Pixel & Sprite Art "Rip" Guide *in dev The purpose of this guide is to give anyone, and everyone that is interested; the ability to rip their own favorite video game sprites using free software that is available to all.
Also, it's main goal is to be well written, easy, and simple to follow for any skill level. Whether you are just getting started, amateur, novice, or expert; This guide is intended to be a walk-through for all who are willing to learn.
presents a guide to getting started in pixel & sprite art ripping.
The purpose of this guide is to give anyone and everyone that is interested, the ability to rip their own favorite video game sprites using legit + free software that is available to all.
Also, it's main goal is to be well written, easy, and simple to follow for any skill level. Whether you are just getting started, amateur, novice, or expert; This guide is intended to be a walk-through for all who are willing to learn.
This Guide is also meant to be a First Part section for a later Pixel & Sprite Animated Sprays Page.
In this section, I will briefly go over the steps that will be taken in this guide.
Familiarize ourselves with the basic steps of "ripping" sprites.
Learn about what programs we will be using and what they do. This, will let you better understand the overall process and stages.
After reading a bit about the Programs we will be using, We will then install & setup the programs step-by-step. This is to insure that the programs willl make sense and that you will be able follow along with a sense of ease and comfort.
Information will not be provided that is not relevant to the completion of this Guide.
Once we get our Programs installed and setup, we will then start the process of recording our sprites to an .AVI file. This step will be very simple and will not take much time at all.
With our newly recorded (uncompressed) .AVI file, we will then bring that .AVI into our Animation software in order to finalize and do the following: Optimize & Setup Timing of Frames, Cut out sprites for transparency, Crop our canvas size, then finish by exporting to a .GIF file.
The purpose of this section is to first introduce the programs that we will be using. This way, we will first fully understand the basics of the programs and how it is we are going to be using them for this instance.
The following programs will be used and needed for this guide: *
HyperCam is used to capture the "action" from your Windows screen and then saves it to an .AVI (Audio-Video Interleaved) movie file.
Basically, it is a "Screen-Capture" program like many others out there. Although this one works perfect for sprite ripping, and is also free + easy to use.
Sound aswell can be recorded from your computer wave device, line in, and/or microphone.
(Although for sprites and this tutorial, we will not be doing so)
Hypercam will be used to record our sprites from an emulator & rom.
GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.
It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.
GIMP will be used to import our recorded (uncompressed) .AVI file from Hypercam, so we can create our final .GIF animation.
All of our steps of trimming, cut-outs, timing, optimizing, and final saving, will be done in GIMP.
The uc-AVI plug-in loads uncompressed AVI files into multilayer images within GIMP. It can also save multilayer images to uncompressed AVI files as well. Audio tracks are discarded & only one video stream is supported. Compressed AVIs may be loaded using mencoder to import.
The uc-AVI plugin for GIMP, MUST be installed in order for us to be able to import our .AVI files into GIMP.
(Save the downloads somewhere easy to remember, perhaps your Desktop..)
If you have ANY problems with the downloads, or if any link is broken, please contact me here, or here.
INSTALL
After downloading the above files, we now must install them.
First, let's install Hypercam.
Launch / Open the file "HC2Setup" (It should be where you downloaded it to, Desktop, My Documents, etc.)
Read and review the legal agreement and you can choose to accept or not. You can simply install it to the default directory it shows (C:\Program Files\HyCam2) or if you like you can install it somewhere else. Click 'OK' and it's done installing!
Next, we will install GIMP 2.6.0, and the UC-AVI plug-in.
Launch / Open the file "gimp-2.6.0-i686-setup-1" (It should be where you downloaded it to, Desktop, My Documents, etc.) If you like, you can review the information, or just simply press the Next button. Then click "INSTALL NOW" and it will install. You may have to restart your computer for GIMP to finalize installation, but choosing to wait will be best. We will restart after we install the plug-in.
After GIMP is installed, Open / Unzip the file "uc-avi.zip" and Copy "n" Paste the file 'uc-avi.exe' into your GIMP plug-ins directory.
example directory
C:\Program Files\GIMP-2.0\lib\gimp\2.0\plug-ins\
Go to Start, Programs, Windows Explorer (Sometimes Start, Programs, Accessories, Windows Explorer) Or simply press the Windows Key + E. Then navigate to the C:\ Program Files\ GIMP-2.0\ lib\ gimp\2.0\ plug-ins\
That's it. Now when we are ready to use GIMP, we will be able to bring in our .AVI files as multilayer images.
PROGRAM SETUP
The one thing we simply will need to adjust a bit, is to make sure the correct settings are set for Hypercam.
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