Author Topic: Packs Making Guide  (Read 7430 times)

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Offline DarkTl

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Packs Making Guide
« on: September 16, 2015, 02:16:57 AM »
I've been making h-packs for various games for many years, and Pytfall has particularly high demands for them, so I feel like I need to share accumulated knowledge with others  :)

Step one: collecting pictures. There are many websites with h-pictures, some are better than others. I personally use:

- gelbooru.com and danbooru.donmai.us; they have quite similar database, so in many cases gelbooru alone is enough, but when you deal with unpopular characters that don't have many pictures, you might want to check both.

- g.e-hentai.org; I usually use "artist cg" and "game" filters when I search something there, since any other types of pictures can be found in other places or are useless for packs. But even with those filters very often you can find many new decent pictures.

- pixiv.net; it's a Japanese database with mostly English interface and mandatory (but free) registration, but it's totally worth it. Many artists actually upload pictures there in the first place, so its database is huge. It also means that there are many terrible pictures from newbies or untalented artists, but nothing can be done about it. Even if you buy VIP and get an option to sort pictures by popularity (yeah, you need VIP for that), it won't help you much since I've seen many great pictures with low popularity rating, thus you will miss them.

- rule34.paheal.net; its database could use better sorting, but in general this website is well known, thus many people upload there h-pictures. Often you can find something new (but not always).

- deviantart.com; useful for rare characters when you need every existing picture. But its search option is not very smart and it doesn't have detailed tags, so sometimes you will have a lot of garbage instead of character pictures.

- google in pictures searching mode; especially useful for rare characters. You won't find many h-pictures, but there are plenty great SFW pictures.

Now, google is smart enough to understand anything, but other websites could be tricky. Usually you need to enter character name like lilica_felchenerow, or felchenerow_lilica. While in other cases you need something like kasumi_(doa), especially when a character doesn't have a surname. One of the ways to figure it out is to use google and enter something like "kasumi dead or alive site:gelbooru.com". There will be plenty of results, like this one. On the left you can see tags of that picture, we need green ones. There is green kasumi (doa) tag, so you can just click on it and see all existing Kasumi pictures.

In the case of pixiv you need to try both English and Japanese character names. Usually you can easily find out Japanese name using wikis.
Pixiv has tags too, but usually they are Japanese. However, when you click on them they lead to small articles about the tag, so it's not hard to figure out tag meaning even without translation.

Step two: deleting duplicates. People make mistakes. If you use many websites, you can save the same picture multiple times. Even on singe website one picture could be uploaded many times. Ideally we don't need duplicates because they are useless.
There are many applications capable to compare pictures and delete similar ones. I personally use VisiPics, it works great and it's free.

Step three: resizing and converting. Many pictures have huge resolutions. It might be not a big deal when you think about one single picture, but not when you have many thousands. Even if you have plenty of space on your disks, others will have to download your packs, and there are people with bad internet connection too. Plus the game doesn't support very high pictures resolutions anyway, and will resize too big pictures internally. I personally resize pictures to 1000x1000.

Other pictures have improper extension, like gif, while the game understands only jpgs and pngs. Also if the picture doesn't have any transparency and has png extension, you might as well convert it to jpg to save even more space. Just make sure you won't convert pngs with transparency.

There are many applications that can automatically resize and convert pictures. I personally use Image Resizer. It's not free, but there are many opportunities in the internet.

Step four: editing. Some pictures have flaws that could be easily fixed. Besides, we use portraits and sprites that require a picture without background, and sometimes you have to delete it if you don't have a decent backgroundless png.

- photoshop is the obvious leader here, but it requires a decent skill, it's not free, and if you only want to make packs, you will never use all its capabilities anyway.
- gimp is decent enough and free, though its gui is far from perfect. Unfortunately, after version 2.6 developers decided to change philosophy of the project and focus on gimp's own XCF format, making work with other formats very, very inconvenient (but still possible).
- paint.net is a simple but powerful application, especially with users plugins. It doesn't have a few tools that gimp has, but it's more convenient in general, and very simple too.
« Last Edit: April 25, 2018, 11:44:25 AM by DarkTl »

Offline xienchaudau

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Re: Packs Making Guide
« Reply #1 on: September 20, 2015, 03:20:06 PM »
Any guidance on converting girls from WM?  what do i do with the girlsx file?

Offline DarkTl

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Re: Packs Making Guide
« Reply #2 on: September 21, 2015, 05:25:57 AM »
A good question.
Pictures have to be tagged with our tagger, also at least three portraits (sad, happy, neutral), a battle sprite and a sprite have to be made, meaning you need to cut background, unless there are decent backgroundless pictures in the pack.
Yes, it could be tricky, but that's the price we have to pay for the next generation of h-games, so to speak.

As for character data file, which means girlsx file in the case of WM, it should be rewritten. We use json files, you can download one of them as example separately from packs in my thread. I will write a separate guide about json data files a bit closer to the release.