Elder Scrolls Forum: Creating an icon tutorial

Ehm, well... I did write a small tutorial a few days ago. Not sure if people can understand it though

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Creating icons for Morrowind - the easy way.
A small step-by-step guide by Miltiades

1. First you need to look at the actual model in the TES-editor you need an icon for. So you either need to have placed it in your plugin. If you already have the capacity to make a detailed screenshot without use of the editor, simply skip steps 2, 3 and 4.

2. Now that you’ve found the model, select a small cell (interiors are great) with lots of gray areas around them.

3. Drag the item onto that cell and place it in the gray area. Now rotate and set it up just the way you want.

4. Make a ‘hardcopy’ by pressing the PrtScr button on your keyboard.

5. Open up Paint and press CTRL-V (this will copy the screencapture you just made in Paint).

6. Select the area you want for your icon and copy it into a new image in Paint.

7. Now flood the gray around the image with either BLACK or BRIGHT GREEN (only use green when the picture itself has a lot of black in it).

8. After this, you need to select yet another area. This time make sure that both x and y are the same (so if x = 350 pixels, then y should also be exactly 350 pixels). You can see these numbers in the lower-right corner of Paint as soon as you start dragging the box around the image. Make sure the image itself is nice in the center.

9. Now copy and paste this latest selection as a new image again and save it as a 24bits Bitmap (BMP).

10. Exit Paint and open up Photoshop.

11. Load up the image you created and resize it to 32x32 pixels in Photoshop.

12. Save this tiny image as an uncompressed 24bit Targa (TGA) file (so a 32bit TGA).

13. Exit Photoshop and load up DXTBmp (from MW Graphics). If you do not have this program, download it > here<

Now it is time to get rid of that nasty black (or green) stuff around your icon).

14. Load your TGA file. Once you see it select ALPHA and then Create Alpha Channel (Black). If you used green select Create Alpha Channel (Green). In the popup-screen, press YES. Now you will see the image in black’n’white in the small screen on the right. The only thing which should be black, is the area surrounding the image (so the image itself should be pure white).

15. Now go to ALPHA again and select Apply Alpha to Image. Now the black will turn transparent grey in the main screen. You can now save your icon and PRESTO! One custom-made icon with transparent background!!!!!

ENJOY!
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Not sure if there's an even easier way, but with this approach I can make an icon in under 5 minutes (loading times of the TES-editor notwithstanding). As you can see, I mainly use the simple 'Paint' program; and only use Photoshop for resizing (because it gave me the best results when cramming an image to a 32x32 pixel icon).

Greetz,

Milt

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