Art Guidelines?

[Crow_T]

I've been thinking of making some graphics for fun and was curious as to what requirements need to be met. I looked at the electric stove and noticed a transparent area around it, and the code scaled it  to 3.5x1.5, is the buffer required on all assets?

Material recoloring, I see some benches are white and there are some red maps for some things, how does this work?

Is partial transparency allowed?

If there is an actual guide out there that'd be awesome.
Thanks!

[kaptain_kavern]

Not an artist at all, but, here, have some guides ;-D

https://github.com/seraphile/rimshare/wiki
https://github.com/seraphile/rimshare

[Crow_T]

That's a good start, thanks!

[jamaicancastle]

Regarding the blank space: In the example of the electric stove, the drawSize is 3.5x1.5, but it only takes up a 3x1 area. If you draw in a 3.5x1.5 grid on the graphic itself (3x1 centered cells with a quarter-cell margin on all sides) you'll see it overlaps the gridlines slightly. This makes it look a little more natural and not as constrained to the in-game building grid. You could redesign it with a drawSize of 3x1 and extend the graphic to the edge of the available space, but you wouldn't be able to overrun those gridlines at all.

When drawing buildings or other things with an irregular drawSize (as opposed to say items, which are always 1x1), I recommend putting up a grid of the intended size as the background of your image, so you can tell how it will fit into the build grid when it's in game.

As for partial transparency: I used it a few times in A17 on apparel and buildings and didn't notice anything amiss. I wouldn't try it on terrain images, but otherwise it should be fine.

(Actually now I want to try transparency on a terrain image just to see what happens...)

[CannibarRechter]

> and the code scaled it  to 3.5x1.5, is the buffer required on all assets?

Nope. Not at all. You just need to make sure that the size and drawSize match up properly. I believe that the buffer area helps with not having a dedicated icon texture, but if you want to just save and create your own icons, then you can do whatever you want.

> Material recoloring, I see some benches are white and there are some red maps for some things, how does this work?

Black versus red decides which portion of the image is allowed to be recolored with the material color you construct with.

> Is partial transparency allowed?

Yes, but you have to use the right shader, and the game may behave funny if you manage to get multiple objects with partial transparency stacked over one another (e.g., a shelf with partial transparency and an item with partial transparency on the shelf).

[Crow_T]

Thanks for the answers all, one more question- how much does the initial scale matter? Does Rimworld do resizing, and is there a good output size to hit in pixels per grid unit?

[jamaicancastle]

Thanks for the answers all, one more question- how much does the initial scale matter? Does Rimworld do resizing, and is there a good output size to hit in pixels per grid unit?

It doesn't strictly-speaking matter (unless the files get large enough to slow the game down, I suppose), Rimworld does automatic scaling. I've always been told Unity prefers powers-of-2 sizes for its own internal reasons, so I generally go with 1 grid unit = 64px, then resize the final product to the closest power.

[CannibarRechter]

> how much does the initial scale matter? Does Rimworld do resizing, and is there a good output size to hit in pixels per grid unit?

It doesn't, really. size= is non-graphical, it just tells the game how much space in game cells the object takes. Units=game cells. drawSize=graphical, and tells the game how big to draw the object. Unit=game cells.

A good rule of thumb is 64x64 for a drawSize of 1.

One bid of advice. You are unlikely to make this mistake, but if you store your images as an off number (e.g., 63x64), they will "work" but sometimes induce strange flickering behavior when the game zooms in and out. So don't do that. ;-P