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Development Forum Favorite Place Icon Spritework    Sanely Insane RisenAngel    Manager     9/23/2014 Recently I decided to try and finish up a metaroom project I started some time ago. The first order of business was to try and make a new favorite place icon since the one I originally made looked awful. I tried to make it look like the favorite place icons of the official metarooms, but this is where I kept running into problems. Compared to the smooth lines of the official favorite place icons, the ones I kept making were obviously pixelated. Furthermore, this is just the base icon - trying to make a glowing version is probably going to be an even bigger headache. What I was originally doing was taking an image I felt best represented the room (in this case, a zander fish), making an outline, and then pasting it onto the base. I've also been using GIMP for this. Since that process isn't working out right now, is there a better way to go about making a favorite place icon? If nothing else, is there any information about how CL went about making their favorite place icons? ~ The Realm ~ Risen Angel's Creatures Blog   Prodigal Sock Ghosthande     9/23/2014 I can relate; it took me a surprisingly long time to start making "decent" favorite place icons, considering how simple the sprites look. My very old ones--including the original Bai-Loki icons--will thankfully never see the light of day. In reference to the pixelated lines, do you mean the "line art" within the colored circle, or the circle itself? Also, what have you been using other than GIMP? Most of the time I just drew the icon shape with a brush 1px in diameter; as long as anti-aliasing is turned on for the brush, and the brush is soft enough, it should look sufficiently non-pixelated. I do know that GIMP is a bit harder to make good-looking lines in than Photoshop... generally, if you decrease opacity enough, it will eventually start looking okay. For the lit up version, Photoshop has a "glow" effect which can be used to duplicate the look of the official icons almost exactly. So I just cheated and used that. I'm not sure if GIMP has a similar effect, but if not, a very large, very soft brush set at a low opacity might be able to duplicate the look too.   Sanely Insane RisenAngel Manager     9/23/2014 I meant the lines within the circle; the circle itself was just ripped from one of the official favorite place icons. GIMP is the only program I've been using considering it's the only non-MS paint program I have on this computer (I'm not willing to purchase Photoshop at the moment). Anyway, I started using the brush with the opacity set to less than maximum; before this I pretty much used solely the pencil and then went over the outline with the blur tool. It looks better, though it still looks horribly jittery since I'm stuck with a mouse. Unfortunately, I'm fairly certain GIMP doesn't have a glow effect akin to Photoshop's (though I've never used Photoshop so I don't know what its effect is like). However, your brush suggestion got the job done just as well. After much fidgeting and taking the advice here, I ended up with this. I think it's nice enough to be usable, though I do think I could do better. ~ The Realm ~ Risen Angel's Creatures Blog   Prodigal Sock Ghosthande     9/23/2014 Nice! Looks like you definitely nixed any pixelatedness.   Luzze   9/25/2014 I don't know what GIMP is capable of but with photoshop it's the easiest to use the pen tool and trace/draw the icon into a vector path and then stroke it with a white 1px hard brush (soft brush didn't look so good..)   Prodigal Sock Ghosthande     9/25/2014 Yeah I don't think you can do that with GIMP. I've used the pen tool also, mostly for things that need smooth curves or geometric shapes--like a DNA, or a globe. It certainly beats trying to draw out a perfect circle or curve by hand. But for small things with lots of details (like critters), vectors can lose some of their convenience. The Enchanted Grove's icon has a unicorn on it... I wouldn't want to use vectors for that.   Mioonktoo     9/25/2014 I know it's late and I've never had Photoshop so I can't make comparisons, but Gimp does have a handful of glow plugins/ filters built right in. They're located in the Filters menu under "Light and Shadow," "Artistic," and "Alpha to Logo." There's most likely better glow plugins in the official repository though. But its really better to just go over your lines with a really soft brush like you just did instead of fiddle around with the glow options found in the menu categories I just listed. Or use Paint.net for the glow effects since it does that better than Gimp. Well, at least my probably outdated copy of that program does. From the depths of Deep Lurkspace I emerge... And suddenly can't remember what it is I came up for.

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