Creating your own unique clutter - How to make a vase from scratch

じ☆ve冰风

I know this vase, you know this vase… most people who played an MZ game know this vase. This is the default vase from RPG Maker MZ and as nice as it is, if you try to stock a full warehouse it can become very repetitive. To be honest, even if you just use it here and there as clutter, it can become repetitive as well.
But how to get more vases? Well, why not make one yourself?

There are various shapes of clay pots, so there are many references to pick from all over the internet. If you don’t know what you want to make, just look around.



For example, I found this nice public domain picture of clay pots.
So how about something taller than the default one, maybe with handles?

Step 1 - the “blueprint” (Graphicsgale was used here)
Since we want to make a clay pot, we keep the default clay pot as style and size reference at hand during the whole process. A good start for a round object is a circle, and that is where this journey starts as well:



The shape for the upper part of the pot seems fitting, but the lower part is more oval. We could either stitch half of an oval to half of the circle or just cut it in half and stretch the lower part to our liking:



This shape looks quite jagged, and that is due to the “steps” in the pixel conture. Smoothing them out is our next step:



Left is the before, right is the after. You can see how much of a difference that makes!

By using the ratio of the default opening as a reference on how the perspective is supposed to affect round shapes, we can create a base and an opening for our own pot:



And then assemble the whole thing:



You can go for a different shape or style with yours, add a lid, handles… whatever you like!

Step 2 - Color (I made this in Gimp)
Now you might have wondered about the odd colors, but those will allow us to select only a certain area of the vase and color it in and keep the sharp edges we created in our design.
In addition, the result is perfectly symmetric, and so will be the shape of the final object if we stick to it. If you are not used to it, drawing a whole vase from scratch without a blueprint can result in something that looks like it was made by a very inexperienced potter.



I like to do color in’s on a larger scale, so I upscaled the vase with no interpolation here, but if you are more comfortable in the original size, do as you wish!
Also add your color reference and coloring reference if you have the room (here both is the same, but I might use a different item to pick the colors from if I rather wanted to have a more reddish pot for example).



For the body, we add the color ramp in circular spots that slightly wrap around the body of the vase. The light is on the upper left, on the right side you add a dark shadow. On the right we can add a little highlight where the surrounding light reflects off the walls/floor onto the vase.
In this step we can also already start adding a dark outline everywhere where the object ends and at the bottom side, where we will have a very hard edge to the base.
As the coloring, this outline is lighter on the upper left.
Since the vase is from a very smooth material without hard edges, we blend the colors into each other (besides the highlight on the right and the outline) with the smudge and blur tools.



For the inside, the main color is a very dark but not black shadow color, with some highlights where the light that comes in from the upper left reflects on the inside of the neck and the inside of the body.





On the top we mark the outline as well as the highlights, since the light comes from the upper left, the general tone of this piece is very light!




The neck is very dark on the right and very bright on the left, as it wraps around the whole object. There is a slight outline to indicate the dent between the neck and the body here.



For the bottom we can work in a similar way as with the top, just a lot darker.

And there we go!



I know, it looks smudged and weird, but we are not finished even though most of it is done!
Now we merge all of the layers with the “final color”, copy and paste them a few times to get rid of the semi transparent spots and merge them as well.
Now we scale them down to the original size with “no interpolation” again:




That doesn’t look too bad now, right? But if we zoom in, the whole thing still does not have the sharp pixelated look from the MZ default tiles:



We fix that by indexing the image and to mimic the dithering we see on the original vase, we use a low color cound and enable the dithering:



There we go, that is already closer to default!




Step 3 - Polishing and Shadow (Graphicsgale for polishing, Gimp for the Shadow)



With the original as a reference on the left, we go over the result, mostly fixing the outlines where needed. I for example felt like I needed more dithering on the highlight, so I added some. You can see the result we had after the indexing on the right, so you can see what changed in this step. The middle is our final result, which we now just need to complete with a shadow!



With a simple oval that is filled with black and set to 50 opacity, this task is also done! We can now add and use the vase and no one will see a difference in style - but happily notice the variation

The pot made it onto my egyptian tileset.




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