Some practical upscaling of Ace to MV/MZ tiles #5 - Two trees

じ☆ve冰风

As with many other tiles, this is a case by case decision, but:
If the trees are a bit lollipop like . with a straight trunk and a closed crown, this is a good way to go!

I would consider this more advanced than most techniques I’ve shown before, but still doable for a lot of people, so let us jump right in!

This is part of a series where I show how to solve some upscaling examples using different methods that are easier than full on redraw (in most cases, for some it is just the thing you have to do if you want it pretty) and not as ugly as just blowing them up with a graphic programm (sorry, not sorry). The examples all come from the Mack VX Ace tiles.




The problem that we have is straightforward: if we want to use the trees in MZ (or my), they are just too small. Luckily they have the above mentioned lollipop shape!

But, to take a step back:
I am teaching you very practical editing skills here. You don’t have to shelve the skill for just upscaling Ace tiles. For example, if you have a tree you like and need more variation for a forest, you can use what you learn here to make variations of it. This is extremely helpful when it comes to pack resources or alternate styles!

Here is how I would tackle them:
Step 1: Copy and ugly blowup anyways



I like to at least try to get a similar outcome in proportions and shape for the trees, so I will use them on a layer below (later with a reduces opacity) as a blueprint.

Step 2: Deconstruction
First I use basically all the combinations of the select tools and or the eraser to get rid of the shadow. I will draw one fitting to the resulting tree in in the end anyways and the shadow will just be in the way.






Then I clean it up with the same methods and copy and paste the trunk to the side and remove it from the crown, too.
Box select, select by color and the eraser can be used here, same as the fuzzy select.
There is no one size fits all, you just need to get those two parts on their own.


It should look about this in the end, with the crown having to have no trunk parts at all attached to them, the trunk may have some leftovers on the top.

Step 3: Copy&Paste&Copy&Paste&Copy&....&Cleaning up
Now I copy and paste my crown pieces in a very specific order:



(the lower layer is my ugly upscale as guideline)
First I paste my crown in twice, left and right, to define the width of the crown I am aiming for.

On again a layer above (not always necessary, but is useful depending on further editing), goes a third piece, this time at the bottom:



And now, as you might have guessed, another layer, and the top:



This doesn’t look too bad, right?
Now it is time for a cleanup.



With a soft eraser I just removed the lower lark edge from the upper part and layer. I also tried to take off a little bit more than that without looking off, to give the leaves just a little different shape.
Then as a bonus I used a 1px 50% opacity soft brush to slightly alter the leaves that I felt looked to distinctly the same - you can do more than just this little touchup or skip if you are not comfortable, but I would recommend at least trying!
here the after:




For the leafy tree, there is more to do in my opinion.
Since it is not just a pointy triangle, the top is clearly less wide:



To fill that in, I added even more copies of my crown, just below the top layer left and right, to fill in the gaps.



now I have a lot of overlapping, with the crown we see basically consisting of six crowns on five layers (left and right are on one).
I now take a soft eraser again, and start with my top layer, removing what I need to have it blend into the crowns behind it.



Now my other two “top layers”...



and the bottom trimmed up…



This already looks pretty close to what I want, but I still have room for improvement.



Using free select, I took small parts from the crown I started with, sometimes mirrored them, and patched them into different positions and over areas where you could see that they were a repetitive pattern that jumped out. I also used tiny parts from the rim to get the shape to exactly where I want it to be.

Step 4: No chance: the trunk is done manually
You read the bad news already, you could avoid this if you had a larger trunk that you could steal, but while it is the most difficult upscaling technique, here we only use it on a very simple and small piece.

I always upscale them without interpolation to have a base that is as sharp as possible (find it easier to work with than trying to salvage blur) and place them on a layer behind the crown, so they can fit right in.



With a hard (but not hard edge) brush I trim them right into share, just a little careful reading trying to emulate the original shape.



Then I use the smudge tool only inside of the lines, to smooth out the areas that were a soft transition before the upscale as well:



After that, I pick the outline color(s; switch as you go since it is not the same all around) and use a hard but not hard edge brush on 50% opacity to paint in the outline:



I used the mouse here (actually I often do for tutorials, a graphic tablet is not necessary to be able to do resources), went multiple times over certain areas and sometimes went into the trunk to work out the texture. Now I switch back to the eraser and trim off the excess.




Other pieces are much more complex, but those fairly smooth and simple shaped trunks are on the easy end


Step 5: Just the shadow left
Yup, and since they had different shadow styles, I’ll switch the fir tree’s one to the solid oval that the smaller tree has as well, since I don’t like it when every tree has a different shadow. I just use ellipse select, fill in with black and set the layer to 50% opacity.




All done:





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