User talk:TehCheat
Hello, TehCheat!
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-- WelcomeBOT (talk) 00:03, 9 December 2021 (UTC)
Images
Hi. Welcome to the Wiki. I have seen you made some images on HLMV, they look pretty good, especially in the facial flex department. Although, I'm here to mention that the Brain Cane picture is using low-res textures. I suggest you downloading a pre-configured dxsupport.cfg and extracting to your "Steam\steamapps\common\Team Fortress 2\" folder (make sure to back yours first, just in case). The .cfg must go inside the "bin" folder. This will ensure that high quality textures (and anti-aliasing) will be applied. Warning: Any time you check the integrity of files via Steam, the dxsupport.cfg will go back to default, you'll have to replace it again if you do that.
Additionally, check the Program limitations part of the Help:HLMV page. There's a few things you may want to install to fix a couple of things on HLMV, the more important ones being the "Fire texture", "Cubemaps" and "hlp_forearm_L and hlp_forearm_R" packs. I do know that you are not using the Cubemaps pack due to one of your User images. However, because of the nature of User images, you don't really need to replace it with proper cubemaps (unless you want), it's just the ideal and consistent way we have been doing images here on the Wiki.
The "Skybox texture" pack will let you do images more quickly, by using the Ctrl+B hotkey to switch from black to white backgrounds (make sure to set your background color to white whenever you load a new model).
Feel free to ask me any questions on my Steam comments section, but please don't add me. I've paused a bit of activity on the Wiki after having helped a lot of people here, especially on the image department. I will gladly help you get into the inner workings of HLMV, as well a few other things I haven't mentioned on this post. 
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21:13, 10 December 2021 (UTC)
- Hi Gabriel, thank you for the suggestions regarding my HLMV images! I've also talked to some helpful people in the IRC and they gave me some advice too. The first Brain Cane image I made was created before I configured my dxsupport.cfg. After talking with the users at the IRC, I installed the replacement dxsupport.cfg as well as some of the tools used by other image editors (namely the forearm fix, the cubemaps, the fire texture fix).
- Thank you for the welcome, and I will ask questions about images if needed.
- You're welcome. I just wanted to mention a few other things:
- Always crop your image when you are done removing the background. If you use GIMP as the image editor, you can go to Image -> Crop to Content, it will automatically remove all empty areas. You can also bind hotkeys to the "Crop to Selection" and "Crop to Content" utilities (go to Edit -> Keyboard Shortcuts and search "crop"). I have mine set for the 2 and 3 keys, respectively. You can select the area from HLMV's window, press 2, and then press 3, and presto, the image is ready (if the two images are identical with the exception of the background color, after deleting the background and lower layer, you can press 2 and 3 to crop, without having to manually select with the square selection). This is actually very handy;
- Avoid cropping images on the sides, only crop from the bottom. For pants/shoes related items, you should focus the cosmetic on the infobox image (the one of the right), but the Gallery section having them zoomed out (see Mann of the House, Flashdance Footies and Robin Walkers). When in doubt, you can ask me or look up for other images on the Wiki and see how they look;
- Don't use weapons that aren't stock, as well do not add attachments like Festivizers, Botkillers, Australium versions, War Paints, and so on. Don't use Festive weapons of stock weapons either. It's important to keep the images clean and to not confuse newcomers to the game by having too much going on in the picture, as well to keep it consistent with the rest of the images on the Wiki. You can see how in the Weapon Demonstration videos we also only keep the weapon that is being demonstrated, with 0 cosmetics equipped;
- It's incredibly important the order of the layers you load in GIMP. First load the picture with the white background, then drag-n-drop the black background one. The black background picture should be at the top layer. Why is this important? If you do in reverse, the anti-aliasing will be colored white, and the picture will have some white "freckles" around the class.
- Also, you can just use the ":" (colon punctation) to reply in talks like these. If you plan to reply this, then, it would be three colons one after the other ":::". - ▪ - 22:44, 10 December 2021 (UTC)
- Also, you can just use the ":" (colon punctation) to reply in talks like these. If you plan to reply this, then, it would be three colons one after the other ":::".
- Thank you for letting me know. I am now aware of my mistakes and I will work on improving them. I have GIMP installed, but I use Paint.NET as my primary image-editing software. I have a plugin that removes backgrounds and softens the edges a bit more. I will switch to GIMP for any future HLMV images and try the practices you suggested.
- I also apologize for using Festive weapons in the images, I will use stock from now on. Once again, thank you for pointing these things out! I hope to improve on these things.
