Grimrock

Is there a specific algorithm or procedure used to make the power attack icons in the standard assets? I want to make items that fit with the standard ones and it's difficult to get my power attack icons to look right.

Can you show a picture of what you get ? Is it a problem with alpha / color mixing ?

Maybe Skuggasveinn can help.
He made a tutorial called "Creating our own Weapons" that contains a new power attack icon:
viewtopic.php?f=22&t=7055
(part 12)

minmay wrote:Is there a specific algorithm or procedure used to make the power attack icons in the standard assets? I want to make items that fit with the standard ones and it's difficult to get my power attack icons to look right.

Give us an example of what you mean by 'look right'; even one done on the fly, for this thread.

Lacking details, I would suggest loading up a standard icon in your image editor as a basis, and making additions to it on separate image layers.
For portraits [for instance], there is a common background image that modders use behind their image cut-outs of the character face.

Aha... Looking in the editor, I now assume that you mean getting the same look with the [built in?] light blue animation effect when charging/and charged? I don't know off-hand; I'll have to look into it.

I'll probably want to make these myself sometime soon.

I noticed for example for spell icons (drawn on the right side of the rune panel) that the texture didn't use alpha channel but was rendered in additive mode. It could be the same for power attacks. In this case use a texture without alpha, additive RGB meaning black pixels will be transparent and each color channel is added to the background picture. Just be careful with saturation on each channel.

Examples: assets/textures/gui/items.tga, assets/textures/gui/items_2.tga, assets/textures/gui/items_3.tga. All of these contain power attack icons. I guess I should have specified that this is a question that only the author(s) of the icons can answer (difference operations on the existing icons show no discernible pattern).

Isaac wrote:Aha... Looking in the editor, I now assume that you mean getting the same look with the [built in?] light blue animation effect when charging/and charged? I don't know off-hand; I'll have to look into it.

Yes, it's not built-in! It's in the item icon atlases. The icon fades into the power attack icon as it is charged up.

I'm already aware that power attack icons use additive blending.

minmay wrote:

Isaac wrote:Aha... Looking in the editor, I now assume that you mean getting the same look with the [built in?] light blue animation effect when charging/and charged? I don't know off-hand; I'll have to look into it.

Yes, it's not built-in! It's in the item icon atlases. The icon fades into the power attack icon as it is charged up.

Today is the first time I've actually downloaded the [full] asset pack for LoG2... so I've yet to really explore it yet. I plan to look at the atlas sets.

Edit:
I have managed passable results in Photoshop; but the concepts probably apply to Gimp as well.

I loaded the default 'great axe' icon into PS; I did this by loading the items atlas and cropped it to the size of the 'great axe' icon.
I selected the black background [using the 'magic wand' selection tool], and deleted the black background; leaving the axe.

Then I duplicated the layer. I added the 'inner glow' layer style to the top-most layer, and added the 'outer glow' style to the second [bottom] layer; setting both to a light blue color ~hex[baecfe]. I adjusted the the size of each style, and adjusted the 'choke' of the inner glow effect to have it cover all the way to the center of the axe handle and blade. That's it. I then exported it as a PNG file, and made the atlas with the GGAT tool.


www.dropbox.com/...customIcons.dds

Of course, one could also refine and embellish the glow effect with painterly effects using the brush, smudge, dodge, and erase tools.
(But this will require that you rasterize the the layer styles, in order to manually edit them.)