Chapter 41: Portrait Formatting & Preparation

Yes: like text editing, there are other ways to do portraits than FEditor Adv. However FEditor Adv > all. It’s much easier than it used to be.

First, you need a portrait with frames and a chibi. I can’t help you with this. This is a spriting thing. You’ll have to learn how to sprite and make your own portraits or request portraits from others (the latter is a bit difficult—people don’t wait around for random people to request portraits, most of the time).

Once you’ve got that done, clear up your spritesheet (a sheet with the portrait, normal talking frames, normal smiling frames, blinking frames, and chibi) so that ONLY the sprites are on there.

Next, we have to reduce colors. Look at your image. The hair should have one set of colors with 3 shades, and the armor should have another set of colors with 3 (max 4, sometimes). Everything else should be either skin colors or outline colors (there is typically an orangish color and dark brown color in skins and the outline color is usually a dark purple).

Open up your image in Usenti. If it won’t load, that’s most likely because it is a GIF, and Usenti is a bitmap editor, so your image must either be a BMP or a PNG to load. PNGs are superior to BMPs because they are MUCH smaller in size, have transparency capabilities, and when you upload them to photobucket, photobucket doesn’t convert them to JPEGs and distort the image with fuzziness. (Cough, BMPs get distorted by photobucket…)

Once it’s loaded, we need to check colors. On the bottom right there should only be one row of colors—16. Lemme show ya.

See, only one row of colors (look at the bottom left). If it’s NOT like that, there IS a way to reduce colors without tedious work. However, there’s a limit to how much reducing can be done before the image changes.

First, zoom in to your image, about 4x or so, so you can easily see the shades of colors and their differences. Next, go to Palette-> Requantize at the top.

Type in “16” like so.

Hit “OK”. Look at your image carefully to see if the quality has changed a lot. If it has, that means you have too many variety in colors, and you need to manually use spriting techniques to reduce the # of colors. Otherwise if there’s no major difference, you should be OK. (Tip: you can use ctrl+z and ctrl+y to go back and forth between the lots-of-colors and 16 color images and look for differences.)

After that, you need to format your portrait. This is what most people have a hard time with. I will post multiple methods on how to do this. Also, there is an ‘old format’ which hardly anyone uses anymore, and a ‘new format’. I will include a few details on both, but mainly the new format.

Tutorial 1: Formatting Portraits Step-by-Step with Layers by Nayr

Note: The following images are used in this tutorial as formats/templates.

Alignments | Standard Format Box

[16:08] NayrLRosfar: step 1: Paste the mug into the hack box on the template. [16:08] NayrLRosfar: step 2: Copy the mug and hack box and paste into the alignment sheet in a new layer. [16:09] NayrLRosfar: step 3: Move the box over until it fits into one of the alignments, find the one that fits and copy paste under the red box on the mug. That'll copy the proper frame alignments. [16:09] NayrLRosfar: step 4: Past into the appropriate spots in the template. Repeat process for mouths. [16:10] NayrLRosfar: step 5: Copy/paste the eye blinks, mouth flaps for talking, and smiling [frames] into their appropriate places on the frames. Edit to fit if splicing in from another mug. [16:11] NayrLRosfar: step 6: Paste in the chibi in the box above the blinking frames. [16:11] NayrLRosfar: step 7: Merge all layers down on template and remove the background color or fill it in completely. [16:11] NayrLRosfar: step 8: Optional. Double check to make sure there are no stray colors that could prevent insertion. [16:12] NayrLRosfar: step 9: save as [a 24bpp] png

Tutorial 2: Video Tutorial on Portrait Formatting by Flyingace24

Video Link

Tutorial 3: Video Tutorial on Old Formatting by Blazer

Video Link

Hopefully those tutorials have taught you how to format a portrait. Now you have to insert your portrait, so get ready!