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making my own armor in GiMP


kohlenklau

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I haven't completely made the new armor with the shading along seams and rivets and such. I have done many of the steps but not all together. But I see it all in my mind!

OK, I am trying to ultimately change a German CMRT Pak36 37mm ATG to be all grey for a BARB scenario. <That Pak along with an in-box full of other such tasks and hopes and dreams where my own armor MIGHT be the easiest solution.> This Pak and many other CM things only comes as dark yellow with green and/or brown splotches (or stripes or whatever). I asked for some help but hey, everybody's busy, I get it. I tried clone stamp, tried map-color exchange, map color rotate. Sometimes these methods turn out ok and I can live with the results. but now I think I will try to just make my own armor. I have a different project to make an all green "4BO" Soviet T-26 from an Italian Semovente which only comes in a challenging swirling mottled yellow with brown camo scheme. I have temporarily used color exchange but it looks fugly.

My current armor recipe is trying a 3 color gradient then I am adding some HSV noise. Stock armor then has some secondary <or maybe even more who knows> layers of random "metallic splotches" over their first gradient layer. Maybe it is a splatter effect layer mask of just a different noise setting with a different gradient? There could be textures that already exists for this and I just need to get them. Though often when you see that cool stuff to use, they want money first.

So, watch me as I have a little fun in GiMP and maybe fix the Pak36 and the T-26. Or maybe fail. Gotta try. 

@Lucky_Strike Please get that eye better! I need a coach.

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Insanely busy, so haven't been able to keep up with all of the interesting things going on, but here's two things...

I'd wager that any Hue/Saturation controls would be your best bet, but I'm not familiar with how they work in Gimp. That would allow you to match disparate colors on one texture, then you could use something like the "Healing Brush" in Photoshop (my weapon of choice) to fix the seams between the two colors. That will add a slight blur to the selection edge, better than the Clone Tool. Save that for things like defined lines.

Before you get to the texturing, this plugin is very helpful for Blender textures:

 

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5 hours ago, kohlenklau said:

@Lucky_Strike Please get that eye better! I need a coach.

😍 going to the docs today, then hopefully the glacial pace of our wonderful NHS may speed up a notch to get the other one done ... or not.

I (or eye) can see enough to take a peek at replacing, removing colour, trying to remember what I've done in the past. What Ben points to with Hue/Saturation is certainly an option, desaturating is helpful, but affects different colours at a differing rates, desaturated dunkelgelb will look quite light but dunkelgrun will go quite dark so will give you a blotchy grey. There are useful replace colour commands in PS, likely something similar in GIMP, careful selection will give good results with this though details might disappear as well.

Does @MikeyD not have a plane yellow version? I know that there were a bunch of plane yellow AFVs released some time ago ...

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I just monkeyed around with it for a few minutes with the gun section. I ended up selecting the two color camo colors (individually), and filling them with the base color, then using Smudge Tool to clean up any remainders of edges, then Cloning details back in. Then I went to Hue/Saturation to approximate the dunkelgrau. There's also the step of adding any color back in from the original, that's an easy Layer assessment.

There's still some hints of dark swirly areas from the camo. That's solvable, but I need to turn my brain off for a while.

pak-37-gun.bmp

Edited by benpark
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I am still pressing on with trying to make my own armor. I did a few experiments and it don't look too bad. I used the gradient with a few colors of dunkelgelb dark yellow. Then I duplicated the layer and did some RBG noise to create the pixel mixture. Then I duplicated that layer and just added a little blur. Trying to make it look like the stock unmodded armor you'd see on maybe a pzIIIG bmp down between the rivets, seams, shadings, shadows and highlights. It didn't take long so maybe if I AM wasting my time, it wasn't much time.

Later I will slap some photos up to show what the heck I am talking about. 

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I tried various noise filters and blurs but I haven't figured out the proper method of duplicating the "armor" we see in stock bmp's. I will keep studying it as time allows. I assume it is a multistep process with filters and using the amazing power of photoshop and the similar programs. I have watched a few GiMP tutorials on making textures but haven't found the right one.

gfmFm78.png

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@kohlenklau

Hmm, I think you are complicating the problem....
I take the original BF bitmap. I desaturate it by setting the options so that only the outline of the lines remains on a practically white background. Then I apply a second, previously prepared layer, which is e.g. the colour dunkelgrau. It is not a pure colour, but a layer created by cutting a fragment from some other mod, real photo and enlarging it to a size of e.g. 2048*2048px. I place the desaturated layer above the layer with the colour and set multiplication as the opacity option. And there you have it! This is how I did Finnish mods in the past and now some mods for Barbarossa. In my opinion the effect is sufficient and the whole thing takes not even minutes but seconds.
Of course later it is worth to refine the mod a little bit, for example create another layer with elements which should not change colour e.g. headlights, additional equipment etc.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 1/30/2022 at 2:36 PM, Suchy said:

Hmm, I think you are complicating the problem....
I take the original BF bitmap. I desaturate it by setting the options so that only the outline of the lines remains on a practically white background. Then I apply a second, previously prepared layer, which is e.g. the colour dunkelgrau. It is not a pure colour, but a layer created by cutting a fragment from some other mod, real photo and enlarging it to a size of e.g. 2048*2048px. I place the desaturated layer above the layer with the colour and set multiplication as the opacity option. And there you have it! This is how I did Finnish mods in the past and now some mods for Barbarossa. In my opinion the effect is sufficient and the whole thing takes not even minutes but seconds.
Of course later it is worth to refine the mod a little bit, for example create another layer with elements which should not change colour e.g. headlights, additional equipment etc.

I did try but I cannot follow from a written description. I need more details in tool name and specific settings. I got to fly to Poland for a tutor session but will wait until it is bikini season.

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17 minutes ago, Suchy said:

I did not notice the alpha channel.

I think if you see the typical BFC CM BMP file in a folder and right click for details, maybe then select advanced details, you can see if it is is 24 or 32 bits. 24 is no alpha channel used. 32 is an alpha channel used for some reason. Like to make Humber antennae disappear...

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