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

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.

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



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...

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!


Artist: Huntclaw

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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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.

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!

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 . 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 !



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.



Step 7:

Spoiler:

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.

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

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

Smiling tank:

Coolest tank:

Nope nope nope nope:

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:

Soon!

Soon:

My brand:

Hrrrng:

Ninja:

Dammit Zarhon, you already had a head start. Let me catch up at least.

Gross, ew, no!:

I like where this is going:

Dabuck is that:

Do not get:

oh look, an expansion:

I'm Jelly:

Best Sisters:

Is there a solid deadline for these to be in, or are we just waiting for someone to say stop?

This competition will run for 2 weeks, until 11:59pm EST Sunday the 4th of August, after which voting will occur for another week before prizes are awarded. Smileys are free to be submitted after the deadline, though they will be ineligible for any prizes.

That's what I've written, and I'll be working with that. Submissions at any time up to that point are eligible for prizes.

Oh man, I was hoping this was almost over.... so much work.

EDIT: Added a new one to that last list, to replace the sick, tasteless, depraved mature content that was taken out.

Bronymous wrote:Added a new one to that last list, to replace the sick, tasteless, depraved mature content that was taken out.

The contest wouldn't be very fair for the rest of was if it wasn't!

I know you're the one who reported it, cheater.

No he wasn't actually.
This is really heating up though :o

Woohoo:

I R Excite:

Broked:

Adorapple:

Rainbow's Red Glare:

Here I come to save the Day:

Blown Back:

What's going on in this thread:

Swaggest Pony:

I had a few others I was planning on, but if "oh Hay" got me a warning...

Bah, you beat me to the punch with the salute one. Oh well, upload it anyway, since Rainbow Dash.

We're getting tanked:

Wat:

Words of truth below:

Equestria buck yeah:

Nat20 face:

That's what she said:

Hello thar:

D&D essential tool:

Adventuring 101:

When in doubt, buck it down:

Rocks fall, everypony burns:

Adorappler:

Rawr:

Flutteryay's:

Adorashy: