I've another noob question.

[YoshiGaming]

So, a couple weeks back I said that I was designing a ship of my own, and that I needed help actually figuring out which program was best (thanks for the help guys, I appreciate it!) and I've finished the hull, but for the past couple of weeks I have been struggling to create a cloaking image for it, since I again, don't really know how to get the specific cloak parts or change the colour of the ship using GIMP or anything. (It's hopefully pretty obvious that this is still a new concept to me - normally I would use premade ships from the core game and any installed mods.)

Side note: I would leave a picture of the finished hull here, but for whatever reason it keeps saying "Sorry, the board attachment quota has been reached" no matter how I attempt to place in the picture. If anyone knows a workaround for this, then please tell me so that a picture can be left here so you can at least see what the ship looks like.

[stylesrj]

I think there was a tutorial somewhere in the General Questions thread that explains how to make a cloak but it's so many pages buried deep.

So I did a quick search for "cloak image" (include quotes) and I found this one by Steamtex:

My method:

Colors:
Grey (goes on top) - c6c6c6
Blue (goes on bottom and is blurred) - 1c8795

Directions:

Make/acquire your ship's outline somehow. I won't help you with this part.

Make the outline of the ship the grey color provided above. Easy enough.

Duplicate that layer which should just have the grey outline. Recolor the duplicate with the blue color.

Apply Gaussian blur (15 x 15 pixels) to the blue layer. Duplicate it and merge the two blue layers.

Apply Gaussian blur (15 x 15 or 20 x 20 pixels) to the blue layer. Move the grey layer to the top.

Export/save the image.

It's not my method but it works well enough I suppose.

My method is something like:

Make the image black and white.
Brighten it up.
Select all the white bits with the colour select tool and delete them.
Colorise the remaining outline blue.

I think I'm missing a step somewhere in the middle though or I have it in the wrong order. It's been a while since I made a cloaking image.

If you don't know how to do any of that, look at the menus at the top. There's a colorise tool under one of them (which by default will put things to blue if you don't touch any of the sliders), brightness controls and an option which turns the ship Black & White.

[YoshiGaming]

I think there was a tutorial somewhere in the General Questions thread that explains how to make a cloak but it's so many pages buried deep.

So I did a quick search for "cloak image" (include quotes) and I found this one by Steamtex:

My method:

Colors:
Grey (goes on top) - c6c6c6
Blue (goes on bottom and is blurred) - 1c8795

Directions:

Make/acquire your ship's outline somehow. I won't help you with this part.

Make the outline of the ship the grey color provided above. Easy enough.

Duplicate that layer which should just have the grey outline. Recolor the duplicate with the blue color.

Apply Gaussian blur (15 x 15 pixels) to the blue layer. Duplicate it and merge the two blue layers.

Apply Gaussian blur (15 x 15 or 20 x 20 pixels) to the blue layer. Move the grey layer to the top.

Export/save the image.

It's not my method but it works well enough I suppose.

My method is something like:

Make the image black and white.
Brighten it up.
Select all the white bits with the colour select tool and delete them.
Colorise the remaining outline blue.

I think I'm missing a step somewhere in the middle though or I have it in the wrong order. It's been a while since I made a cloaking image.

If you don't know how to do any of that, look at the menus at the top. There's a colorise tool under one of them (which by default will put things to blue if you don't touch any of the sliders), brightness controls and an option which turns the ship Black & White.

Thanks, I appreciate the help you've given, it's really helped me create the ship! Now all I'll need to do is throw the thing into Superluminal and apply the cloak image. So again, thanks(and sorry for bothering you with the questions that's probably been answered a load of times)!

[stylesrj]

Eh, I wish we had the tutorial stickied because it is a common question and I have a vague memory on how it's done. So it'd be a good way for both of us to know.

[mr_easy_money]

I see this question has already been answered, but there's a method I found on http://toothycat.net/~hologram/FTL/Ship ... orial.html that works perfectly. The tutorial is pre-AE but most things are the same. The focus of this question is the cloak image which is at "Step 10: Make a Cloak Image" on the tutorial.

Let's get to it!
The following is a step-by-step sequence of GIMP commands
Note: I'm not sure why it tells you to "increase the layer size numbers by 20". I think it's trying to tell you that the cloak image should be larger than the ship image so that there are margins, but doing this step just makes the cloak image bigger than the ship and doesn't fit the ship at all

Code: Select all

    Open the ship image
    Layer -> Layer Size -> increase numbers by 20
    Image -> Fit Canvas to Layers
    Filter -> Edge Detect -> Laplace
    Press Shift-O for the Select by Colour tool
    Click a transparent bit of image
    Selection -> Invert
    Fill tool, set tool options to fill whole selection, fill selection with colour #f3f3f3
    Layer -> Duplicate Layer
    Page Down to select the lower layer
    Selection -> Grow -> 1 pixel
    Selection -> Feather -> 5 pixels
    Fill whole selection with colour #57c8fd
    Set lower layer opacity to 50%
    Export image as myship_cloak.png into your mod's img/ship directory

[YoshiGaming]

Thanks for all the help everyone! This has really helped, as well as the help from my last post about actually making the hull itself(thanks for that too styles )! Now all I've got to do is put the thumbnail in, and since the last time I did that somehow broke it, I'll get to work getting it to work. Sorry about taking so long on this and not actually replying, I've not been on my PC since The Division released, plus school exams don't really help either. But anyway, thanks for all the help! I'm hoping to have the mod itself up soon!

[Braxbro]

There are many ways to do it. I may be new to modding, but I actually like the effect of over-sharpening the image, clearing away everything of the original ship (other than the outlines, of course) coloring the leftover outline blue (light), filling in all the blank space with a slightly transparent blue color which I then put the original ship under, giving the original image transparency until I like the image. I use the white outlines on the outlines to make a glow effect for the outlines. Works decently, but not quite happy with it.

Done in Gimp.

If you like that style, then feel free to use it...

I won't be.