New Character Creator - Alpha (Source included)

[jdarling]

Like many on this board a long time enemy of mine has been placeholder (or programmer) art in my applications as I'm either too cheap or too untalented to actually get real artwork. I ran across a great site the other day for characters (http://silveiraneto.net/tag/pixelart/) and after some reading (and downloading) I realized that this guy had generated an almost perfect template for multiple different characters. The only problem (at least in my mind) was that the template was done in GIMP.

I'm no GIMP expert, and doing things in it takes me much longer than it should. So, being the awnery lil feller I am, I exported each layer of his graphics to a PNG file and then wrote a quick and dirty app to build characters from it. A bit of Google and some playing with basic math and I managed to add HSV adjustments to the editor. Now you can grab different building blocks, drop them into "layers" change the color/etc and export to a PNG for your own use.

Of course, you can also easily create new layers to be added.

Anyways, I'm posting the entire source as Open Source (not my fault if it formats your HD) for anyone to screw up. Hopefully this will be of some use to someone. If you make improvements that you want to share, post them here for others to make use of. If you make improvements and don't have a website to host them on, post the code changes here and I'll think about putting it into my build ()

Anyways, download link: http://www.eonclash.com/charsbuilder/charsbuilder.zip

Screenie:



Some planned updates:
Export frame information
Preview animations (as you can see from the icons and buttons)
More effects
Import/Export per Parts Bin entry
etc etc etc....

BTW: This should work on MAC, Linux, and Windows as I've done all I can to stay away from platform specific code!

- Jeremy

PS: Yes, I did take a bit of concept from Charas Character Creator.