PVGames Resource Pack Tips and Tricks

Well then there is a problem :)


best would be to maybe then go for a Plugin that lets you control animation, and which is compatible with Yanfly  vic aftermath. no idea if there is one yet.


If you find something let us know, might be useful for all PVers.

Hey all. Since I was asked on my recent status, here are some of my tips on getting the best out of these resources. For now I'll just concentrate on working with busts, faces, and paperdoll character pieces. Enjoy.


1. Make Up





There are several ways to get the make up effect, and it depends on the image editing software. Here are some of the ways, which you can even combine:


- Lipstick: increasing saturation of the lip area (with some darkening and contrast effect, it can look even better)


- Lipstick: using recolour tool or the equivalent to change lips to target colour or alter their hue


- Eye shadow: using darkening tool/brush to darken around the eyes area. Can use recolouring tool there too if you want to make it dark red or dark blue for example.


- Eye liner and lipstick: create another layer on top of the original --> use regular paintbrush to colour the lips red and draw black around the eyes --> make that layer semi-transparent (opacity of about 60% works well).


You can also add more. For example, using paintbrush on that semi-transparent layer method above, you can create face paint that blends in well with the rest of the face.


2. Facial Hair





Ok, so we have beards and many exotic types of facial hair. But what if the option you want is not there? What if you just want a small goatee or what if you want a light stubble? You can use existing beards to help you with that.


For light stubble effect, simply paste the beard as a new layer on top of the original and turn down the layer's opacity. The lighter you want the stubble, the less the opacity.


For goatees, biker moustaches, and the like, simply paste the beard as a new layer, and then cut out the parts you don't need, leaving only the needed parts. At times you might want to soften the edges where you cut, so that it doesn't look like it was cut out and blends better in with the face.


3. Combining Different Pieces





Centurion's epic headgear above or Elleria's hairstyle are both products of a combination of multiple pieces. It's often a good idea to cut out parts of one piece and add them to another. Sort of like frankenspriting, except with character busts.


Elleria's hairstyle above uses one hair piece which goes around either side of her head, and another hair piece pasted as another layer behind the original as a hair bun, giving altogether a whole new hairstyle.


Centurion's headgear uses a combination of face cloth, as well as elements from two different pairs of goggles. However, these aren't the only things you can combine into fancy attire. You can also...


4. Using Machine Pieces





Because why the hell not? The Wild Steam pack has a tonne of different machine pieces to make various machine sprites and vehicles. But we can also use some of them to create cool err... accessories and implants for the busts of our badass characters. There are enough machine pieces to create all sorts of cyberpunk-looking gadgets and accessories, which also include military masks or big sci-fi weapons for the paperdolls of the characters.


5. Using pieces on different body parts





All right, so we have our fair share of tops, bottoms, shoes, hats, etc. However, we can use parts of one attire on any other parts of the body. The two paperdolls above both have armbands, which were created from other clothes pieces. The best way to do this is to cut out a big shape of the cloth you want to use and paste it as a layer on top of the original. Then trim around the arm or leg or neck as you see fit.


6. Glowing Eyes, Pitch Black Skin, and other supernatural effects





There are many enhancements you can do to the bust, which come especially useful when creating a non-human or supernatural creature. Below are some things you can do:


- Glowing Eyes: Use a regular paintbrush and reduce its hardness (or the equivalent) as much as you can. Pick the right size and colour, and do a single click on the eyes. The low hardness causes the paintbrush to become less transparent the further from the centre you go, which is very akin to an effect you get from a shining light. Try to pick a lighter colour for the shine. Darker colours don't look very natural for a shine of light. So if the character's eyes are red, for example, then pick a lighter shade of red for the shine.


- Pitch black skin or hair: Go to the brightness and contrast options. Reduce the brightness by a large degree AND ALSO reduce the contrast. When things are darker, there is a lot less contrast between the different shades. By reducing the contrast when making things darker, you avoid having unnaturally pitch black spots.


- Pasty white skin or hair: You can do the opposite to the above. Increase the brightness by a large degree AND ALSO increase the contrast. When things are brighter, there is more contrast between the shaded areas and light areas, so to keep things natural, increasing contrast a bit can help.


- Supernatural skin colours: Perhaps you want a blue skin colour of your otherworldly race or something of that sort. This is pretty easy to achieve, but might be worth mentioning anyway. Depending on the image editing program you use, there can be several ways to achieve this. For example the recolouring to target colour tool can achieve this in seconds. Alternatively you can try to fiddle with the hues and saturations or even colour balance effects that let you change the amount of red, green, and blue on the image.


7. Making paperdoll look more natural





This one's a pretty minor point, but it can make a big difference in how you present your character, especially if you're putting them on the front cover or a title screen of your game. The paperdoll image is pretty static, and we only have one pose in order to make it easier to have all the clothes pieces fit. But once the ending full body image is finished, we can tweak it further. For example, look at the image above. I rotated Spider's arm by 90 degrees, so instead of it going statically down by the side, he brings it in front of himself. I then added a few machine pieces to make it look like he is holding a hacking device. It's only a small change, but it can do a lot for the game's presentation. Just remember to merge all the layers together before you rotate body parts, or else you'll end up with one layer rotating and the others not.


And that's it so far. Didn't realise this would end up sounding like a tutorial, but hope these tips are useful. Feel free to ask if you have any questions. :D

I don't own the Wild Steam Pack because I thought it doesn't fit well with the MV packs in terms of different sheets and the fact that you would have to upscale it.


Has someone tried it yet? Has someone used the Wild Steam Pack in combination with the Medieval MV packs, already build characters and maps with it and can give tips and advice?

@mardin: I've been working on some character busts lately which mix Wild Steam and Medieval MV character pieces, but I am preparing them for the use in Ace, not MV, so not sure if that's relevant.

I've upscaled a lot of the Wild Steam tiles and machine pieces for use in MV, and think they look quite good. The shadows on some of them look a bit crazy, but it's nothing that can't be sorted.


You can use some of the WS clothing without upscaling. I'm using the Steampunk goggles and glasses, and they work fine. They don't snap on to the busts properly, so you'll have to manually align them. The clothing doesn't work too well, though. I tried upscaling some of them, but they just look like garbage. I am quite fussy when it comes to things looking right, though.


If you'd like to try your hand at resizing things for MV, take a look at this topic; I followed the steps provided by Taarna.

@Matseb2611: Interesting, I am thinking about going with VX Ace all the way since downscaling would be looking a lot better than upscaling.


@The Stranger: I am mostly interested in the clothing and the weapons...some of the Tiles, too. I already tried resizing with other packs...read through all the methods and tried a lot of them. But none of these got me 100% satisfied.


Tough decision. I think downscaling the MV resources and then using it all together with all the other PV Game Assets for VX Ace would give me access to a ton of possibilities...I think I will wait for the dungeons pack and then decide. Thanks for helping out.

I honestly haven't had much trouble with the scale between the two packs. The only thing I found myself needing to scale down slightly were the hairstyles in the Medieval packs. They were slightly bigger to fit the heads of the Wild Steam pack busts (though I also had this problem with some of the busts from Medieval pack too). Haven't had any trouble with Wild Steam pack clothes fitting onto new busts either (maybe some pieces cause discrepancy, but I've not come across those). Here are a couple of the busts where I've used Wild Steam clothes on Medieval character busts with no upscaling being needed. The blue shirt the cop on the left is wearing and the brown sleeveless jacket the engineer on the right is wearing are both from Wild Steam pack.

Something just doesn't look right about the way these things line up. What is wrong here? The gate is way taller than the wall too. The perspective just looks off. It looks like the base of the turret is sitting on the base of the wall piece to me. The gate side looks fine. Maybe it's just me. Can I get a decent explanation on how this castle stuff is used? I'm just not getting a good idea of how it can be put together. Very limited experience with mapping like this.

EDIT:Asking around, people say it looks fine, that gates are typically taller than the surrounding walls. 

I'm honestly a bit intimidated to parallax since: 


-Takes a lot of memory


-I'm not the best at map-making even with the RTP


Advice would be appreciated and maybe some maps that are preferably not parallaxed. Doodads are acceptable though. Just kind of want to utilize the resources to the best of my ability.

I would love to see some good maps made without parallax. Maybe someone is quite good at it and would like to share his/her wisdom (and pictures). I agree that memory is definetly an issue. I am definetly not the best person to give out some advice about mapping. I would definetly use a variety of different lighting. Lots of good lighting with some wisely chosen overlay improves maps a lot. I hope for more animated pieces in the PVStyle...like smoke, candles and other stuff to make the maps look less static.


But basically I got the same problem as @BloodletterQ. I would love to hear some advice to make PVStyle maps look good and interesting without using parallax mapping...

My advice, and what I will try to do when I really start mapping: Look at some good old Iso RPG from the 90s to get ideas. Right now, I'm thinking I will try to go for inspiration to Neverwinter Nights.


But sadly, I think it will be hard to do without parallaxing. Maybe the bind to map or the doodads plugins can substitute.


the way pillars of eternity made its map can be an inspiration too

The graphics style is similar I guess but I'm not going with the 8-way movement due to all the compatability NPCS have to do as well, not to mention the awkwardness to ensue from on-touch encounters.


I'll be using the Doodads anyways just to get me started.

See, that's probably something I'll take from pillars of eternity too: Majority of static npcs. But I really kinda want to use 8 frames 8 directions for the pcs cause it looks smoother.

My encounters are set encounters, just like in PoE. Since battling is going to be very strategic(and because I hate them), I refuse to do random encounters or encounters that chase you around at Mach 5. If there is a way to disable the "run" command in battle, I'll definitely be doing that.

I think the Doodads plugin is pretty damn good for these tilesets. Like here's some maps I did when I was playing around with the plugin.

The Doodads plugin is amazing for those who do not want to parallax.


You can technically use these resources without parallaxing, but some of the larger assets (buildings, etc) take up a lot of space in a tileset. I don't recommend using the tiles as is, they do require some tinkering if you only want to use the editor.


I enjoy parallaxing, mainly because I love being able to mess around with the floor tiles\ground texture in fun and interesting ways. :D

Parallaxing (or the doodad plugin) is the way to go. I didn't really even try to make these be useable in the default editor "as is" because, simply put, you will always get lackluster results from that, even with the default RTP graphics. Not that you *can't* use them in the default editor, just that you will never get as good results.


If you are worried about memory, then check out the doodad plugin - simple and awesome!


You can also focus on making smaller, more condensed maps. Think about what it is you want the player to see and interact with, focus on those elements and don't worry about trying to make and fill a giant map.

Doodads are the way to go.  Make mapping so handy and fast.  I deleted all my parallax and am redoing my game with doodads, theres a couple of bits you can't do but as long as you set your region instructions right they are so fast and easy to place.  I know its the wrong soldier bust I haven't bothered making the needed one yet as this map is not till later in game.





Splitting every tile from the T&C, MI and MW packs was a pain in the butt and some things need to be split.  One problem with my doodads is some of them I used whole images.  For example the castle stairs are massive and bridge and I would have been best to split it into little chunks and tiling it like with the editor/parallax.  Something I'll get round to eventually.

Those maps are gorgeous.

@padr81 Yeah. You have to cut up various objects\images if you want to use smaller sections of them as doodads. It's a bit time consuming, but I think you'd agree that they end result is more than worth it.