Working with portraits

[Madmartigan]

I've seen scraps of info here and there about this, and perhaps this has been documented and I missed it, but I can't seem to figure it out.

How do you shift the palette for a portrait back and forth for editing? Basically, how do I take this:

...and reorder/restructure the palette (or whatever I need to do) to make it look normal, so it can be edited, and then revert it so it can be used?

I assume it would be a similar process in any image editing program, but for the record I am using Jasc paint Shop Pro 9. I have several other programs I can use, but I think it doesn't matter.

What's the trick?

EDIT: In case it is not assumed, I need to be able to use the portrait in the sprite sheet.

[Kaijyuu]

Use palette 9-16. They correspond with the palettes 1-8 used by the sprites.

Not sure how you'd switch back and forth with your particular program, but that's how the game does it.

[Madmartigan]

I get what you mean but that doesn't help, and I don't think ShiShi will export a .bmp with a normal looking portrait (tried).
The portrait looks normal when I patch the sprite to the iso, but looks screwed up when I open it in paint or image viewer.
I'm assuming it works something like this:

copy the portrait,
paste as new image,
rotate it,
hopefully do something with the palette to make it look normal,
do any editing,
revert the palette,
rotate back to sideways,
and paste back into the sprite file.

Or maybe I'm way off and someone who's done this before can explain the right way to do this.

[CidIII]

Open up Paint and make the portrait there and then when you are finished c/p it back into the appropriate spreadsheet. By opening up a separate Paint you will no longer have any sprite palette restrictions .

The portrait you have there is all inverted and fucked up because it was ripped by Shishi's into a .bmp, why it does that I have no idea, maybe it has something to do with using the palette from the battle sprite instead of the portrait.

Then all you need to do is map out the palette, which isn't hard once you get the hang of it, I use GIMP for that sort of thing, if you are having trouble I could give you some pointers to how I do it. I guess I could do it for you also, I've done it for many people already .

[Madmartigan]

Open up Paint and make the portrait there and then when you are finished c/p it back into the appropriate spreadsheet. By opening up a separate Paint you will no longer have any sprite palette restrictions.

Isn't there a way to export a normal looking portrait from shishi so I don't have to start from scratch?

The portrait you have there is all inverted and fucked up because it was ripped by Shishi's into a .bmp, why it does that I have no idea, maybe it has something to do with using the palette from the battle sprite instead of the portrait.

Yeah that's what happens. I guess I don't fully understand the image format because there are like 2 or 3 palettes in the .bmp, and when I first started doing this I was getting errors importing .bmps to shishi because I had made a 4-bit 16 color image. This is also keeping me from altering the format in any way, so I can't use layers and I can't copy/paste anything into the image unless it has the exact same palette, or shishi will turn colors that aren't in the first 16 index entries to black or some weird color.
If i try to use raster layers, it forces me to convert to 16 million colors, which is fine, but then I have NO idea how to reformat it.

I guess I'm just a confused scrub.

[CidIII]

Hmm, I thought I used to know an easier way.

But, you can try this, get the portrait from this page http://www.ffhacktics.com/spr.php?id=RAMUZA2 , rotate and paste it back into the sprite sheet. Add the colors you want to use into the palette starting at color #128, make your edits to the portrait and see if it works then.

[Madmartigan]

Well this is a good start.

It worked as long as I didn't edit the portrait's colors before pasting into the sprite sheet. When I imported into ShiShi, it gave me a warning about colors not being in the first 16 entries (assumed this was the tan color) and as far as I could tell, nothing from the original image was altered (except the tan color, which was turned to black (transparent). However, I got the same warning even if I got rid of the tan before importing, but still it seemed that the image was fine after importing. This was all tested using Ramza3's unedited sprite and Ramza3's unedited portrait.

Didn't work for portraits that didn't have the same palette as the original bmp. I know this is because the 3rd(?) row of the palette index is reserved for the portrait, and they didn't match. So there must be another way to do this without manually editing each portrait palette's color before pasting the new one in.

Thanks for your help! Still could use some more...

[CidIII]

You're going to have to edit the colors sooner or later, they don't necessarily have to be in the right spots at first but the colors need to be in the palette.

Colors #128-#256 is all reserved for portraits.

[Smash]

Hopefully this could help..

I had a similar problem, but when making my own custom portraits. After finishing them in paint, I figured on my own that in order for them mugs to look right, they had to use the first 16 colors of the pallete, the same ones as the sprites.

What I did was replace colors 129 to 143 with the first 16 colors, starting at 1, but not 0. That one's supposed to be black, I think.
I took some time to make a tut:



You can do it inversed also, do your edits, then recolor it back. Any questions, just post.

[jimmyjw88]

I'm sorry for this silly question but how do you align them in order?
Slowly one by one reorder them?

[Smash]

I'm sorry for this silly question but how do you align them in order?
Slowly one by one reorder them?

Open paint on a separate file you want, and take the colors on the colormap and put them one next to another.
This is only to use them as a guide when recoloring the portrait. You don't need to change anything in the actual colormap.

[jimmyjw88]

Oh, and how do you change sprite palletes?
Like for example, knight. The palletes are fixed right?
So like if i want to change knight's cape to red and hair to blonde and armor to gold....how do i change its palletes?

[Smash]

I'll assume you have GIMP, it's the only program I know how to use for these sort of things.

Go to GIMP > Dialogs > Colormap. It will show the color window I posted on the minitut above. Select the desired color to change, click on the pencil button, and another window will pop up. On that one, you can alter the colors based on a number of aspects.
What I do simply is, let's say I want to make a recolor. Let's suppose you have the desired colors in Paint, you go to Colors > Edit colors > Define custom colors; write the Red, Green and Blue values back on the Gimp window (Red, Green and Blue only, leave the other spaces alone) and there.

If you are making custom stuff with your own colors, this is a must know.

[jimmyjw88]

Oh...i see.
Ok. Thanks Smash. Will find you again if got any trouble.
Ahaha....sorry....i'm suck at this palletes thingy =.=
Even my cless sprite i made (pending), i just use red mage palletes because i don't know how to change palletes =.=
Anyway, thanks again ^^

[Cheetah]

Wait a minute, the sprite and the portrait don't need to be using the same palette. They don't need to look correct in your spriting program, as long as the palettes are set up right they should look correct in ShiShi and in the game. I didn't read the whole conversation but hopefully that clears any misconceptions.

[jimmyjw88]

Oh....so meaning all the palletes must be 16-bit colors and everything is going to be alright?

[jimmyjw88]

Hey Smash...erm..just to be sure...judging by the post above, you using vista?
And GIMP works on vista? ^^

[Madmartigan]

It would seem then that there's no getting around manually editing the portrait's palette one by one? (for the sprite sheet)
It would be ideal to import the palette into the sprite file from the portrait file you are working on (as long as it is 16 colors of course). If this is possible, would it have to be indexed differently?

For example, take a photo of myself, convert it to 16 colors [with black as first in the index], import or manually edit the sprite's portrait index, and paste the photo into the file.

Thanks Smash for sharing your technique. What do you mean when you say "put them in order like this"?[referring to the palette] Are you able to change index order in GIMP? I can sort by "luminance" and "hue" with the program I'm using but that's it. Are you doing this by manually editing the index? If so, what is the order?

[CidIII]

Black does not have to be a color in the Portrait's palette just the Tan (nothing needs to be transparent).

It really doesn't matter how they are arranged, just that the bitmap is mapped to the colors correctly, and it really isn't much of hassle rearranging 16 colors, GIMP allows you to rearrange them fairly easy.

[Smash]

It would seem then that there's no getting around manually editing the portrait's palette one by one? (for the sprite sheet)
It would be ideal to import the palette into the sprite file from the portrait file you are working on (as long as it is 16 colors of course). If this is possible, would it have to be indexed differently?

For example, take a photo of myself, convert it to 16 colors [with black as first in the index], import or manually edit the sprite's portrait index, and paste the photo into the file.

Thanks Smash for sharing your technique. What do you mean when you say "put them in order like this"?[referring to the palette] Are you able to change index order in GIMP? I can sort by "luminance" and "hue" with the program I'm using but that's it. Are you doing this by manually editing the index? If so, what is the order?

What I mean with that is, you organize them in a separate Ms Paint file, in the same order as the ones on the spritesheet(129-143), to then swap those colors (in the mug) for the ones of the sprites.(1-15)

And well, on Gimp you can change pallete order, hue, green red and blue values, and more random stuff, to pretty much get any color you want. I actually never rearrange the pallete order, it simply does to edit the colors out.