Porting battlebacks2 from Ace to MZ - the easy ones

じ☆ve冰风

Drawing battlebacks is hard, that is why they are one of the scarcest resources out there.
We can use MV and MZ battlebacks interchangeably, but due to the size difference, VX Ace ones are lost to those using the newer engines… or are they?

Well, if you saw my thread, you might already know the answer, but in case you wanna port something I have not already touched or something from a pack or non-RTP source, it might be handy to know how you can do it on your own ;3

I will use GIMP here.

First of all, we start by opening a MZ battleback1, best one that thematically matches the battleback we wanna port for easier color correction.
Second, we set the color mode (Image - Mode) to RGB.

Optional is adding a MZ battleback2 as well, for height reference for our port, but that is not crucial.

The biggest problem with these ports is the perspective, and we will look into that later. But for this tutorial as base: no perspective - usually not much of a problem, as long as the left and the right side of a battleback look very similar.

Stone3




Pasted into a new layer, you can easily see that there is a lot of stuff missing, but due to the background just basically being a more or less repeating pattern, there is not much of a problem.
We duplicate the layer and move it to fill the whole width:



When doing this, I like to temporarily set the layer to semi-transparent so I can try to line the pattern up as well as I can, here is the result:



Now you can either use the eraser to blend those two layers together, but I prefer layer masks. They are non destructive and allow me to easily change which parts I wanna have visible. I use a soft brush here for easier blending and try to also keep the stones with the more generic look and erase those with the obvious color differences and cracks:



We could even stop here, but there are three things to make it better:

• fix the obvious duplicate stones and areas
  
• add the pattern on the top (alternate would be just to move it up)
  
• color correct
  

I will show you all three things, this is also the order in which I usually do them.
You don’t have to erase all, I like to have a calm look and pick those that annoy me the most:



Then I can either use the clone tool, healing or copy and paste of “normal” stones plus blending with a soft eraser/layer mask to get rid of them.

I used only healing here, where you basically select a “reference area” by using ctrl + klick and then go over the “to be healed” area.
Here is my result:




To add the upper part, we do the same, we see if we can copy and paste to fill in the area - sometimes mirroring or piecing together the right pattern is required.
In this easy case, copy and paste does most of the trick:



Ligtening up the copied part to match colorwise…



With color curves that problem is already not much of a problem anymore… just some blending with a soft eraser/layer mask + maybe healing again…



nearly done!

All that is left is adjusting the color. Ace usually has a higher contrast and brighter colors that can look quite intense combined with MZs one.
But since we have our reference ground, we can use that to get to a nice look.

There is no “one way to go”, I personally use the color curve again and start by lifting the darkest color. Then I see if I like the result or if I need to change the hue/saturation as well.



Here I actually turned the saturation down as well, and, I am done!

Just delete the layer with your reference background, export and you are good to go!





本贴来自国际rpgmaker官方论坛作者:Avery处,因国际论坛即将永久关站,为了存档多年珍贵资料,署名转载到本论坛存档,由于官方帖子为英文原帖，需要中文翻译请点击论坛顶部切换语言为中文就可以将帖子翻译成中文浏览,方便大家随时查看,原文地址：https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/threads/porting-battlebacks2-from-ace-to-mz-the-easy-ones.162983/