2017-04-22 [Tenets 03] The Best of Both Worlds

[ZacAttac21]

Purple fire and... a chandelier made of flowers? Daryil gets the trippiest dreams.

[Tapewolf]

I figured it was purple grass, but you'd have to ask Merlin...

[Merlin]

Purple grass on the inside of a house, and a chandelier of flowers and leaves. I pretty much let my flatting plugin pick the colours for that cell's background to make sure it was something peculiar

[Puyon]

Oh, Daryil... can't even let people keep their pants in their dreams...

Purple grass on the inside of a house, and a chandelier of flowers and leaves. I pretty much let my flatting plugin pick the colours for that cell's background to make sure it was something peculiar

"Flatting plugin"? What's that?

[Merlin]

"Flatting plugin"? What's that?

This thing! http://peltmade.com/psplugins-flatting.html
It's a multifill and flatting plugin, that fills in the colour and removes the lines.

I only use it for Dark Lord, Daxxon and Tenets because it makes things take much longer to colour.

It works like this!

You start with pure black outlines (you can use "image->adjustments->threshold" to change aliased outlines to antialiased)


Copy those outlines onto a pure white layer, and add some extra lines for the markings to make it a bit easier to colour


The multifill plugin adds colour to the lines, with no colours sharing a line.


Then flatting it brings each colour flush with one another, removing the lines


Then you can just colour it with a low-tolerance non-anti-alised fill


Then that just fits under the lines pretty easy. But the colouring the right colour takes a while, you can tell in the multifill+flatten image that the spikier areas have a buncho of colours all over the place

[Tapewolf]

I had sometimes wondered about writing such a thing myself, but so far it's been quicker just to colour things by hand.  If they colour each sector differently, I don't see much improvement over flood-filling them manually since I'd have to do that anyway to make the colours actually correct...

EDIT: Oh, there are some multifill scripts for GIMP - I might have to try one sometime, just to see...

[Merlin]

It removes the white spots that otherwise might be at the spikey points in the linework, and makes it a little easier to do edits to the work down the line, but that's about it

[Tapewolf]

It removes the white spots that otherwise might be at the spikey points in the linework, and makes it a little easier to do edits to the work down the line, but that's about it

Yeah, I already have a way to deal with holes - select everything white by colour, deselect the eyes and teeth, and that will leave you with all the holes, which you can then block-fill using the shift modifier.  Azrael's wings make it more awkward, but if you've ever wondered why James' wings and the lab coats tend to be off-white, there's your answer.

[Merlin]

Oh right, that's a good trick. Photoshop 7 crashes on my PC when I've got small selections active, so I try not to bugger around with the select tools too much. It's kind of aggravating, but apart from only doing things while having large areas selected, doesn't seem to be much I can do about it.

edit: Also using off-whites is pretty good anyway, they can be a bit easier to shade and match with other colours (and they're certainly easier to highlight, heh)

[Gelpi]

Is that the Biceps Bishop from Critical Mass?

[Tapewolf]

Is that the Biceps Bishop from Critical Mass?

Yes, and a certain someone from Dark Angel as well.  I think this is why Merlin was all over the Tenets project, because of the scope for cameos and rarely-drawn characters.