HowTo - A Guide to Making RebED Cards

A Guide to Making RebED Cards

RebEd allows editing units in Rebellion, and saving edited settings as a whole. If this is sufficient for scenarii-oriented editing, it is quite limitating for scenarii-building. So, added were the "RebEd Cards", that you can download from most Star Wars Rebellion sites.

A card is basicly a set of settings for a particular unit. In this guide, we'll take a stupid example and design a Bill Clinton card. Then we'll dive into the depths of DLL Editing and arrange a hunt by Monica, Starr and a few Reps.

Once you'll know how to edit a character and make a character card, you'll know everything : other units are edited the same way. I hope you'll enjoy the tour.

Step 1 : Planning

Before crazily editing every stats and pics, we need a plan and some materials.

For Rebellion editing, this means a good pic of the unit and a good idea of the settings/behaviours we want for our unit.

A character pic requires three things :

a good quality/resolution. Rebellion Pics are 200 pixels high, so in our source pic, the character should be at least 100-150 pixels high. The bigger, the better.
a good lighting. Our character shouldn't be too dark, in a colored atmosphere or whatever.
a good layout. The character should stand, without anything in the way (objects, other characters...). You should be able to cut the character away from it's environnement, without having it look weird or silly.

To have a good idea of what a good character pic looks like, its size, lighting... pick a character in RebEd, go to Encyc Pics editing (the small "E") and save the picture. Having it easily reachable on your desktop to check the various aspects will greatly help. In what follows, this picture will be called "reference picture".

Our base Clinton picture is the "official" one.

If you compare it to a reference picture, like Solo's, you'll see that it's a little oversized (Solo's chin to eyes distance is about 55 pixels from chin to eyes, while Bill's is approx 72 pixels). That's not a problem, you lose quality when magnifying images.

Step 2 : Preparing the base picture

Now, we have a good picture, time to prepare it ! First you'll need a good pixel-based image editor (forget Paintbrush...). If you have none, I suggest getting Paint Shop Pro, it has all the niceties and is available as shareware. The rich ones could go to PhotoShop, but it's really too much for what we'll be doing here. You'll also need a quick viewer and a good picture resizer, so go and get IrfanView while you're at it. (try http://www.softseek.com/). In what follow, I'll suppose you have IrfanView and PSP, but all the used functions should be available on other editing tools. Remember to turn off Antialias on pictures, so the colors don't bleed together.

With a first IrfanView, open your picture and open your reference Rebellion character pic side by side. Resample your picture to have well proportionned characters on both pictures. If you want to be quick, use the chin-to-eyes ratio as resizing factor. For Bill's this means 55 to 72 = 76 to 100, reducing Bill's to 75% will do. Save your work.

Now, we'll need to crop your picture. Open your picture in PSP, and crop the character. Save the cropped pic. For our Bill, no need to crop, it's already cropped, too much cropped, and we'll have some "image reconstruction" to perform.

Remapping the palette : Rebellion uses a fixed 256 colors palette, if we don't remap the pic to this palette, it will look ugly in Rebellion. In PSP, open your reference picture, save it to another name (we'll modify this picture, but don't want to lose our reference). We'll name this saved reference the "base pic". Now, copy the cropped character to the clipboard, and paste it in the base pic, where you want him to be in the final picture. Don't upgrade the base pic color level !

Our Bill, reduced by 75%, palette remapped and pasted over what once was Solo...

This is the "base pic", first version

Cleaning the background : take the blue color with the dropper (if your character is of the same blue, you can take a green, etc...), this will be our transparency color. Fillup the background with that blue color (you'll probably have to do manually the work around your character, I recommand a 1 pixel wide paintbrush for that and a big magnification).

Note : the color that will be transparent in Rebellion is that of the leftmost-bottommost pixel.

The cleaned up Bill.
The background was removed and I redraw parts of the jacket and tie (was easy, mainly black. Could require artistic skills for a more complex dressing).

Our "base pic" is now ready.

Our base pic should now be ready, with right size (400x200) and right palette info. Save your work.

Step 3 : Preparing the "build pic"

Ok for characters, there is no "build", but that picture is named this way for all the other units. In RebEd, save the build pic of your reference character to a file. Use it as a reference and resize/crop your base pic to have the same overall look and the same size.

Be sure to pickup the blue color as transparent in PSP, or it will mix your character's color with the blue, and your character pic will have a blueish aura. If you have some experience with PSP, you'll get a better quality by using "bilinear resampling", but this also mean you'll have to get your hands dirty with masks and color depth conversions to avoid the blueish effect.

Bill's "build" pic (80x80).

I used bilinear resampling and masks to make it.

With the completion of the "build pic", we're almost done, the remaining pics can be auto-generated by RebEd. But if you're a real pro and have plenty of time, you can make them by hand, the process is the same.

Step 4 : Editing the character - Stats

Now, it's time to get back to RebEd. Pick a character to replace (Solo for instance). Adjust the various stats (combat, jedi, etc...) according to your character. Then click the small "E", we'll modify the pictures.

Go to the latest tab, "Characters Extra Pic", the one with a 400x200 picture of the character on a blue background. Right-click and load your base pic. Got to the previous tab, right-click the build pic and load your build pic. If you remapped right during Steps 3 and 4, there should be no color changes after loading the pictures.

Autogenerate the two smaller picks (or bigger in the case of fighters) by clicking the arrow buttons.

Got to the first tab, "Encyclopedia", right-click and autogenerate the encyclopedia pic with the appropriate background (alliance or empire). You may directly load a 400x200 encyclopedia pic if you have one (don't forget the palette mapping !).

Edit your character's name : keep in mind that it cannot be longer than the name of the character you're replacing, so the smaller, the better. Enter a description.

This is what you should get if everything went ok.

With pics and stats edited, our card is now complete.

Step 5 : Saving and loading the character

Close the encyc pics editor. Click the "Save Card" button, RebEd will prompt you to enter your name for card's credits. Et voila.

A card edited over Solo, can be loaded over any other character (there is a full compatibility between major and minor characters cards), but keep in mind the name length problem. If you load "MyCharacterWithALongName" over "ShortNameGuy", you'll get a name truncation warning (but pics and settings are adjusted ok).

Note : Card Signatures are nothing "hard" or "secure", they're just a way to store info about the author's name to help you sort your cards and remember who did what. They are displayed in the CardViewer and in the "Load Card" window.

Step 6 : Adding More

In the intro we said we would like Monica & Starr to go after Bill. This is why I proposed replacing Solo?: in Rebellion, Solo gets chased by bounty hunters. This is a built-in event, and cannot be overriden. We'll take advantage of this and replace the bounty hunter events with ours.

We'll need to use the generic DLL Entries Editor for that, and a few pictures too. Grab a pic of Monica, Starr and victorious Bill, if you could grab a sound sample of Bill too, better. (remap your picture !)

In the DLL Entries, get to the Events/Han Solo/Bounty Missed, load your pic, load your sound sample, edit the text. That's all. Instead of getting a Solo defeating the BH, you'll get a Clinton defeating M & S. I'll let you replace the other events (Jabba, rescue...) with what you see fit.

So, wasn't so hard was it? Now you can follow the same steps to create other cards. And finally, enough edits to make a TC! Good luck!

Published on: 2004-06-12 (55727 reads)

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