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Well, I'm not the first one to attempt to make an African mod, so that the units stop being white-only. This thread is for the people who have made or want to make black units, to discuss about how to do it.
I have designed a method which gives quite staisfying results, but which requires much, much work. So far, I have done the default animation of the infantry facing SW (I put the original design for comparison)
The method is :
- With FLICster, extract the unit with a team colour that cannot possibly be mistaken for skin colour, or for shadow. Bright blue does the job well.
- while editing the ordinary unit, isolate all colours that are used for the skin. Select the colour in the palette, and replace it with a basic colour (bright yellow / red/ green / lime, depending on what is not on the picture).
This way, you can see if messing directly with the palette will have an effect on clothes and weaopns or not (the biggest challenge with africanizing units is to keep clothing as it is)
- The aim is to mess with the palette as much as possible while not altering the clothes. To do this, I work on two separate files :
In the first file, I mess with the palette to my heart's content until I find a satisfying skin colour. Read: I replace original skin colours by black colours.
In the other file, I do not replace any colour of the palette. The only thing I do with the palette is to add the black colours (I take them from the Impi).
- I then copy the skin zones from the first file into the other one. I carefully eliminate non-skin zones from my selection. This is the real tedious task. It is much less tedious when the unit has many clothes (rifleman) than when the unit has few (warrior).
What do you think ?
I have designed a method which gives quite staisfying results, but which requires much, much work. So far, I have done the default animation of the infantry facing SW (I put the original design for comparison)
The method is :
- With FLICster, extract the unit with a team colour that cannot possibly be mistaken for skin colour, or for shadow. Bright blue does the job well.
- while editing the ordinary unit, isolate all colours that are used for the skin. Select the colour in the palette, and replace it with a basic colour (bright yellow / red/ green / lime, depending on what is not on the picture).
This way, you can see if messing directly with the palette will have an effect on clothes and weaopns or not (the biggest challenge with africanizing units is to keep clothing as it is)
- The aim is to mess with the palette as much as possible while not altering the clothes. To do this, I work on two separate files :
In the first file, I mess with the palette to my heart's content until I find a satisfying skin colour. Read: I replace original skin colours by black colours.
In the other file, I do not replace any colour of the palette. The only thing I do with the palette is to add the black colours (I take them from the Impi).
- I then copy the skin zones from the first file into the other one. I carefully eliminate non-skin zones from my selection. This is the real tedious task. It is much less tedious when the unit has many clothes (rifleman) than when the unit has few (warrior).
What do you think ?
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