Final Fantasy Hacktics

Basic Head Swapping Tutorial

Time for another fine tutorial from yours truly, todays theme is head swapping. What's that you might ask? Head swapping is when we have 2 sprites, and we want to take the head from one of the sprites, chop it off with an axe, and frankenstein it onto the other sprite. While this to a beginner sounds easy, its harder said than done. While the process of head swapping is easy to pick up and learn, and also a great way to learn basic spriting, it still involves a keen sense of at least the basic artistic eye, sometimes you need to add or remove certain elements to make the "new headed" sprite look right.

Alright, first we are going to need the tools.
1) Get a version of Adobe Photoshop. I know that most other spriters on here will tell you that "Photoshop is nonsense, Graphics Gale or Paint or [insert a program name here] is better", maybe they are right, maybe, but this tutorial works best with photoshop.  However if you copy the function you should be fine otherwise.

2) Obviously we are going to need 2 sprites, so that is up to you which 2 you want. One is the source, the other is the one that will get a new head.

3) The fine tools supplied up here on FFH, pretty much Graphics Gale and Shishi Sprite Editor. Graphics Gale is wonderful to get the number of colors down to 16, and Shishi is an absolute must if you are ever planning on seeing your sprites that you are about to create in the actual game.

4) Read my other tutorial New "Creating Custom Characters" because that in a sense covers some basic info that I won't bother to explain again here, like the in depth powers of the M tool, what cropping is, ect.

5) Patience and a clear mind. This is very important. Every spriter on here will agree with me that if you are either nervous, or feeling aggressive, or simply have too much things on your mind, then it is not the right time to jump in and sprite. Try to find a nice, quiet moment where you are at harmony with yourself when you sprite. It helps also with stress and frustration, which may or may not come with spriting.

Good. We are ready to begin.

The first thing you are going to want to do (once you have completed the 5 steps above) is open up your 2 sprites in Photoshop. For this tutorial, I will be showing you with screen shots how to get everyone's favorite Final Fantasy character, Cloud Strife's head onto my Dark Knight's body. Don't complain, I'm trying to keep this as simple as possible. Before anything else, check the amount of colors on the (here Dark Knight) and follow the steps from my other tutorial on getting rid of the portrait and saving it for much, much later. Be 100% sure that the sprites colors are at 16, after getting rid of the portrait, if not then you must have screwed up already! I think you can figure this out easy enough with logic and my other tutorial. Well, since the DK has only a few colors this will be much quicker, because there is room left on the palette for Cloud's head. Either way, if you should run into some major problems now (like you go over 16 colors) don't worry too much, that'll be covered later on. If the layer box is not on, push F7, and make sure that the image on both of them aren't indexed, but rather locked background. Image>Mode>RGB Color if you are confused. Then once hit Ctrl+J, and get rid of the locked background, we don't need it once we have a free layer to work on. Both sprite sheets should have only 1 layer and be called Layer 1 now before continuing.

Select Cloud's sprite sheet by clicking once the top of the bar in PS if it isn't the darker blue color (but rather light blue). Now we have Cloud ready. With Z, the short cut for the Zoom tool, zoom in on Cloud's head, as big as you need it. Now like so, with the box tool which is M (short cut), box in his head, but not any other things like his shoulder or clothes, the only way you can do this is if you do it slow and hold Shift the entire time, like so:
[attachment=4:3bjyydlk]pic 1.png[/attachment:3bjyydlk]
Great, you have his head ready to be cloned! Ctrl+C for copy magic! Go over to the DK and click the bar once on the top to we have him as the selected work picture. Zoom in with Z on the same frame (here the second frame on the sheet), real close now, real close. 1600% zoomed in is the maximum, and that is actually pretty good. Its pasting time! Ctrl+V. Wow look! Now you have 2 layers! The first is the DK, the second is the floating head. Here is how it randomly looks on my screen:
[attachment=3:3bjyydlk]pic 2.png[/attachment:3bjyydlk]
Push V while (if you haven't done anything, layer 2 is automatically selected) which will give you now control of the Cloud's head layer. Observe that with the arrow keys and the mouse you can freely move Cloud's head around. Amazing! Now I got Cloud's head into the right position with sheer logic, always line up the heads by means of the eyes. A little trick to see if you are doing it right is by to constantly click the little eye ball next to the layer name to hide and show the layer. As of now, I noticed a few things by turning it on and off a few times: Cloud's jawline is over running the DK's armor and also there are still quite a few pixels left from the DK's helmets horn. No problem really, one thing at a time. Since the jawline of Cloud is over pixels which should be showing through, we need to fix that first, because the horn pixels are simply put erasable for good. With the M box tool again, make a 1 pixel big box and highlight jawline pixels that need to go and push Del, but make sure that you are working on Layer 2 and not 1. I have marked for this tutorial the 2 pixels which I consider are wrong in green.
[attachment=2:3bjyydlk]pic 3.png[/attachment:3bjyydlk][attachment=1:3bjyydlk]pic 4.png[/attachment:3bjyydlk]
Excellent, I am nearly done! Now by holding Shift, I highlight select the 2 layers in the Layers box, and right click. All the way towards the bottom, select Merge Layers. Now once again you will have only 1 layer to work on. This is a quick job to do - get rid of the extra helmet. With the eye dropper tool (I) click somewhere, anywhere on the black background. Switch over to the Pencil tool (B) and have it set to only 1 pixel. If you see a square icon good, if its round, change the Brush into the Pencil tool by going over to the long box on the left and holding down click over the Brush until the little box comes where you can change it to a Pencil. Simply with the black background color paint over all the helmet pixels flying around and one frame of the entire head swapping process is done! Repeat this for all the frames and you should be good. Do not forget to replace the little square shaped heads on the spritesheet as well, like the one that you can find in the bottom left corner. This counts as a head as well. This pretty much wraps up the tutorial, if you are still uncomfortable of how an image looks after head swapping it, post your work in the Sprites forum and the nice people will most likely help you correct any mistakes or anything that is wrong! Don't forget to check out my other tutorial on how to get colors down to 16 and inserting portraits! Very important to get it working right in the game!
[attachment=0:3bjyydlk]pic5.png[/attachment:3bjyydlk]
Good luck and have fun ~Jon

(Requesting this be a sticky and lol it still says I am banhammered yet I posted this. This is the basic head swapping, more to come on in depth use of Photoshop.)