How to port generator parts from one gender to another

じ☆ve冰风

You know, I just sat down and designed that beautiful lady that I want to use in a project I will totally not abandon as all the previous ones and…



I like her, I like her a lot. But somehow I think she needs some headgear, something elegant and fancy that still suits a warrior… but somehow none of the options is what I really like.

But wait!



The guys have just what I want! Dammit! It is so close and yet still out of reach!

Of course it is not totally unavailable for me, and so it is for you.
A general rule of thumb is that you convert anything but clothing with a comparingly okay amount of work put into it, due to the different poses and of course body shapes.

Now let me run you through what to do if you want to convert a generator piece from male to female - or vice versa.
The desired piece in this case can be found in the generator folders of male by the name (and subnames of) “AccB_p4”



The female folder on the other hand contains 10 different AccB, meaning the next “free name” would be “Acc_p11”.



So what I am going to do is select all the files in each folder that belong to AccB_p04 in the MALE folder and copy them over to the female folder, while changing the 04 to an 11 in the process, leaving everything else of the names as they were!
So here is an example for variation…



or for face:



In this stage, I simply copy and paste everything over, without further edits.

And then, I simply check how well it works on my sprite:



And in fact, the face and TV and TVD work just fine. The SV seems to be okay at first glance, but when you look closely at the frames, you will notice how its position jumps around between the different poses.



If we compare the male and female SV base, we can clearly see that the head - the base for this piece - is only in the same position in a few frames.
So I open my SV_AccB_p11 and the female base in the same file in Gimp and check one of the frames where the male and female head line up perfectly - for example the top left:



This is the position I want for every frame.

And now comes the boring part: I go through every frame and check if it is in the right place, otherwise I cut and paste it into the desired position. Often you can move the three frames at once or for the kneeling pose, you can even select all 9 of them at once.



It was boring, but at least it didn't take long. Now I am deleting the body image from this file and overwriting my SV_AccB_p11.
The last thing to do for this part is adjusting the SV_AccB_p11_c that goes with it. So I open that file as well, and add my changed SV_AccB_p11 on a layer on top of it.
Now I will need the “select by color” tool a lot:



Just a range of 0 and no feathering or antialiasing.




I moved the upper layer a little to show what we need to do: as you can see, everything blue is marked with this yellow, and all silver with that gray. What we are making here is a mask for the recoloring, and to not mess up anything, we need to stick to these exact same shades for our new mask.
The mask (here I will use the SV for the example, but TV and TV use this technique as well) work like this:






Above you can see the default settings and the color mask for the headpiece on my screenshot.
If I now set the “main color” to a red, everything of this specific part that is where the orange areas of the masks are, is recolored to a red gradient.



The masks work as a guide for the program to know, which area on the sheet actually is “main color”, “Sub color 1” and so on. This means you can have for example an all white dress generator part, but if the mask has a pattern on it, you could either have the Sub color for it be different to have the pattern shown or same and have a uni dress.
This is important due to the fact that the default colors for all these parts are very different and the program needs a guide to know which areas make up a part. It could be solved as it is on the face parts, with multiple images, but that would blow up the SV, TV and TVD folder and is not necessary at all, as the masks here work fine.
In case you wondered: for the head parts: orange is the main color, gray is sub color 1 and blue is sub color 3 and there is a pinkish shade for sub color 4.
Due to the recoloring relying on a color map that has the exact right shade at the exact right place, it is so important that we get ours right in the conversion.
I could even just cut and paste the mask layer into the right positions as well, but this way is faster:



With my color selection I first select one of the blue shades, and then I add the other ones to that selection as well, until everything blue is within my selection.



Then I use the bucket fill with the “fill whole selection” and the color I picked with the pipette from the color mask.
Now I do the same with the silver part and fill the remaining transparent surrounding on the layer with white:



Now I overwrite the old layer mask with that new one, and I am done!

After restarting MZ and loading my saved character, everything is in place:




This should work just like that on most types of parts, with clothing requiring a lot of further editing work (which requires a lot of actual pixel art skill, so nothing beginner friendly) and cloaks and hair with some extra work involved, but doable.


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/how-to-port-generator-parts-from-one-gender-to-another.153316/