Slitherine

Well, I already hinted at it recently, and I noticed flakfernrohr has done the same - as I announced earlier, I haven't been all idle in the time I was absent from the forums.
In fact, quite a lot of time was spent on things Panzer Corps, and the biggers chunk of it is represented by the tool I'm announcing here now.

Some of you are maybe familiar with the skined icon packages flakfernrohr and I released earlier. (See Be Prepared to be WOW'ed thread).
To produce these sets, I had made a little tool that was able to create them en-masse for any number of skins I provided it with.
It was pretty rough around the edges and in no shape to release to anyone, and it was also a little short on features early on.
A lot of time and effort went into changing this, and I think I had some measue of success.
The tool is still a litte rough - please don't hesitate to report bugs or mention feature wishes in this thread - but I think it's finally time to let you guys take it for a ride.
So, enought with the forewords, I present to you:

Dwight's Camo Sprayshop



You can download the current version here.

If you find this little tool useful at all, there's several ways for you to give something back.

- Post your impressions here.

- Report bugs/issues or improvement/feature wishes.

- Create some nice, themed skin groups and share them in this thread.

- Create unit masks for any unit not-yet in the package. I'll post a tutorial on how to do this down below.

- If you're a unit maker, please consider making a blank (not camouflaged) version of your icon. Even if you don't want to bother making a mask for it yourself, this will allow others to do so. (On the other hand, if you don't want your units to be skinned - like HBalck for example - your icons will not be part of this application, don't worry.)

I hope the work wasn't in vain and some of you guys will find this little tool useful.
Have fun.

Edit 2014-04-08: Uploaded new version with some new features (solid color preview backgrounds, aircraft skinning, batch processing).

Edit 2015-05-26: New version 1.1 uploaded - icons can be sorted in groups now and the EFX Studio has been added.
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rezaf

Tutorial: How to create a unit mask

Ok, I'm going to try and outline the process of creating a custom image mask in this post.
Note that I'm using Paint.NET, but if you're more familiar with another graphics program, like Gimp, Photoshop or Corel Draw, for example, you can use that instead.
Then it's up to you to find the relevant commands and options, though.

First of all, let's open a unit icon. The process is the same for any kind of unit, but it's considerably more complicated for wheeled units and/or units with lots of small details.
For the purposes of this tutorial, I just picked a Tiger tank. Unmodified, the icon looks like this:


The mask tells DCS which areas of an icon to apply a camouflage to and which areas of an icon are to be painted in secondary or tertiary color.
The area of the image the mask should ignore alltogether is painted in black in the mask file.
To ceate this are, we switch to the Magic Wand tool.


Make sure Tolerance is set to 50%. Sometimes, a little fiddling around might be neccessary, but usually, this default setting works just fine.


Click on any "empty space" in the icon. This will result in a selection that looks like this:


As you can see, the selection includes transparent parts of the image (the checkered pattern) as well as shadows - this is actually the most important part of the selection, as otherwise applying a skin to the image can result in the camo pattern being visible in the unit's shadow, and obviously that's not how it's supposed to be.

Obviously, we don't want to paint the mask directly onto actual icon, so we add a new layer to the image. The layer window is toggled with F7, if you have any troubles spotting it.


Adding a new layer will automatically switch focus to it, but at any point of this process, it's a good idea to make sure you have the correct layer selected.
If it isn't already active, switch your current color to Black (RGB 0/0/0). Remember, this is the part of the mask that tells DCS to ignore these parts of the image.
If you can't find the colors dialog, it's toggled with F8.



Now, fill the selection with the active color.



The icon should now look like this:



Now it's a good idea to invert the selection. The parts already painted in black are obviously not very interesting for us any longer, they're supposed to be ignored, and inverting the black selection means we can safely paint on the remainder of the image without accidentally repainting anything black.



Next, we can color parts of the image we want the second color applied to. With tanks, this is usually the area around the tracks, but it'll be different for other units. For open vehicles, for instance, it's usually a good idea to choose this color to paint the interiors. You'll get a feel for it in time.
For now, just switch the active color to pink (RGB 255/0/220).



To paint larger areas of the image, the Brush is a good tool. Size is up to you, but I find 10 is a good choice for the big icons - make sure to disable Antialiasing (the second to right icon in the toolbar allows you to do so).


Just paint away over the areas you think should be colored in the solid color. Like I wrote, for tanks, that's usually the tracks. You won't be able to spot the camouflage on anything that's black or so dark that it's close to black, so you don't have to be too thorough.



To mask finer details, the Pencil is a better utility. It's size is only one pixel and you don't have to worry about Antialiasing.



I use it, for example, to mask the insignia or small details like tools attached to the hull of a vehicle, also the guns (see below). You'll quickly be able to select the right tool for the job yourself, don't worry.



For guns, I usually use the tertiary color. It's designated in a mask with the Cyan color (RGB 0/255/255). Btw., be careful to pick the right colors, otherwise DCS won't be able to properly work with the mask.



Once everything has be masked correctly, the process has to be repeated for the opposite big icon and for the two small icons below. Note that the official icons have been created from 3D models, so the details you can see from the other side are usually a little differend - this means you can't just copy-paste the mask you created for one side and flip it around the x axis.
Anyway, once you're done, your file should look like this:



Now all that's left to do is to throw out the original layer. On the layers window, switch to it (It should be labeled "Background") and select delete (the red "X" on the bottom of the layer window).



Your image should now look like this:



Select File->Save As and save the mask to a file. It has to bear the exact name the original icon had, only with _Mask appended to it, and it needs to be a 32 Bit PNG image.
In Paint.NET, once you've entered your new filename and pressed enter, a Dialog will pop up in which normally, auto-detect is selected. Make sure to switch this to 32 Bit!



And that's it, we're done.
You can now copy both the icon you masked and the Mask file into the BaseIcons directory of the DCS application. Next time you start it, it'll automatically detect the new icons and you can skin them too.

One more thing that might be worth mentioning: Skinning doesn't work well when the base icon already has a color of it's own (like green for the soviet icons, for example). Icons that are already camouflaged will usually look horrible - don't bother making a mask for them. Units which are just colored can be adjusted to work well with the app, though - I'll cover this in a different tutorial.

I hope you can understand this tutorial, if any questions remain, feel free to ask.
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rezaf

So, quite a while ago I made some more modifications to the tool, but at that time Dwight was a little busy and noone appeared to be interested in the prospect when I posted the national icon teaser to this thread, so I kinda forgot about the feature, still, it's sorta completed, so I figured I might just as well upload it.
The feature I'm talking about is the ability to replace national insignias on any icon with a mask made to support this operation.
This works better with some icons than it does with others, but here's an example with an icon the process works pretty good with.

Selecting the basic JagdTiger icon in DCS, we start from this state:


Checking the new option gets us this icon - with some units these look pretty bad, but others like the JagdTiger could be used without a new emblem. Just experiment a bit if you want.



And from the combobox next to the new option, you can select any supported nationality and DCS will replace the original insignia with one of the selected nation. Right now, support is limited, and the icons have many weaknesses - I'm not a very talented pixel artist. If someone manages to come up with better emblems, by all means, please share them and I'll be glad to replace my amateurish attempts with your superior version.
Also, any new nation would be very welcome.

Here's a preview how a different icon will appear on the icon:



The new feature hasn't been tested very much yet, and not all icons support it for now, so I'm sharing this version in a seperate link for the time being. Check it out if you're at all interested and ignore if you are not.

Download the version that can replace emblems here.
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rezaf

So, here's a little mini-tutorial on how to update your masks to make use of the new feature outlined in the post above.
Start from any mask you've created using the tutorial in post #2.



Add an additonal layer to the picture.



Now (and make sure you're on the new layer!) paint a light purple rectangle (it MUST be a rectangle, otherwise horrible things will probably happen) around the area occupied by the original national emblem.
In some cases, you might have to select a larger area for the process to work properly, in some cases, keeping it tight will be neccessary, you'll only know for certain after testing.
Do note that if you, like I often did, just didn't bother with the tiny emblems on the two small icons in the bottom, you'll now have to do so if you want the new emblem to be visible there - tiny as it'll be.
This rectangle must use color code (RGB) 72/0/255.
After you made your purple rectangle on the new layer, the image should look like this:



Now, move your new layer to the bottom (this is done with the small blue downward pointing arrow on the layers window, it's tooltip says "Move Layer Down") ...



... switch back to the original layer, select the paint bucket tool (keyboard shortcut "F"), set the tolerance to "0" (default is 50) and fill the area you originally masked away so the camo scheme doesn't paint over it with a dark purple (RGB 33/0/127) color.
Note: If you've started from scratch, you should still have the original icon as a layer and will need to paint over the exacts pixels where the original emblem was located (as opposed to a rectangle around this area like above).
Your image should now look like this:



Now you only need to repeat these steps for the opposite facing and the small icons (be careful to paint on the right layers), select "Image -> Flatten" to get rid of the additonal layer (unless you started from scratch, then you have to continue as outlined in the original tutorial) and you're done - DCS will now be able to replace national emblems on this icon.

Just study the masks that come with the experimental DCS version from the post above (you'll notice most having the purple blobs) to study how it's done, and should any questions remain, feel free to ask them here.
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rezaf

Reserved

Reserved (That's the last one)

Sounds absolutely amazing, I'm dl-ing right now. The examples flak posted in the other thread were top notch. Thanks for making this available

I like the title.
I wish to thank both.
Flak because of the textures and also because he was the man who "enticed" rezaf to do the tool.
Rezaf because he's the one who have created this tool. I can only imagine how much work was involved.
I'm sure all the community will be pleased with your efforts and this will help undoubtedly to produce more reskin units.

A great thank you.

What a team Flak and Rezaf.

Gentleman thank you very much.

I don't want to sound like drama-queen right now,but with all of the crap that's going on in my life right now I needed some kind of good news. I know it sounds silly that something like this would provide that kind of joy,but it does.

Thanks guys from the bottom of my heart...thanks a million.

This tool is obercool. I just played around with for a while. The basic options are very easy to access, most are self-explaining. So far all seems to work fine, didn't save anything yet though. I didn't get that the ID thing in the settings is about, but I look forward to the tut, I guess it will become all clear then

Thanks for the great tool guys!
You should trademark the name .

bebro wrote:I didn't get that the ID thing in the settings is about, but I look forward to the tut, I guess it will become all clear then

The (first) tutorial will cover how to make unit masks - those are needed to "teach" the app how to skin even more unit icons.
It's not hard, just time consuming, and if a number of people would volunteer to do one or a few masks each, it'll be only a little amount of work to do and everyone can benefit.
Maybe we'll have masks for all stock-units eventually - imagine the possibilities.

The ID is for when you export a group of skins. That'll make a zip archive in the Outgoing directory which contains the group name, the date of creation and the ID string.
When you post such package here, for example, everyone can download it and put it into his Incoming directory, from where the application can import it automatically.
At least that's how it's supposed to work.

I'm sure you guys will encounter more quirks and questions as you go, it's only the first public release.
I'll do FAQ section eventually.

Thanks for the positive feedback so far, everyone.
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rezaf

I was and AM CONSIDERABLY HUMBLED by Rezaf tagging my name to it. As I have said before, all I did was make the skins. Rezaf did the hard dirty work, not me. This man deserves special notice by all PzC gamers, fans and developers. I truly think the developers need to give this mod serious consideration for meritorious service and functionality.

For those of you who want to make your own skins and designs, I used Microsoft paint (the absolute simplist softare to use) with the SAME paint functions for colors as Rezaf incorporated into this mod. :idea

For those of you who only want the German, Axis and Soviet skins in the file I made, here is a Media Fire link: http://www.mediafire.com/?wy12z2crzea2y04

In the future, as I make more skins and build another file of enough to be worth adding (versus one or two at a time), I will make skin packs and put them on MediaFire for download. I'll post it in this thread topic. For now I think I am going to play the game a bit on my custom maps with our new skins.

UPDATE 5-15-12 FOR NEW SKIN PACK*******UPDATE 5-15-12 FOR NEW SKIN PACK******UPDATE 5-15-12 FOR NEW SKIN PACK****

I have finished a new bunch of skins and thumbnails for the DCS machine. With these added, the total skins for vehicles is now over 330. There are an additional 24 different "uniform" skins/thumbnails for infantry and ground units although they will work for armor or planes as well if you wish. So, 350 skins +/-. The two skin patterns of Windhund and Feldherrenhalle are courtesy of Churchy. VonPaulus donated his Slovak pattern Camouflage and which were expanded/modified it for larger icons. As always with anything posted on this forum by me........ you are free to use these in any manner associated with PzC.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> http://www.mediafire.com/?f3bqqu4bdkl6ps6 <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

They have been checked several times and they all work in the DCS machine, but please report any malfunctions to me and I will correct them.

Some skins may appear similar on vehicles however you may find they have a different appearance on the icons depending on the size and shape of the icon. I figured too many is better than too few. And of course if you don't like them, you don't have to load them or use them. You can even remove the skins and thumbs you do not like from the DCS files to narrow your selections, just be sure to match skins and thumbnails appropriately.

Have fun, I think these are pretty realistic in appearance when applied to the right icons.

Last but not least is a gratis skin-thumbnail pack from Bebro. He did these and sent it to me. I include it with his permission.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> http://www.mediafire.com/?swab1bcl6yq5a2q <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

All you need to do is unzip the files and load them into your current DCS skins and skin thumbnail folders (do not insert the folders, only the skins and thumbnails). Be sure to back up the ones you have in your DCS before you merge the files just in case of a malfunction. Should you encounter duplication, just "skip" those files. I have tried to avoid any duplication of files, but frankly with this many files, it got a bit confusing.

Rezaf is now working on and has almost finished his newest version of DCS which will apply NATIONAL EMBLEMS TO ANY ICON. He informs me he will be putting it on the forum soon once he has made sure everything works properly. Mongo is working on another mod that will make custom unit modifications easy to insert into any scenario or campaign. He informs me he is very near completing it and will be putting it on the forum as well.

I just created some units.

I'm totally blown away by the possibities.

I really love the background color so that you can see how the units looks "in game".

Awesome job Rezaf ...simply awesome.

Great job Dwight on finding those camo patterns.

Now back to work

It's always fun to witness how people end up in having some identical approaches to the same problems, that in spite of using different methods.

It's really easy to make a re-skin unit. Part of the success will lie in the mask and in the source unit. I'll test different approaches and see if we can get better results.
For example if you can improve the contrast of source units or even use some sharp filter. Some work to do.

Rezaf's gave us the tool, now it will be really, a community effort to improve and create more skins.

Tell me rezaf, do we have to have that specific magenta and cyan to mask with secondary and tertiary color?

Thank you. This could not be any more like what I was searching for - a guide on how to skin, and a specific tool to do it.

VPaulus wrote:Tell me rezaf, do we have to have that specific magenta and cyan to mask with secondary and tertiary color?

What are you trying to tell me with this question VPaulus?

Without such specific mask, the app can't work with an icon.
My very first version of a skinning tool didn't require a mask, but it also produced very sub-par results.
After a while I came up with a simple masking method that only used black and transparent. So I could exclude some areas from being skinned - for example minor details or the track or whatever.
Then I made the masks even more elaborate to allow me to exclude interiors and guns from being skinned AND to allow me to skin them in a different color instead.
How do you suggest the app should know that it isn't supposed to paint the skin over the interior of a Marder, for example? Or even just the national insignia?
Early skinned icons from me ignored these details, but I think they looked much worse because of that.
In the future, the masks will probably become even more detailed - the next thing I'd like to add would be the possibility to outline part of each icon as carrying the insignia. Then, people could even repaint the insignias on the fly, for example by selecting a nation from a dropdown.

Like I wrote, I'll cover the process of creating such mask in a tutorial - and I do hope to get some help in creating more masks for more icons.
I'm sure you can recognize how it works from just looking at the mask files, but others might require a little more in-depth coverage.

Once again, thanks for the positive feedback everybody.
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rezaf

Rezaf the nation thing would be the only thing needed

The way you have simplified the process is simply amazing.

I love the filter for the gun barrels and tracks.

As everybody knows,I'm not the most computer literate person on the face of the earth and I'm finding this tool easy to use.

Hey!!!!!, the new slogan to use for the tool:

Dwight's Camo Shop (by Rezaf).................. "it's so easy a Mongo can do it"

What I meant, was does it have to have those exactly rgb values for magenta and cyan?
Magenta - 255, 0, 220
Cyan - 0, 255, 255
I understand why you are using it. And I agree it's the best way.
Sorry for not having be clear enough.

I find the tool, quite good as the way it's now.
During my work with applying texture's to PzC base icons, I've come to the conclusion that in some cases, you would benefit if you could apply a sharpness and adjust the lightning of the model.
I've this example to illustrate the differences between having the normal base icon and with adjusting the light and sharpness.


So in this wonderful tool, I'm only missing three things:
- A slider to adjust the lightning (maybe brightness and contrast)
- A sharpness filter
- A slider for zooming texture
These are my only suggestions. And of course, if that means a lot of work, just forget it. It's good as it's now.
I can also consider, If people think that would look better, creating myself the base icons with sharpness and/or lightness on.

As far as it concerns the different national markings, I don't think we can get an easy solution.
So to apply the national markings it has to be manual.

Final word. I do think that this a tool that will help most of us, specially those which are not easy familiarized with paint programs.
And even for those, it will help to speedy the process enormously, unless you're a perfectionist, but in that case there aren't any tool that can help you.
In my case, I'll surely use it in all my projects. It will help tremendously. I'm very grateful.
Thanks a lot.

I can only hope and pray that the national icon can be added,but if it can't no biggie

Thanks again to F/R