Thread: Anyway to get a Character Image on a Transparent Background?

Anyway to get a Character Image on a Transparent background? I have pain stakenly masked manually but always have trouble on certain separating background from foreground.

What I am looking for is a good place the would be simple to separate them or even better have the capture have a transparent back ground (like Spore Character Creator's black background)

My Goal is to cut and paste all my characters into one image.

This sounds like a job for,

Super Grover!

Screenshot your character in the dressing room. It's got a black background so that will be very easy to mask out in your graphics editing software of choice using select by color, magic wand tool, etc.

Originally Posted by Dalthyn

Screenshot your character in the dressing room. It's got a black background so that will be very easy to mask out in your graphics editing software of choice using select by color, magic wand tool, etc.

Oooooh, good answer! I was racking my brain trying to think of a good neutral place to park for that...

Unfortunately, the dressing room provides a relatively small image of your character. However, this does suggest another possibility. Find a place without mountains, like the Shire, at night. Stand on a rock to elevate your character above ground level. Rotate the camera to frame your character against the night sky and shoot your pictures. Cropping out a few stars should not pose too much difficulty. You could do the same thing on a day with a clear blue sky to gain the benefits of daylight illumination.

Originally Posted by Vexendynamus

Unfortunately, the dressing room provides a relatively small image of your character. However, this does suggest another possibility. Find a place without mountains, like the Shire, at night. Stand on a rock to elevate your character above ground level. Rotate the camera to frame your character against the night sky and shoot your pictures. Cropping out a few stars should not pose too much difficulty. You could do the same thing on a day with a clear blue sky to gain the benefits of daylight illumination.

There are many dressing room enhancements available as skins from lotrointerface.com. Several UI skins include them as well. I use Azure Glass, and my dressing room is enormous. This does also remove the background from the dressing room, but if you used one that does that, you can create an empty chat tab, set your chat window to opaque black (or whatever other color you want), drag the chat window to an appropriate size, and open the dressing room over the chat window. Et voila, a VERY large rendition of your character, against whatever solid color background you want, appropriate for "green screening".

Problems with the dressing room;

1) Your character is very small

2) Your character does not look the same on the landscape as it does in the dressing room. The dressing room does not render your gear exactly the same way.

3) Not everything about your character is rendering in the dressing room. You want a pose. Not possible. Want to show your steely daggers, bows, cute horse. Not possible.

I find 2 especially annoying. I typically get some one to model the item for me. So I can what it REALLY looks like.

I didn't even notice 2 until recently. That's really annoying.

Not sure if this is what you are asking, but you can load your screenshot in Gimp (free, cross platform) and create a transparent background layer in there. You still have to do the labor of telling it what your character comprises of the image, but once done, Gimp is pretty nice for this sort of thing. It also has a wand, so the suggestions about nighttime, or maybe against a wall in your home with a very DIFFERENT color wallpaper and no decorations around would help. A really contrasting background will help, especially with an auto selection tool.

Originally Posted by hucklebarry

Not sure if this is what you are asking, but you can load your screenshot in Gimp (free, cross platform) and create a transparent background layer in there. You still have to do the labor of telling it what your character comprises of the image, but once done, Gimp is pretty nice for this sort of thing. It also has a wand, so the suggestions about nighttime, or maybe against a wall in your home with a very DIFFERENT color wallpaper and no decorations around would help. A really contrasting background will help, especially with an auto selection tool.

I am using GIMP, I agree its a great program, not as good as Photoshop but then, its free and Photoshop is thousands of dollars.

Used to be a program call Knockout, the was good, but I have not seen that in a while.

The dressing room would be great, but the lighting is ALL wrong. Same with nightime shots.

The best I have come up with is using second computer/account to take the images and have the various characters come in and pose on their spot and then merger the images together, but I have to be fast since the sky changes quickly. I have not found a good lit place that not effected by time of day.

I have not found a place I can get a mostly sky background, or a solid background with good lighting. Any Ideas?

I bookmarked this "tutorial" - didn't take me too long to do my first test (see my thread in the Postcards forum).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RtFt...eature=related

Edit - haven't found out about lighting in general yet - but he has one thing in there with making a shadow.