My first piece of cc!
Mar. 15th, 2010 09:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
katrisimsSo have I been procastrinating again? Yes, I have! And it has produced a result!
So, I played more with screenshots. I installed Gadwin, and found out I much, much prefer it over Fraps. First, it gives me reasonable sized jpges instead of rediculous sized bmps. And second, I don't know how, but I think the pictures are all around prettier too. Here's an example from my photoshoot hood:
I actually liked this one enough so that I decided to do what I've been wanting to do for a while now: make a custom painting out of it. I followed this tutorial by Ndainye, and managed to get the result show up in game - go me! Baudolino seems to approve:
Or at least he approves of the woohoo he had with Marylena the last time I played them.
And he would be right, that is a recolor of Bella squared. I could have picked a bigger frame for a picture with so many sims, but remembering and guessing what is how big was surprisingly difficult. I might redo it with a bigger frame some time, but for now I'm quite pleased with the result. I'm definitely not going to be a cc creator, I think copypasting a picture on top of another is pretty much on the limit of what I can manage. ;) But it's nice to manage this little piece of magic nevertheless.
With that being done and said, I started thinking maybe I actually should try to use Gadwin for all my game pictures. After all, with that I can get reasonably sized jpegs, and I quite like the results. I had a look at my converted chapters, and am a little bummed about the picture quality degeneration on Slideshare. On my machine, the in-game camera shots look fine even when I fullscreen the pdf, but on Slideshare I can see some fuzziness coming in. Maybe it's just that I look at my own work with a critical eye, but somehow other people's pictures look prettier than mine...
Of course, with Gadwin, there are a couple of things that I'd need to figure out. First, I'd need to find out whether I should resize the pictures for the chapters, or if just stuffing it into the correctly sized box in Open Office Impress does the same thing. I'll simply need to test that one out. If I need to resize, I think I'd best use a batch resizing program, handling closer to 150 pictures per update would probably drive me batty if I did it by hand... On a related note, I should also get rid of the action icons that show up on all of my todays uploads, too. I know that can be done by editing the picture, but I'm not very skilled at that, and again, hand-editing all pictures for all updates is not something I'd look forward to doing.
So, I have a question (or maybe two) for you all. What is it that you use for your simming pictures? The in-game camera, Gadwin, Fraps, something else? And what do you do with them so that they look good in the updates? Resize, edit out things, edit otherwise, yet something? And finally, if you do some of these, are there tricks that you do to make them less tedious? Any thoughts and advice would be appreciated. =)
In the end, have yet an adorable picture which shows I think pretty well why I'm liking my experimentation.
Oh, and the chapter? Well that's progressing too. I'm now on slide seventy-something, and have shot my Sal scenes for this chapter as well. This one has taken me way longer than it should have, but maybe I'll actually get it posted some time in this decade or so.
So, I played more with screenshots. I installed Gadwin, and found out I much, much prefer it over Fraps. First, it gives me reasonable sized jpges instead of rediculous sized bmps. And second, I don't know how, but I think the pictures are all around prettier too. Here's an example from my photoshoot hood:
I actually liked this one enough so that I decided to do what I've been wanting to do for a while now: make a custom painting out of it. I followed this tutorial by Ndainye, and managed to get the result show up in game - go me! Baudolino seems to approve:
Or at least he approves of the woohoo he had with Marylena the last time I played them.
And he would be right, that is a recolor of Bella squared. I could have picked a bigger frame for a picture with so many sims, but remembering and guessing what is how big was surprisingly difficult. I might redo it with a bigger frame some time, but for now I'm quite pleased with the result. I'm definitely not going to be a cc creator, I think copypasting a picture on top of another is pretty much on the limit of what I can manage. ;) But it's nice to manage this little piece of magic nevertheless.
With that being done and said, I started thinking maybe I actually should try to use Gadwin for all my game pictures. After all, with that I can get reasonably sized jpegs, and I quite like the results. I had a look at my converted chapters, and am a little bummed about the picture quality degeneration on Slideshare. On my machine, the in-game camera shots look fine even when I fullscreen the pdf, but on Slideshare I can see some fuzziness coming in. Maybe it's just that I look at my own work with a critical eye, but somehow other people's pictures look prettier than mine...
Of course, with Gadwin, there are a couple of things that I'd need to figure out. First, I'd need to find out whether I should resize the pictures for the chapters, or if just stuffing it into the correctly sized box in Open Office Impress does the same thing. I'll simply need to test that one out. If I need to resize, I think I'd best use a batch resizing program, handling closer to 150 pictures per update would probably drive me batty if I did it by hand... On a related note, I should also get rid of the action icons that show up on all of my todays uploads, too. I know that can be done by editing the picture, but I'm not very skilled at that, and again, hand-editing all pictures for all updates is not something I'd look forward to doing.
So, I have a question (or maybe two) for you all. What is it that you use for your simming pictures? The in-game camera, Gadwin, Fraps, something else? And what do you do with them so that they look good in the updates? Resize, edit out things, edit otherwise, yet something? And finally, if you do some of these, are there tricks that you do to make them less tedious? Any thoughts and advice would be appreciated. =)
In the end, have yet an adorable picture which shows I think pretty well why I'm liking my experimentation.
Oh, and the chapter? Well that's progressing too. I'm now on slide seventy-something, and have shot my Sal scenes for this chapter as well. This one has taken me way longer than it should have, but maybe I'll actually get it posted some time in this decade or so.
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no subject
Date: Mar. 15th, 2010 08:06 pm (UTC)I use the in-game camera to take pictures. Then again, my laptop isn't exactly using a high-end graphics card, so I'm not going to get super-crisp, clean pictures no matter what I use.
I take the snapshots at 600x450. In Impress, I set the picture size at 8.333"x6.25". At least for my computer, that seems to make the large snapshots not degrade when viewed fullscreen. On better computers, I have no idea.
no subject
Date: Mar. 15th, 2010 08:42 pm (UTC)Aha, so I'm not the only one who's been working just with the in-game camera, phew!
Hmm... I take the snapshots as 600x450 too. I tried to do a little bit of a comparison, and to my eye it would seem that your pictures are clearer than mine on Slideshare. And at least by eyeballing, our pictures are the same size... I think I should yet check the sizes in Impress, to be sure I'm not trying to stretch them or so.
Thanks a lot for the input! I think I'll be playing around with Impress and Slideshare a bit in the near future, to see what kind of pictures work best for me.
Oh, and for a reference for myself: to get rid of the action queues, it works to go to cameraman mode from buy mode - the design tool (R) removes the grid. (The falling tutorial by Ndainye revealed me that.)
no subject
Date: Mar. 16th, 2010 03:00 am (UTC)I use the in game camera for update pictures, but only because I don't want to have to edit around pause lines and queue icons. I do use Gadwin for any cc pictures I take though. They are just so must prettier that way!
Your family picture looks great.
no subject
Date: Mar. 16th, 2010 04:22 pm (UTC)Ah, it's kind of relieving to hear that I'm not the only one who's using the in-game camera still. I have to check out my size settings in Impress, so I don't so anything that accidentally degrades the quality...
In any case, I might actually consider swapping to Gadwin entirely. The pause lines and queue icons were a problem for me too, but for the pause lines there is a hack, and the queue icons disappear in buy mode (the design tool hides the grid), so there's a workaround. I might see if I'd be patient enough to do that, as there is so much prettiness in the Gadwin pictures!
Thanks! I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out, especially for a first try. =)