—wherein you may notice that I faded the smallest, finest lines, letting that eliminate any low-res qualities they'd have given away if they were bolder—but it also shows the replacement threading. I didn't draw that, though. Instead, I Googled for it. Naturally, whenever you use real world imagery in a FFXI texture, you'll need to ensure that it looks fine when it's shrunken to a smaller version, which a lot of things won't. The amount of detail lost will be immense. On top of that, they'll then be blown up to cover whatever you're texturing. This is why it's easier to make Tarutaru look good, by the way: their textures are hardly changed at all.

Here's the final version, and the customized face that I made to go along with it. A lot of in-depth work was done around the medallions to sharpen their appearance, and to refine the crappy looking ones that were drawn onto the chest texture underneath.

http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/155...customface.jpg

If you want it to look good, you're going to spend a lot of time on it. Just recoloring alone won't get you perfect results. While you surely already knew this, I suppose all that may have given you an idea about the investment you'll have to make if you want it to turn out nicely.

[Yugl]

Pixel-by-pixel drawing is way to intense for me even though the results are amazingly clean. I wouldn't mind doing a cartoon vector armor in the future (If that's even possible).

[Kohan]

Pixel-by-pixel drawing is way to intense for me even though the results are amazingly clean. I wouldn't mind doing a cartoon vector armor in the future (If that's even possible).

Here's another possible shortcut, then:

1. Zoom in, and select the area that suffers from the bleed-in (not by just clicking on the color, but by drawing around the problem area, and include some of the clean, same-color texture nearby).
2. Create a new layer.
3. On the original layer, use the dropper to obtain the correct color closest to the bleeding problem.
4. Using the airbrush on the new layer, paint over the excess pixels.
5. Adjust the transparency of the layer as needed.

EDIT: The steps didn't emphasize something properly, so I tried to re-word them to clarify it.

[Kohan]

Would anyone be interested in doing a custom .dat for me? Would be willing to pay some reasonable amount ($25?).

Would like a Guy Fawkes Mask, if possible. If anyone is interested, or anyone knows of one that exists, send me a forum PM.

I'm not interested in making a mask, but I will say that if you want it on at all times, you may as well do this: find a large, clean image of a Guy Fawkes mask, and then paste it onto your model's facial texture. Take a little care to do it right, of course. Save it, and change any obscuring head armor DATs you have to something that's either invisible or won't hide your face. Use BlinkMeNot to prevent yourself from ever changing gear, and enjoy.

If you need to learn how, someone fortunately provided a mirror for the backup of FFXIDATs' tutorials that I created. It was here.

[Yugl]

Here's another possible shortcut, then:

1. Zoom in, and select the area that suffers from the bleed-in (not by just clicking on the color, but by drawing around the problem area, and include some of the clean, same-color texture nearby).
2. Create a new layer.
3. On the original layer, use the dropper to obtain the correct color closest to the bleeding problem.
4. Using the airbrush on the new layer, paint over the excess pixels.
5. Adjust the transparency of the layer as needed.

EDIT: The steps didn't emphasize something properly, so I tried to re-word them to clarify it.

I'll give that a try when I get some free time, thanks~

[Yugl]

Just to be clear, you mean edit this right?

http://img408.imageshack.us/img408/9...atgiblack2.png

[Kohan]

Just to be clear, you mean edit this right?

http://img408.imageshack.us/img408/9...atgiblack2.png

I'm not sure what you're asking. We were talking about the Dragoon Empyrean plated armor, but the image you've posted is a gi texture.

What I was referring to were the cuisses, primarily—the plates covering the outer thigh. The gauntlets, too.

[Yugl]

I was asking if that is the texture you've been referring to (Not specifically the Gi, but that file) since you mentioned placing one texture over another in your spoiler post (Elvaan body + BLM JSE). I just wanted to make sure I was not using the wrong file/image.

[Kohan]

Technically, the cuisses would be located within that DAT, so that is the one you would want to edit—if that's what you're referring to. I'm still not entirely sure I am interpreting your question correctly, but yes, the cuisses are part of the body armor DAT.

[Yugl]

I was just uncertain how you went about doing this part:

To start with a clean slate, I dumped the textures, scoured the DATs out there for a nude one that had good textures already, and carefully combined the two:

It seems you would put the disfigured naked DAT and the armor DAT (Both of them are rectangles like the above Gi image) together with one using a highly transparent setting.

[Stromgarde]

I think I see what you mean, Kohan. Yugl, open up the body psd I gave you and edit this part:

And use some of the aforementioned techniques to transition from the appearance on the left to the one on the right:

2x magnification:

When I heard cuisses the next thought was 'wlegs', so I was at a loss as to what would be needing correction on the leg armor proper.