Spriting: Palette Order and FF3SE (outdated)

Quicky Fact: The Correct Palette Order

1. transparent
2. outline (black)
3. eyes
4. pupils
5. hair (lighter shade)
6. hair (darker shade)
7. skin (lighter tone)
8. skin (darker tone)
9. outfit 1 (lighter shade)
10. outfit 1 (darker shade)
11. outfit 2 (lighter shade)
12. outfit 2 (darker shade)
13. NPC
14. NPC
15. NPC
16. NPC

This is a guide on how to correctly use FF3SE (the Ultima Weapon Icon):

Background: FF3SE uses a .PNG format as opposed to its rival FF3usSE (aka Relm Editor) which uses .BIN files which typically are only used by it. FF3SE has the ability to change Portraits, Characters , Espers and Monsters. The character that are available for change range from Terra-Kefka.

Things to keep in mind: The biggest misconception comes from a display error for the Right Walking Down sprite's legs and the Right Walking Up sprite's legs, and also from the fact that FF3se auto-loads palettes in a certain manner that's not fully known to our little spriting community.

FF3se SpriteSheet usable Tile Map:


The Walking Down/Up sprites' legs (Green-outlined Tiles) is not a glitch in the game itself; it is only a glitch in the display on the editor. The Right Walking Down/Up sprites' legs load the exact same tiles as the Left Walking Down/Up sprites' legs, only flipped horizontally.

Do not draw on these two sections of the spritesheet!!!

-When the sheet is loaded into the game, the program will automatically draw over whatever you put in that space with whatever was in the LEFT Walking Down/Up sprite’s leg’s position. This is merely a display error and does not actually affect the game or ROM.

This is due to how the FF3 game/ROM stores sprite data. It does not have a full sprite for every animation! It reloads pieces of other animations that are identical to save space. The Red-outlined Tiles above illustrate all of the areas that are reused from earlier sprites on the sheet. The White-outlined sprites are entire sprites that are pulled from earlier on the sheet and you should never bother trying to draw these specially, as they will simply be written over. It would be good to keep this in mind when drawing your 'Arms Raised' (Front/Back) sprites since I've noticed a lot of spritesheets on this site where the 'waving' sprite doesn't match up because the artist didn't realize it was going to be drawn over like this.

Palette Issues:
It's a limitation of the program for not being user-friendly, but it is not glitched. You can, in fact, easily control the palette order of ANY spritesheet PNG, BMP, GIF, etc you upload into this program from a superior editing program (like Photoshop... or even MSPaint) simply by understanding how the program itself works.

FF3se loads palettes in a very straightforward manner - it starts in the upper left-hand corner and reads left-to-right, top-to-bottom, adding a color to the palette in the order that it encounters them.

http://i167.photobucket.com/albums/u137/...ial/T1.jpg GOES HERE
This means that if you use the top row of 16 pixels of your first sprite (pictured with Soldier above) on your spritesheet to correctly order each color of the palette the way you want it, then all of the colors of your spritesheet will be correctly aliased to the colors of your palette that you want.


For example:
Let's change Soldier's sprite to something else. Let's use that cool Ike sprite I just drew! Soldier is on the same palette as Locke, Merchant, and a few other NPCs, so whatever color changes you make to one will happen to the others.

Step One:

We want the palette to read,  
TransparentDefault-Black-White-Blue-Green-DGrey-Skin1-Skin2-Gold-LRed-DRed-LBlue-(DGreen-LGreen-Brown-LBrown)
So we'll have Locke wearing funny clothes w/ Greenish hair (don't ask), then you can use MSPaint or Photoshop to easily draw the sprites and constrain the color count to those 16 colors and then save them as PNGs.


16 Colors Exactly! Yay!

Step Two:

1.) Once you have the sprites looking how you want, simply go to the top left corner sprite (the Left Walking Down sprite) and change the top row of 16 pixels to those 16 colors in the proper order
-the order could be important for keeping any NPCs who were using this palette from looking distorted and weird.

2.) Then save the PNG files. If you happened to be using the top row for part of your Left Walking Down sprite, just memorize what it looked like, it can't be more than a few pixels.

Step Three:

Now you have a spritesheet PNG with palette order hard-saved in the upper-left-hand corner. Simply import it into FF3se using its Import function and voila, the palettes will be in the exact order and values you wanted them in (be careful that you only have 16 total colors on the PNG or it will not Import at all... Photoshop is awesome for finding any excess colors you may have accidentally introduced into the PNG)!

http://i167.photobucket.com/albums/u137/...ial/T4.png GOES HERE


Oh no! Now your first sprite has an ugly bar of colors on its top row!



Well yes, you put it there to get the colors to align correctly. But now it has served its purpose, you can use FF3se's tools to easily change that first sprite's top row (it will display on several of the sprites, but don't worry, you only need to erase the first one and they will all erase with it) back to whatever you had it as originally.

Step Four:

Save your file and the ROM has been quickly updated without the need for tiresome .bin files that you can't edit with -good- graphics programs like Photoshop.

Step Six:

Now, this DOES NOT SOLVE the issue of the Dead or Riding sprites that are missing from FF3se's code.



1.) Simply draw these onto the characters existing .PNG and import it onto FF3SE.
-Be sure to have the death sprite vertical.  
-Do not save it over to original .PNG because you will be using that again!!
-I suggest saving your Riding sprites over the Laughing sprites location as they have the same Tilesize requirements. Conveniently, the Surprised sprite is right next to those and you can place your vertically-oriented Death sprite there. (Though you can use the Green-circled area too if you want to make the next step a little faster.)



2.) Save the ROM with the Death/Riding Sprites.
-Be sure to have a back-up .PNG that has the original edit without the Death/Riding Sprites.
     
3.)  Now with the Dead/Riding sprites saved onto the ROM, you can open up the ROM using FF3usSpriteEd (the Relm Editor) and use its quick copy/paste tile functions to place the Dead/Riding sprites in the correct slots.



–If you turned the Dead sprite vertically to get it to load properly, then make sure to use FF3usSpriteEd's tile-rotating function on each of those tiles once they've been pasted into the correct location.

Step Seven:

1.) Now that your Dead/Riding sprites are in the right location, save your ROM and close the Relm editor. Reopen Terii's FF3se editor and simply repeat the PNG-loading steps from before with your backed-up PNG file of the whole spritesheet.

2.)  Save, and then the entire spritesheet has been fully loaded onto your ROM using FF3se, and you never had to rely on either Sprite Editors' crappy tools to draw your sprite-y masterpieces!


Notice how everything looks normal and there's no ugly color bar now!

tl;dr - If you follow these steps, you can use a REAL graphics program to draw your sprites and then correctly import the PNG files into your ROM with customized palettes intact and properly ordered.
You just have to draw your palette's colors in order on the first 16 pixels on the upper-lefthand corner of a spritesheet before importing it.


This tutorial was written and constructed by DjinnandTonic.
This tutorial was edited by Sutebenukun.

Wow this is really helpfull, it should help whith a lot of spriting, way to go Ren!

Thank you, but all I really did was place this into steps. The real scribe here who made this tutorial (in another thread no less) was DjinnandTonic. I have asked him to make screen shots to supplement the tutorial for those who aren't that good with english.

ahh yes i see what u mean, i just looked at the 1 DjinnandTonic did now.

its a pretty good idea 2 do screenshots 2

Can I add screenshots on Import custom sprites from other games (like Breath of fire 2 or kirby)?

Do you mean adding screenshots, showing the steps of this guide with those custom characters?

If that is the case, feel free to email me @ sutebenukun@hotmail.com
I can add those screenshots as a supplement to the guide.

Oh wow, you did a great job cleaning up my tutorial! Thanks a lot, I hope this speeds up the spriting process for everyone!

I'll make some screenshots for this in a bit to make sure that everything's clear!

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http://s167.photobucket.com/albums/u137/...0Tutorial/

Okay, here's the first few images loaded up on Photobucket. I don't have FF3usSpriteEd on my work computer, so I can't show off the second half of it (with the Death/Riding sprites), but I'll get that done soon enough. I used changing Soldier to my Ike sprite as the example.

Of particular note:


This image shows all of the tiles that are repeated in the FF3se display - in other words, drawing on the Red or Green tiles is pointless. The Green tiles are the two that are incorrectly flipped in the display. The White tiles are entire SPRITES that are loaded from already-drawn tiles so there's absolutely no reason for them to even be in the display... >.>;;

excellent tutorial man

that helps much! for my Brendan 1 more thing sprite gallery dont work.....

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but it dont solve the in fight sprite i mean when my brendan fights he is glitchie!!!

Great tutorial!