Welcome to lesson four! So far weÔÇÖve focused entirely on the drawing tools in GIMP and how to use those tools to get started on creating a freestyle adventure of your own. From now on, we'll also be focusing more on sprite-based artwork but there's no reason at all why you can't apply the techniques just as easily to freestyle art as well. Now, onto to today's lesson!
Today we'll be working on editting other peopleÔÇÖs images, and it will hopefully give you an insight into the process of building a sprite-based game.
Part 1: Getting someone elseÔÇÖs picture into Gimp
There are a lot of different ways to do this, but here are two of the simplest:
Method one
- Navigate to the web page with the picture you want.
- Right-click on the picture. Click on "Copy".
TOP TIP: If the picture you want to copy has been resized by the forum and you want to download it in its full and original size, right-click on it and select ÔÇÿopen in new tabÔÇÖ OR click on the little magnifying glass. You can now right-click and copy the image as normal.
- Open gimp.
- Select: Edit > Paste As > New Image
- Go to the web page with the picture you want.
- Right click on the picture. Click on "Save Picture as"
- Navigate to where you want the picture, and click on save.
- Open gimp and select File > Open
- Navigate to the location you saved the picture to, then press Open.
Part 2: Copying a part of the picture.
So here we have our intrepid goblin all set to start doing some adventuring! But we're not going to get very far if you can't move your sprite around the scene.
- Choose the rectangular selection tool (the box with the dotted outline) and click and drag over the part of the image you want to select. Be careful you donÔÇÖt make the box too big or youÔÇÖll bring some of the floor along too! It's usually easy enough to fix, but sometimes it's just easier to be careful.
- Select Edit > Copy
- Select Edit > Paste as > New layer. Now you have two goblins! If you havenÔÇÖt done so already, you probably want to open your Layers Toolbox so you can see what youÔÇÖre doing more easily (Windows > Dockable Dialogs > Layers OR just hit Ctrl-L).
- Now select the move tool...
- ...and move the copied layer to your desired location.
- But now we have another problem because IÔÇÖve got a horrible big box of wall colour that is dangerously close to blocking out my view of that ever-so-fancy hat! To deal with that, select the magic wand tool and click the wand onto the ugly background behind the goblin sprite (on the goblin's layer, NOT the background!) to select everything thatÔÇÖs the same colour.
- Then you simply press ÔÇÿdeleteÔÇÖ on your keyboard et voila! The background colour for that layer is now gone (transparent) and we can see all the lovely stuff on the desk again!
Of course, now we have the problem of too many goblins...
- Highlight the background layer again (in the layers toolbox) to select it and draw a selection box around the area you want to remove.
- Select the ÔÇÿcolour-pickerÔÇÖ tool and click somewhere on the back wall to make that your main colour.
- Select the pencil tool, and set the size to something reasonably large (20 is fine) and colour over your selection box. Don't worry about going outside the lines - remember if you have an area selected you can only alter the things within your selection area. Everything else is 'safe'.
