Here are a few advanced techniques I use for painting cars with
JASC's Paint Shop pro 5. Now, all these require that you do your car editing at 640x400 and in 16 million colors. That means when you're done you'll have to merge all the layers, resize the car to 320x200, and then load the N2 palette. Then you'll have to cut the white part with the car out, and paste it on a valid PCX file that will work in the game. Just so ya know :)
- Filling something with a texture.
First, make sure that the area you want to fill is selected (has the 'marching ants' around it), otherwise you won't get the edges of your shape or number. Choose the Fill tool, and choose 'Pattern' in the options box. Now click 'OPTIONS'. The second drop-down menu will let you select any of the currently open images as your fill texture, so make sure you've already opened the image you want to use as your texture. Now just choose the one you want and fill in your selection. :)
- Outlining numbers This one's a little complicated, but read and follow this carefully and you'll get it. :)
This requires at least 2 layers on top of your background image. So create 2 new layers, and choose the top-most one in the Layers Option Box.
1) Now, use the Text tool to create a number. Click OK once you've got the font and size you want. Now, make sure you don't right click, you want to keep the little marching ants around the number(s). Now, this is the time to fill your number with a texture, run a filter on it, etc.
2) Now, hit CTRL-SHIFT-F. This will 'defloat' the selection. Basically, this makes it so you can use the selection area on every layer. You don't have to 'defloat' more than once, just select whichever layer you want to make changes to. Once it's defloated, it's defloated for all the layers. :)
3) Now, go up to the 'selection' menu, choose 'modify-expand'. This will expand the selection in each direction. If you choose 1 pixel, it will expand it by 1 pixel, 3 expands by 3 pixels and so on. I usually do my numbers big to start with and then resize them to fit the car once I'm done. I usually choose about 120 pt for most numbers. Expanding by about 5 or 6 will work nicely. Just play around with it 'till you find settings you like. ;)
4) Now activate the next layer down by clicking on it in the 'Layers' palette, and fill the area with your outline color (say, black). Voila, you'll see the number and it's outline. You can do as many different outlines as you want, just do another layer underneath, click the next layer down and do 'modify-expand' again. Now fill with another color and you'll have a second outline. Make sure you make the outlines thick enough that they'll show up on the game. I usually don't do more than 2 outlines, it doesn't show up well otherwise. :) Also, make sure you have enough layers for the top number and all the outlines. DO NOT try to do a fill on the background image when doing this. hehe
5) Now, click the little colored button next to the 'background' layer in the layer options box, this will make the car invisible. Now, right click on one of the layers in the options box, and select 'merge-merge visible'. That will smash your top layers together and keep the resulting merged layer separate from the bottom one. Now hit CTRL-X to copy the number to the clipboard. Click on your background layer (with the car on it) to make it visible again, and use CTRL-V (paste) to place your number on the car as many times as needed. Move, rotate and resize as necessary. :)
That oughtta be enough to keep you busy for quite some time. If you bought Paint Shop Pro, you'll definitely want to read the section about Layers in the manual. They're a little hard to explain. Basically, each layer is like a transparent sheet of paper. You can edit each one separate from the others, then mash certain ones, or all of them, together. You can move the contents of one around, while the contents of another stay put (using that black arrow cross tool). It's VERY handy. There isn't much I don't do without them anymore. Just keep working and experimenting, try not to get frustrated, and you'll do fine. :)
Good luck with these, once you've got them, you'll have a pretty good handle on what's needed to do cars like I do them.
Have a good one!!
- FREEZ
