Changing Character Portraits

[Zerothemaster]

Good day, I'm a new guy who's been haunting your forums for... a long time. Anywho, I figured I'd actually post for the first time (fancy that!) since I have a question and google's not helping very much.

There are some characters, characters that I really like, like Deadpool or Vulture or The Joker, that have absolutely terrible character portraits (either too big or nonexisting or badly colored). I've tried to change the portraits, but I only have a really basic knowledge of Fighter Factory (older version, I know enough to make static stages), they don't seem to work, usually just not showing up. Does anyone know of a good tutorial, or can give me some help/instructions on how to accomplish this?

Also, I'm sure this has been asked before, so I apologize if I missed a really obvious place to solve this.

~Zero

[Cyanide]

Portraits thankfully can use their own palette. Simply reduce the colour depth to 256 and you have a functional portrait. You may however have transparency issues. What programs do you have at the moment so we can tailor the answer a little bit with where to go and what slot transparency is in.

[Zerothemaster]

I might take another shot at this with a random character with your suggestion. Do I have to make a pallette for the portrait like you do for a character?

Fighter Factory 1.0.12.2005 UP3
latest build of WinMugen

I'm good with upgrading to FF3 if it's totally amazing and makes everything easier.

[Cyanide]

Not if you're working with winmugen it doesn't.

Take any character, create a 120x140 image. Index it (who cares how just do it) and then save as .pcx. Put it into mugen and see what happens. Most likely the black bits (RGB 0,0,0) will be see through, we can fix that but we need to know what you're using to provide any detail.

Any image inserted into mugen needs to be 8bit or 256 colours.

[Zerothemaster]

What exactly do you need to know? I'll use GIMP for the editing (and probably the indexing, if I can figure out how to do it) and Irfanview to convert to .pcx. Then I'll open the .sff in FF and change it. Anything else you need to know?

[Cyanide]

Gimp is enough there. Take the picture you want to use as the portrait. If it has a background you want transparent, make sure it's not in use anywhere else in the picture. If it's a solid pic do the following

Draw one pixel of pink somewhere on the picture that you can recolour easily

Apply a colour map to the picture to index it. Edit the colour map. Take the colour you want transparent, that's either the pixel of pink or the BG colour and drag it to position 0 on the colour map.

If you used the pixel method, recolour that spot with the pencil tool to what it should be.

Save the picture. It's preconfigured now with the correct transparency in position 0. The "pink pixel" method gives you a colour you're not using in the picture to take up that slot so nothing else will be transparent.

[Zerothemaster]

Huzzah! It worked.

Thank you, now to figure out what's wrong with other things, like weird palette problems.

Thanks again.