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Smiley Thread! [New Submission 14/9/13]

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Post  Pingcode Tue Jul 16, 2013 12:49 pm

New Smiley for comment: Smiley Thread! [New Submission 14/9/13] UZwFlkU

---

Finished Competition:


Last edited by Pingcode on Sat Sep 14, 2013 6:06 am; edited 9 times in total
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Post  LoganAura Tue Jul 16, 2013 1:06 pm

Right, I'm going to implement the smilies as best as I can once the competiton has ended and also impliment a couple of Custom Titles

The one who wins the poster's choice gets "Smile Like you Mean It."
The one who creates the most smilies gets "Smile Smile Smile"
And the one who wins Moderator's Choice gets a title of their choice!
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Post  Zarhon Tue Jul 16, 2013 3:27 pm

How do we make the smiley's in question? Any image format? Is cropping/shrinking of a image enough, or is pixel-work required? Optimal / restricted size of the smileys?

Can we use other people's work as a basis (e.g. the head portion of another vector), or do we need author approval + proper credit? Are the only vectors "allowed" the ones from the show itself or ones we make/draw ourselves?
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Post  A1C Bronymous Tue Jul 16, 2013 3:31 pm

Is there any way for those of us who are not Photoshop savvy to contribute?
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Post  Zarhon Tue Jul 16, 2013 3:37 pm

Bronymous wrote:Is there any way for those of us who are not Photoshop savvy to contribute?
Pick/crop the parts you want in the smiley and submit the thing, hoping the mods/whoever's implementing the smileys shrink and touch it up?
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Post  A1C Bronymous Tue Jul 16, 2013 3:58 pm

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Post  Stairc -Dan Felder Tue Jul 16, 2013 4:23 pm

Note: Naturally, the Title of Your Choice is subject to moderator approval.
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Post  LoganAura Tue Jul 16, 2013 4:41 pm

Stairc -Dan Felder wrote:Note: Naturally, the Title of Your Choice is subject to moderator approval.

Well of course :U No way we're going to let someone have cuss words or the like as their title.

Zarhon: Any image format and size is fine, as long as they can shrink down relatively well. And you can use other people's art with their permission.

Brony: as zarhon said. I generally use paint myself.
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Post  Zarhon Tue Jul 16, 2013 5:27 pm

Here's a few of my submissions! Shrunk most of them to a somewhat-smiley size, and added transparency. They're all vectors others isolated/made cause I suck at arts. Asked for permission for the non-show / non-resource ones, waiting for replies.

Don't ignore Pinkie:
Dat Lyra:
Cutie Marks:
Obligatory Derpy:
Changelings:
The horror!:
He he hee:

Edit: Two more animations. Both Mr. Poniator's, who gave approval:
Hâagen DaszBloom, Awkward dance:


Last edited by Zarhon on Wed Jul 24, 2013 10:57 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Post  Pingcode Thu Jul 18, 2013 12:37 am

The intent of the 'must be your own work to be eligible for prizes' is to be fair to the people interested in putting together their own smileys from existing works - with the value of the prizes I'm by no means expecting original work coming out for it, but taking pre-made smileys and submitting them would make the competition about who can find the best smileys instead of who can make the best smileys.

So try whatever you like because right now there's not a lot of competition and even making a token effort could net you one of the prizes!
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Post  Paper Shadow Thu Jul 18, 2013 5:23 pm

I don't always use smilies (mostly because I wish to put 8s just before a closing bracket without having it changed to a smiley complete with deal-with-it sunglasses), but when I do, I wish for them to be used to gloat about my success/failure in the luck department...

Smiley Thread! [New Submission 14/9/13] VMwoP2VSmiley Thread! [New Submission 14/9/13] ZFtjyUh

I can make more and/or make them bigger if there is demand...
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Post  A1C Bronymous Thu Jul 18, 2013 5:30 pm

So does that mean mine are officially submitted, or do I absolutely need to do all the cropping myself?
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Post  LoganAura Thu Jul 18, 2013 11:56 pm

I personally would say crop them yourself.
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Post  Pingcode Fri Jul 19, 2013 1:55 am

Well, they can be taken as is, but I have a feeling they probably won't make the cut for smiley. I recommend giving cropping it down and doing transparency a shot - it's not as hard as it sounds, and it'll be much nicer that way.
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Post  A1C Bronymous Fri Jul 19, 2013 2:06 am

It is as hard as it sounds, actually, when you don't have any idea how to do it. Extremely tedious without the proper tools, and the end result is barely passable. I got one done, but then I accidentally saved it as a jpeg, which gave it an opaque background again, which means I basically have to do it over.
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Post  Pingcode Fri Jul 19, 2013 4:07 am

Bronymous wrote:It is as hard as it sounds, actually, when you don't have any idea how to do it. Extremely tedious without the proper tools, and the end result is barely passable. I got one done, but then I accidentally saved it as a jpeg, which gave it an opaque background again, which means I basically have to do it over.

Good point - I'll put a tutorial together later tonight.
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Post  Paper Shadow Fri Jul 19, 2013 10:05 pm

I remade my previous submissions to make them bigger...

Smiley Thread! [New Submission 14/9/13] WSTHbqpSmiley Thread! [New Submission 14/9/13] WWUsaQD

I tried making one of the other dice into a smiley, but it doesn't look as smooth, and I worry how the other sizes would look, so I decided not to...
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Post  Zarhon Fri Jul 19, 2013 10:50 pm

Hm, do OC's fit for smiley's? Got my avatar picture (of Shallow Vibe from the Grand Line Adventures campaign). Picture was made for me by a friend of mine. It's smiling, to boot!

Smiley Thread! [New Submission 14/9/13] UANidJr
Artist: Huntclaw
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Post  Paper Shadow Fri Jul 19, 2013 10:56 pm

Zarhon wrote:Hm, do OC's fit for smiley's? Got my avatar picture (of Shallow Vibe from the Grand Line Adventures campaign). Picture was made for me by a friend of mine. It's smiling, to boot!
Initially I was going to go around looking for player's characters to draw for smilies, but I decided against it for obvious reasons...
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Post  A1C Bronymous Sat Jul 20, 2013 6:43 pm

Smiley Thread! [New Submission 14/9/13] <a href=Smiley Thread! [New Submission 14/9/13] Smiley10" />

So there's the fruits of my labors. Note the obvious pixelation and hard corners on her face and hair.

Waiting on that tutorial, but I really think someone else should do it.
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Post  Pingcode Sun Jul 21, 2013 5:57 am

My Little Guide To Smileys

Okay, so there's been some concern on the difficulty of making smileys, so let's go through the process of making a smiley. We'll start with the proverbial first cab off the rank, Very Happy! Very Happy

For this tutorial, I'm using Paint.NET, a paint program that implements a number of basic features omitted from standard MS Paint (such as Layers, the Magic Wand tool, and undo control), and while rudimentary it gets the job done nicely - and importantly, for free.

Step 1: Find the right shot

Not every shot is right for making a smiley - you want to pick a good shot for making into a smiley, or your job will be very difficult and there's a good chance it won't look right at the end. You also want to take the shot at as high a resolution and at as high a quality as you can reasonably manage. A high def picture will mean less work making it look good and more leeway for slight errors in your work - shaving off one more pixel than you should off a 12 pixel width line is much less noticeable than the same off a three or four pixel width line with artifacts.

For our :Dsmiley, I started with looking for good shots of the party pony, Pinkie Pie - she's smiling a lot, and in fact has a song all about smiling. As luck would have it, one presented itself right at the beginning of Smile Smile Smile. I cropped the image using the Snipping Tool, available standard with Windows 7 under Start > All Programs > Accessories > Snipping Tool. Other options include Alt + Print Screen, which will capture an entire window.

Spoiler:
This first shot is an example of a bad shot to try and make a smiley out of - her teeth are beginning to shine and bleed out into the environment, it will be very difficult to get a good looking smiley out of this without manually cleaning away the shine and that won't necessarily work too well. Instead, I dialled back a little further and took a shot in the split second before the shine.

Spoiler:
This one's a lot nicer - Nice high resolution, no immediately obvious artifacting, and a clean shot to work with. This would be even better if I had a better source than youtube, but you work with what you've got and I don't got.

Step 2: Decide what you'll keep and crop down

For this step you want to think about how much you want to crop out of the image, and size it down accordingly. For most ponies, if you're removing the neck you should crop the mane down to the forelock, while if you want to keep the mane keep the neck. It varies on a case by case basis, but in general you want to avoid losing the 'essence' of the character's look.

Spoiler:
In this case, I'll opt to keep the neck and mane. Pinkie can work as a disembodied head, but the posing of the mane makes it difficult to remove it without losing excessive amounts of her hair.

Step 3: Crop away the background

Now we need to start work on the background. Select the Magic Wand tool (selected in the below image) and control-click on all the parts of the image you want. The tolerance determines how far off a patch can be before being excluded by the magic wand - you want this to be high enough that you get the whole pony. You can also use the Lasso tool (second from top, on left) to collect any stray internal bits that haven't been selected due to artifacting or borders or whatnot. Better programs tend to be more intelligent about this, but any errors the magic wand makes can be corrected later.

Spoiler:
Here's the selection. Now we can Invert our selection (Ctrl-I) and hit Delete to remove everything we don't want.

Spoiler:
And here's the result! Note that our magic wand deletion wasn't perfect -that's to be expected, we can't expect a program to substitute for a human yet.To make it easier to see where the problem spots are, we're going to create a white under-layer so we can see what we're erasing.

Open the Layers window (F7), and create a new layer Smiley Thread! [New Submission 14/9/13] FWWZRzl. Fill the layer completely in white, and then place it under the background layer (our image). We should end up with something like this:

Spoiler:

Now we can wipe away the garbage left over from the background. Select the background again and use the Eraser tool to remove the leftover undesired trim, at as high a size as you can. Don't worry about the edges of the smiley, we'll come to those later. There's also a few little bits where we've lost more than we wanted to - we can fix those later as well.

Spoiler:

Now we've cleaned up the worst of it, and we can move on to fine tuning. Optionally, you can change the underlayer to black as well, and wipe away any light pixels you may have missed.

Step 4: Edge Cleanup

Now here comes the tougher part: Cleaning up the edges.

Start by zooming out completely - look for any parts that are really obviously off-colour. For this image, the most obvious is the patch around the forelock, and the slight discolouration from a pink beam near the neck. So we'll be going after those.

Spoiler:

Take the eraser tool, set it to as large as you can afford (here I used size 9 initially, shrinking it as I got closer to the edge.)

Spoiler:

Now that we're done cleaning that up, we still have the problem of pixels missing. No problem! These are ponies, we can just paint over the holes. Take the eyedropper tool, and select the outline.

Spoiler:

Now, take the paintbrush tool, set it to a decent size, and paint over the gaps.

Spoiler:

Congratulations! Now we have a large smiley ready for resizing.

Step 5: Resizing

Now we just resize it! Hit Ctrl-R and resize it so its height is approximately 50px - we want these to be usable in conversation, after all!

Meet Pinkie Very Happy!

Smiley Thread! [New Submission 14/9/13] 43wRYtd

Step 6: Line Darkening

Now there's a final step that we want - right now thanks to the shrinking process our pink party pony's outlines are too thin, and hard to see in places. So what we need to do is darken them down a little.

Create a new layer on top of your smiley (the small one) and set it up to darken the lines.

Spoiler:
The settings I used. Not a hard and fast rule, experiment and see what works.

Then, using the eyedropper and the large version of the image, go over the smiley on your darkening layer, thickening any lines that seem to be indistinct so they're nice and clear. No need to overdo it, just as much as is necessary. Spots to keep an eye on are the ears, any mane designs, and the nose + snout lines (on forward facing ponies), which usually don't have the width or contrast to survive shrinking.

Smiley Thread! [New Submission 14/9/13] MC18jx3

Step 7:Smiley Thread! [New Submission 14/9/13] MC18jx3Smiley Thread! [New Submission 14/9/13] MC18jx3Smiley Thread! [New Submission 14/9/13] MC18jx3

Spoiler:


Last edited by Pingcode on Sun Jul 21, 2013 1:39 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Post  Zarhon Sun Jul 21, 2013 1:01 pm

Neat tutorial. I kinda did something similar, apart from the darkening and the background cropping. I don't think the lasso tool works quite well enough to get rid of the artifacts in GIMP. I'd just use "color select" to pick out the artifact colors and delete em, with varying degrees of success.

Although, I'm not sure how complex paint.net is compared to GIMP, but I personally found it a rather hellish process to get around the interface aspects  of it (e.g. finicky selection, layers acting stupid on you, and other complexities, rather than the actual method of isolating the image....) before I could go about decent image manipulation.

And I notice you didn't mention at all how to apply transparency to the picture (or does paint.net do that automatically? The way I see it, that picture would be against a white background, which would look a bit ugly with the forum's bluish colors).

I think I'll try making three more smileys out of screenshots.
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Post  A1C Bronymous Sun Jul 21, 2013 4:25 pm

I was using Paint, but I was just doing my best to erase everything around the face I don't want. Paint is easy in a sense that its Microsoft paint, with all the ridiculous tools and options of Photoshop that no one knows how to use, but slightly different, so that Photoshop users have a a hard time with it, occasionally.

When you crop and cut, it does give you a transparent background, though, so at least I have that. I'll try again on a bigger face, may have to find a better example of that face than Luna.

EDIT: Magic Wand is terrible. How do I add to a selection with it without it undoing or destroying something already selected? NVM


Last edited by Bronymous on Sun Jul 21, 2013 5:23 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Post  Zarhon Sun Jul 21, 2013 5:11 pm

Made some smileys! Not quite satisfied with the tank ones, though...

Smiling tank:
Coolest tank:
Nope nope nope nope:
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Post  A1C Bronymous Sun Jul 21, 2013 5:36 pm

So one thing that you should add to that tutorial is a better explanation of the Magic Wand Tolerance, and an optimal setting for it. For this one, there was an extra hour of work going through and adding individual pixels along borders within the face to the selection. It seemed to be a one or the other kind of issue, where too low (not selecting all of the pixels, and causing extra work), and too high (Selecting all of the face pixels and most of the background as well, defeating the purpose) were about 1% of tolerance apart. Your pic didn't have any pixels unselected from the face, so how did you do that? Oh THAT'S how the lasso works.

Schemey Belle:

Trixie Creep:

DEEEEEEEEEEEEERP:

Rarity- You done?:

So Much Yay!:

Getting easier now. Practice.
Luna's Neighborhood:

Annoyed:

Dohoho Friendship:
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