So shit just happened to align and I wanted to make a new theme. As it turns out, during this past week, Flamespeedster released a Bakemonogatari theme that I found quite spiffy for the picture. I had taken an initial look and was hoping it was a scrolling screen theme, but unfortunately it wasn't. It actually bothered me because I was imagining the source image may have been a full landscape image and so I went hunting for the original image.
I found it....and I wasn't super happy (though not surprised) that it was in fact a portrait image. I came up with a possible mental solution of making a render of Senjougahara, erasing her existence from the image, enlarging the image, and then placing her back into the image in hopes of making the possibility for usage as a scrolling theme possible. The only problem was erasing Senjougahara. I did a little preliminary editing and attempted to erase her upper body (being the easier half to remove) and realized that a lot of work would have to be put into the bottom half. As with any major bits of image work, shit gets wonky after a certain threshold of major yet shoddy image editing and I wasn't really willing to spend a ton of time working on another theme because I was actually planning on making some video recordings to flesh out the "In-depth" guides section of my thread. Of course, having a large portion of video as just silent shady image editing work spanning for a couple of hours (I'm not a pro at image editing) didn't really ring a bell with me and so I dropped the idea on the same day.
Surprisingly enough, the topic came about again when Purge was asking if I was going to make another theme because apparently the one theme that I need to work on and fix up the most is the godlike one (folder icons might need a revamp if I get a better idea, and I need to clean up and make the icon borders glorious like my other ones). For whatever reason, he also was on the Bakemonogatari train and so I considered it again for a little bit.
Even with the extra consideration, I still didn't want to make the theme and was going to reply that although I was going to make a theme eventually, it might not be Bakemonogatari. This was because I came to the realization that even if I erased Senjougahara, the railing was at a slant and thus there wasn't a way to make it a clean looping image. I procrastinated on the reply in order to search for a theme topic so that even though I said I wasn't going to make a Bakemonogatari theme, I could give an idea of what I was going to make as a theme. The next day on IRC though, a guy named tilt came in with a rather rare help request.
He was asking if anyone could help him extract the voices and sound effects from the JP version of Fire Emblem Fates, not for a rom hack, or something silly, but for a theme. Of course, I read this and was like "I got this shit, whether we actually get the files or not, I'm going to try to help until we do". And so, a couple hours was spent hunting down various programs, attempting to compile others, hating Visual Studio for all the weird voodoo shit it does (though in the end, it did compile with VS) only to find out that one of the programs the guy initially tried already dumped the audio files he was looking for, but he just couldn't play them in a media player and all the names were just the offset of the file within the archive rather than actual nice filenames (metadata is there, but apparently the program just didn't use it).
So, with the actual files, we ended up getting the tool we could use to convert bcwav to wav (ctrtool) and I gave him a simple batch script to convert them. After this long experience, and well into the midnight oil, we were talking about some theme stuff and somehow Bakemonogatari came up again (maybe I brought it up) and I showed the preliminary edit I tried. Strangely enough, he thought that the railing was the hard part of erasing Senjougahara, whereas I thought that the clouds would be the really hard part. Just to prove that the railing wasn't going to really be an issue, I spent a little bit of time editing some new railing to put over Senjougahara and showed that.
During this time, I realized that I could probably fix the issue with the slanted railing and create a looping screen my slanting the entire image. Giving it a quick try, I found out that the railing itself was actually pretty straight and rotating it didn't really make the image look any worse. Momentum began to build here because I was like "huh...I have a half erased Senjougahara, and there is this pole right on the edge that I can use to hide the transition, and I don't need to blow up an image (dumpstering quality), and if I look at where the screen placements would be, and then I can vary up the plants on the bottom I think..."
At this point, I realized that I had spent a fair amount of time already just trying to remove Senjougahara and laying out a theme I wasn't even planning on making and decided I might as well finish it.
I'm considering taking up Flamespeedster's initial idea of Senjougahara's uniform as the folder icon instead of my usual icon border specifically because Senjougahara's uniform isn't bi-laterally symmetrical (she has a shirt pocket on the left)...but at that point, I might do something lewd like make the back folder a picture of her collarbone so that when the folder is open, I just have another render on top with her pulling out her collar and... Though if I wanted to do that, it might be more fitting to use her casual dress that she actually wears in the picture because there is even more skin there :3. In any case, the icon border is the "harder" thing to accomplish because I still have no ideas for that...at least, I have no ideas that I have already tried.
On a separate note, I'm more or less documenting each "major" step I take in making the background image as "snapshots" in an xcf file to hopefully make a video explaining what I did in order to accomplish it. Anyways, as a progress image:
I found it....and I wasn't super happy (though not surprised) that it was in fact a portrait image. I came up with a possible mental solution of making a render of Senjougahara, erasing her existence from the image, enlarging the image, and then placing her back into the image in hopes of making the possibility for usage as a scrolling theme possible. The only problem was erasing Senjougahara. I did a little preliminary editing and attempted to erase her upper body (being the easier half to remove) and realized that a lot of work would have to be put into the bottom half. As with any major bits of image work, shit gets wonky after a certain threshold of major yet shoddy image editing and I wasn't really willing to spend a ton of time working on another theme because I was actually planning on making some video recordings to flesh out the "In-depth" guides section of my thread. Of course, having a large portion of video as just silent shady image editing work spanning for a couple of hours (I'm not a pro at image editing) didn't really ring a bell with me and so I dropped the idea on the same day.
Surprisingly enough, the topic came about again when Purge was asking if I was going to make another theme because apparently the one theme that I need to work on and fix up the most is the godlike one (folder icons might need a revamp if I get a better idea, and I need to clean up and make the icon borders glorious like my other ones). For whatever reason, he also was on the Bakemonogatari train and so I considered it again for a little bit.
Even with the extra consideration, I still didn't want to make the theme and was going to reply that although I was going to make a theme eventually, it might not be Bakemonogatari. This was because I came to the realization that even if I erased Senjougahara, the railing was at a slant and thus there wasn't a way to make it a clean looping image. I procrastinated on the reply in order to search for a theme topic so that even though I said I wasn't going to make a Bakemonogatari theme, I could give an idea of what I was going to make as a theme. The next day on IRC though, a guy named tilt came in with a rather rare help request.
He was asking if anyone could help him extract the voices and sound effects from the JP version of Fire Emblem Fates, not for a rom hack, or something silly, but for a theme. Of course, I read this and was like "I got this shit, whether we actually get the files or not, I'm going to try to help until we do". And so, a couple hours was spent hunting down various programs, attempting to compile others, hating Visual Studio for all the weird voodoo shit it does (though in the end, it did compile with VS) only to find out that one of the programs the guy initially tried already dumped the audio files he was looking for, but he just couldn't play them in a media player and all the names were just the offset of the file within the archive rather than actual nice filenames (metadata is there, but apparently the program just didn't use it).
So, with the actual files, we ended up getting the tool we could use to convert bcwav to wav (ctrtool) and I gave him a simple batch script to convert them. After this long experience, and well into the midnight oil, we were talking about some theme stuff and somehow Bakemonogatari came up again (maybe I brought it up) and I showed the preliminary edit I tried. Strangely enough, he thought that the railing was the hard part of erasing Senjougahara, whereas I thought that the clouds would be the really hard part. Just to prove that the railing wasn't going to really be an issue, I spent a little bit of time editing some new railing to put over Senjougahara and showed that.
During this time, I realized that I could probably fix the issue with the slanted railing and create a looping screen my slanting the entire image. Giving it a quick try, I found out that the railing itself was actually pretty straight and rotating it didn't really make the image look any worse. Momentum began to build here because I was like "huh...I have a half erased Senjougahara, and there is this pole right on the edge that I can use to hide the transition, and I don't need to blow up an image (dumpstering quality), and if I look at where the screen placements would be, and then I can vary up the plants on the bottom I think..."
At this point, I realized that I had spent a fair amount of time already just trying to remove Senjougahara and laying out a theme I wasn't even planning on making and decided I might as well finish it.
I'm considering taking up Flamespeedster's initial idea of Senjougahara's uniform as the folder icon instead of my usual icon border specifically because Senjougahara's uniform isn't bi-laterally symmetrical (she has a shirt pocket on the left)...but at that point, I might do something lewd like make the back folder a picture of her collarbone so that when the folder is open, I just have another render on top with her pulling out her collar and... Though if I wanted to do that, it might be more fitting to use her casual dress that she actually wears in the picture because there is even more skin there :3. In any case, the icon border is the "harder" thing to accomplish because I still have no ideas for that...at least, I have no ideas that I have already tried.
On a separate note, I'm more or less documenting each "major" step I take in making the background image as "snapshots" in an xcf file to hopefully make a video explaining what I did in order to accomplish it. Anyways, as a progress image:
