StarCraft Portrait Editing Tutorial

So, you want to make a Starcraft-campaign, hmm? Well, a good campaign requires good characters and good characters require personality. You need three things to give your character personality : a voice, a past and a new portrait. This tutorial is about the latter : creating new unit portraits, or, more specifically, modifying existing ones. Note that there are other ways to modify portraits. The method described here is one of many, but this tutorial is meant for those of you who have absolutely no experience with portraits or the Starcraft file-system.
I’ve made the occasional note in Italics.-Magic

Required software

In order to extract, convert and modify StarCraft portraits, you’ll need three programs:

• MPQ View
• RAD Video Tools
• A paint-program, like PaintShopPro

MPQ View

Most of the essential data of Starcraft (like sounds and graphics) is stored in so-called MPQ-files. In order to extract the graphics we need, you’ll need the program MPQ View. It is freeware and can be downloaded here : http://www.starcraft.org/downloads/utils/mpqview.zip

Old Smacker Tools

This is the program you’ll need to convert, play and reassemble your extracted .smk-files. There is a newer version available, but it is known to cause certain problems. This program is freeware and can be downloaded here: http://www.radgametools.com/down/smacker/setup.exe

RAD Video Tools

This is the newest version of Smacker tools. Some people have experienced trouble when using this program to create portraits for Starcraft. The program is more powerful than the old smacker tools, but it’s also a little unstable. Use at your own risk! http://www.radgametools.com/down/bink/radtools.exe
I wouldn’t say it’s unstable- it’s just that you need to use the old Smacker tools since smacking it with the new version will make the portrait be either static or fuzzy. I use the new version, since it’s easier to navigate Windows with to find your portraits.-M

Paint Shop Pro

In order to edit the pictures, you’ll need a paint-program. Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop are probably the best, but these programs aren’t freeware. You can use the shareware versions, though. They contain all the features of the retail versions, but you can only use it for a limited amount of time. It can be downloaded from these sites:
Paint Shop Pro: http://www.jasc.com/
Photoshop : http://www.adobe.com/
I personally recommend Paint Shop Pro for the beginner. Both are similar, but I found PSP to be easier to use.-M

Extracting SMKs

OK, now that you’ve got MPQ View, we can start extracting the necessary portraits. In this tutorial we’re going to modify the dragoon’s portrait.

• Open Mpq View.
• Click on ‘Open Archive’
• Browse to your Starcraft directory.
• Select the file StarDat.mpq and open it.

MPQ View will now make a list of all files that are stored in the Mpq you selected. In order to make it a little easier you can choose to display only the .smk files. These are the files you’re looking for right now.

• Scroll down the list and look for the directory ‘portrait\PDragoon’
• Select all files in that directory,.using the shift key. (PDrFid00.smk upto and including PDrTlk02.smk)
• When you have selected all seven files, click ‘save’
• Select the directory where you want the files to be saved
• When asked, choose ‘Keep Structure’. The files will now be saved with the same directory structure as in the MPQ

OK, the files have now been extracted. If you want to extract the sounds or the portraits of Brood War units and heroes, you should open the MPQ file BrooDat.mpq instead of StarDat.mpq.
Similarly, if you want to view or extract the movies (Also Smacker movies) look at the install.exe on the StarCraft or Brood War CD.
Portrait folders: I find it easier to have an archive by having an actual modified portraits folder, with parbiter, tmarine, etc in there. It might be useful to extract all the portraits in the entire Mpq for your convenience. –M

Converting the animations

All we have now is a bunch of animations. Unfortunately, we can’t edit the animations. We can only change the separate frames they’re made of. Now we’re going to use the Old Smacker Tools to convert the animations into bitmaps. I’m not going to tell you about every option of this program, because it is a very powerful tool and you can do an awful lot of ‘stuff’ with it. Instead, I’m just going to tell you, step by step, how you can break down a .smk animation into separate .bmp files. Here we go.

First of all, start Smacker Tools. It should look like this:

• Go to the ‘Graphics Processor’ menu.
• Use the browse window and go to the directory where you’ve extracted the dragoon’s animations.
• Select the first animation, PdrFid00.smk.
• Under ‘Enter the output file name’, click ‘Type’.
• Select output as BMPs
• Click on ‘convert’.
• A dialogue box will appear. Choose ‘No’.
• Smacker Tools will now convert your animation.
• Repeat this process for every animation.

Modifying the portrait

Now you’ll have a directory full of .bmp files. This is where the fun begins. Start your paint program and start changing the things you want to be altered. Here are a couple of tips:

• Load all the .bmp files of one animation at the same time. This is less confusing than opening a single file at a time.
• Write down exactly what you have changed. This way you’ll be able to repeat the process later. You might forget when you start working on other animations.
• Us the ‘repeat’ option of your paint-program. It’s terrible when you have to repeat the same thing over and over again, manually… It’s also wise to use keyboard-shortcuts.
• Don’t change too much, because you have to repeat the same thing for every frame, over and over again. Besides, some portraits that have been modified too much will not look very good in Starcraft. Check out the ‘Hue Map’ command- it lets you swap colours around. E.g. if you change the blues to red in a Hue Map with a Dragoon .bmp, the water-liquid on a Dragoon’s port will be red. The key is to experiment!-M
  
• If you want to know how you can modify your portraits, check the chapters about Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop.
• Play some music while you’re working. Portrait-editing is hard work, but with some music playing in the background it’s a lot less boring! ;-)

A few examples.


Here’s the original Dragoon portrait, the blue version and the red one, which is mirrored.


And what I tend to do is create a number of subdirectories for each portrait- it makes managing the mass of bmp’s for each individual portrait animation much easier. i.e.-
When I recompile the changes, I simply cut and paste the newly created .smk’s into the main directory so I can either zip them or put them all into a portrait directory for usage. The ‘original’ folder is for backing up portraits in case I need to start afresh.-M

Palettes

Now that you have modified your portrait, it is not ready to be made into an animation again. There’s still one thing that needs to be done.

Starcraft uses only a limited amount of colors. It is quite probable that some of the colors you’ve used in your modified portrait are not supported by Starcraft. In order to make your portrait fit in SC, you’ll have to apply the SC color palette to it. You can download it here:
http://www.samods.org/staff/magic/porttut/sc_unit.zip

Now, extract this zip-file to the palette directory of your paint-program. If you don’t know which one that is, try looking for a directory which contains several .pal-files.

Now, load all frames of the modified portrait in your paint-program and apply the sc_unit.pal to them.

Now you’re ready to convert the frames back into an animation.

Putting the animations back together

OK, now that you have modified all portraits and applied the correct palette to them, it’s time to make them into animations. Don’t worry – this won’t be hard…

• Start Smacker Tools (The old ones that is.-M)
• Go to the ‘Smack’ menu.
• Use the browser window and go to the directory in which you have saved your modified portrait.
• Select all frames of a single animation, using the shift key.
• Click ‘Smack’.
• A dialogue window will appear. Click ‘Create List’.
• In the next window, make sure that every frame of your animation is in the box on the left side of the screen.
• Click ‘Save As’.
• Choose a name that you can use to identify the list with, e.g. PdrFid00.lst.
• Click ‘Close’.
• Select the .lst file you just created.
• Click ‘Smack’.

And there it is- your first modified portrait. Now repeat the process for the remaining animations.

Getting the portraits to work in StarCraft

Now, how do you get these modified portraits into Starcraft?

It’s simple. You’ll have to create a directory called ‘portrait’ in your Starcraft directory, e.g. C:\games\Starcraft\portrait

Now it depends on which portrait you want to replace. You’ll have to use the exact same name as Starcraft uses. So, if you want to replace the dragoon’s portrait, you’ll have to put the modified animations in a directory called ‘portrait\pdragoon’. If you’re not sure what the name of the directory should be, the use MPQ-view to find the name of the portrait you’re trying to replace.
For quick testing, simply copy the whole directory over into a starcraft\portrait folder and delete after you’ve checked it out in StarCraft.-M

Appendix 1: Paint Shop Pro

Paint Shop Pro is a widely used program. Some may say that it’s not as advanced as Photoshop, but others will say that it’s a lot more user-friendly than Adobe’s paint-program.

If you’re going to use Paint Shop Pro to edit your portraits, there are a couple of options you may want to try out. I will describe them here.

Most of the editing you’ll do is color-changing. Let’s take a look at the ‘color’ menu. First we see an pull-down menu, labeled ‘adjust’. The sub-menus are described here:

• Use ‘Brightness/Contrast’ in order to make an existing portrait darker or lighter. Play around with it and see what it can do.
• Use ‘Gamma Correction’ to change the balance between the amount of red, blue and green used in the picture.
• Use ‘Highlight/Midtone/Shadow’ to make the portrait darker or brighter.
• Use ‘Hue/Saturation/Lightness’ to change the colors of your portrait. Experiment with it and you may get some impressive results.
• Use ‘HueMap’ to change colors. It’s harder to use than ‘Hue/Saturation/Lightness’, but the results can be even better.
• Use ‘Red/Green/Blue’ to change the balance between these colors in the portrait.

Back to the color-menu :

• Use ‘colorize’ to give your portrait a certain complexion. Experiment with it for the best results.
• ‘Use Grey-Scale’ to make the portrait black and white.

Changing the portrait’s colors is not the only thing you can do with Paint Shop Pro. There’s one more thing that many portrait editors use : mirroring. Choose ‘mirror’ from the ‘image’-menu to do this. It’s an easy way to give a portrait a new look.

It’s important that you experiment a lot with your paint-program. It’s the only way to discover interesting ways to change your portraits. There are many, many options and possibilities. Some may not look as good as the others, but only by experimenting you’ll find the right way to create the portrait you’re looking for.

It may also be advantageous to check out newly created portraits by people and modify them likewise. You can open up campaign mpq’s and extract their portraits in the same way, but make sure you get permission from the author! I believe Joel (Portrait supremo at Campaign Creations) stated that he’ll allow anyone to use his portrait’s in any form without needing to ask him directly, as long as clear credit is given to him.-M

Appendix 2: Photoshop – By Snoopy

Most portraits for Fall of the Gods were created with Adobe Photoshop, which is the ultimate graphics editing tool. Here's a bit of advice for those lucky enough to possess this tool. Note that I was using Photoshop 5.5 and then Photoshop 6.0 beta, and I'll cover the latter...

First of all, input format should be some 24-bit one, so when disassembling an .smk in Smacker Tools, choose, say, BMP. This is important since Photoshop is not designed for working with 256-color files and its abilities are greatly reduced when working with these.

Launch Photoshop and open the files you want. You can open a lot of them at once, which’ll make the whole parade move along a lot faster. I opened the files in batches of 10 (e.g. one former smacker at a time:).

Modifying

Most common tasks in portrait making are mirroring and making a tint, right? So, mirroring is quite simple. From the image menu, choose Rotate Canvas, then Flip Horizontal. That's it. There's an even simpler way - keyboard. Press Alt+I, E, H.
Note that undo option in Photoshop works rather weirdly. If you press Undo (Ctrl+Z) again it will redo the thing you have undone. To really undo past the first action, you will need to choose Step Backward option (Ctrl+Alt+Z). When I first started using PS 6.0 I had a lot of trouble before I found this one.

Now for the tint- select the color in the Color tab of the Color/Swatches/Styles toolbox, if you don't see it choose Show Color from the Window menu. The typical tint is blue, right? The best color is 66/66/255 (RGB), a nice light blue. So, now for applying it. Go to Edit menu, choose Fill (or press Shift+Backspace). Choose the color to be used as filling (Foreground is default and nice). Then choose the mode. Best modes to use are Soft Light, Overlay and Screen. Choose the desired opacity (the higher this value the more color is applied to the image). In other to fill a certain area, select it first using Magic Wand Tool, it will select the areas by guessing which area is really which (by color similarity I think). If you find the selection is too broad, reduce the value in Tolerance box.

Just one other effect that can be handy - Lens Flare filter, accessible from Filter menu, Render category. It creates some sort of light source, this is the way I added eyes to an archon. There are three "lens" types: '50-300 mm Zoom', '35 mm Prime' and '100 mm Prime'. Experiment with them, they yield different results in different conditions, but the first two seem to produce red light and the third one - white light. That is, if you use them with mediocre brightness (like 100-150%).

Saving

Now for saving it. Usually 24-bit images reduced to 256 color look hellava messed up, right? Not with Photoshop, if you do it right! To save it right go to File menu, choose Save for the Web (or press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S instead). The window 'Save for the Web' will open up. Click on Original and then on Optimized tab to see what the image looked like as 24-bit and then what it will look once saved as 256-color. Usually, the visible difference will be little to none, hail Adobe! Choose GIF format, and don't mess with other options. Press OK and the Save Optimized As dialog box will appear. Click Save and you're set. Close the image and ignore the message prompting you to save the image, unless you want to have another (24-bit) duplicate to be saved. By that time the GIF should be saved already. Rinse, repeat for every image. If you close Photoshop properly (which means not killing it with Task Manager:)), the current color and dialog box (including Fill) settings will be saved and thus reusable.

Good luck.

- Snoopy