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Avicii's Tips - how to create your own components on BC

Posted: Sun Oct 07, 2012 11:29 am
by Avicii
Hello all fellow Battle Chronicler users, I have had a request to give a detailed step through on how to make your own fancy components on Battle Chronicler. I know there is a slightly detailed description already on the Battle Chronicler website (LINK) but I will help simplify this more (hopefully).

Steps

Step One. Choosing your graphic or image

To some people this can be the hardest step, I know when I am looking for a certain picture or graphic I can be searching for a while. Basically my steps will let you find a picture to represent a spell, affect etc and use it on BC after all we all know the same ones can get boring and it is good to have a bit of uniqueness to represent your army. So for my example for everyone to see I will be creating markers/counters for two spells, Glittering Robes and Amber Spear, here are the original pictures I found online apologies for the size of the pictures.

Image Image

Step Two. Removing the backgrounds and shaping the picture

This step is the main step to making the picture look like a component. Use any image editing software that allows you to clear backgrounds (there are millions out there all free to download), some of the more popular ones are Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop. However the dark horse for me which I didn't realize was very easy to use is Microsoft Word 2010 (not sure about older additions). Word has an extremely easy option to remove backgrounds on pictures here is a tutorial (LINK).

there is also a tricky negative with this however once the background is removed you can't save it straight from some programs purely because they will just add a new white background on the picture ( #-o what a waste of time), however I only know word does this some others like paint shop pro will save the image without the background :D . The good news though... if you have Word you should have Microsoft Picture Manager, so from here you copy the image into MPM from Word and it will be Background free (it will look like it has a white background but it really is gone this time). Trial and error and it will pay off, I won't lie when I tried to make my first banishment (kamehameha) it took me and extremely long time to successfully save the image with no background. Saving the Image as .PNG works best but most other image types will work with BC if not just re-save as a different image type.

Image

Step 3. Making the picture into a component

Now on Battle Chronicler click edit > Components on the drop down menu and a pop up will appear with all the components already created, click new and another pop up will appear now the creation begins. Be sure that once the picture is uploaded there is no sign of a background otherwise it may look a bit ugly. I'll step this one from top of the pop up to the bottom (picture displayed bellow):

1. Name - Clear cut
2. Category - these are the usual categories you see the skulls and markers in, my personal preference is to place mine in the special category
3 & 4 Themes and Tags - I have never used these
5. File Type - Choose Image
6. Type - Select counter, this is so it can be used in all turns
7. Shape - Keep it at its original shape i.e if it was a picture keep it as a rectangle
8. Width - I keep it at 6 x 6 purely because that is the general size, you can change the size when writing a report as most will know
9. Opacity - basically this is how see through the component is, I place mine about 70-80%.
10. Level - choose how high it will be on the board, I choose Cloud so it is above everything.
11. Border - 0.00 will take the border away
12. Image file - Upload the image

Image Image Image

Step 4. Test and enjoy

Test your final result and see how it appears, if its settings aren't to your liking follow the steps again :D

Image

If anyone has any questions about something I may not have covered please ask and I'll be glad to help, or if there is a certain component someone would like me to make I can do it quite easily and send it in component form. Also I would love for people to get back to me on components they may have made and share them on this thread so we can get a big collection of components for everyone to use and I will work on a zip file of High Elf BC components for all to download :D .

Hope this all helped, get to work all battle repers :wink:

Avicii

Re: Avicii's Tips - how to create your own components on BC

Posted: Sun Oct 07, 2012 11:36 am
by Swordmaster of Hoeth
Avicii, that is brilliant! You addressed two main issues I had, namely background removal and image import. I knew I was doing it in a very strange way but now I can spice up my diagrams! Thanks so much! =D>

Re: Avicii's Tips - how to create your own components on BC

Posted: Sun Oct 07, 2012 12:35 pm
by Avicii
I did forget to mention that some backgrounds will be harder to work on then others, but the youtube tutorial makes it fairly easy to follow how to do it all.

Avicii

Re: Avicii's Tips - how to create your own components on BC

Posted: Sun Oct 07, 2012 1:21 pm
by Elessehta of Yvresse
Image processing in word? How odd, there are some powerful but free image processors available, namely the GIMP.
I'm not paying for Microsoft Office when I can use tools like this.
I expect to see some well fancy battle reports now ^_^
I remember Brewmaster used to photoshop extra cool bits in to show spell effects and such, it would be much easier to be able to do it al in BC.
Thanks Avicii.

Re: Avicii's Tips - how to create your own components on BC

Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2012 1:07 am
by Avicii
Yeah I know, I stumbled upon it when I was looking at youtube how to remove backgrounds easily and realized I already had Word 2010. There are tones of Image editors out there for free to make it easy for anyone, but I figure if anyone has word 2010 then it is easier than a lot I have tried. When I first saw D's BRs I realized he used unique components for his spells which is where I decided to make my own..so it is really thanks to him :wink:

Re: Avicii's Tips - how to create your own components on BC

Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2012 3:27 am
by Jimmy
Nice mate, great write up. This should be stickied.

Re: Avicii's Tips - how to create your own components on BC

Posted: Thu Mar 07, 2013 10:40 am
by Avicii
Who can sticky this?

Re: Avicii's Tips - how to create your own components on BC

Posted: Mon Apr 29, 2013 9:20 am
by Avicii
BUMP!

Re: Avicii's Tips - how to create your own components on BC

Posted: Mon Apr 29, 2013 8:36 pm
by Curu Olannon
Avicii wrote:Who can sticky this?
I can :)

Re: Avicii's Tips - how to create your own components on BC

Posted: Tue Apr 30, 2013 12:06 am
by Avicii
Much appreciated Curu.

Re: Avicii's Tips - how to create your own components on BC

Posted: Thu Jun 13, 2013 12:52 pm
by Eirik
Hey, maybe you can tell me why strange movement lines appear behind my troops on turn 1? Is there any way to remove the movement lines for only one unit?

Re: Avicii's Tips - how to create your own components on BC

Posted: Sun Jun 16, 2013 12:06 pm
by Avicii
i believe there is an option in the left drop down bar to remove movement arrows. select the unit at the top left first.

Avicii

Re: Avicii's Tips - how to create your own components on BC

Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2013 10:04 am
by Lesten
Hello. Sorry for "barging in" like this but I'm trying learn how to use battle chronicler and hoped you might be able to help. It has to do with adding a component as a symbol.

I'm trying to add an image as a symbol to be used by a unit. The size of the symbol is 50 mm, and I want to use its actual size, despite having a smaller base (or in some cases I want to use its actual size despite having a larger base) (i.e. I want the symbol to be 50 mm regardless of the size of its base or unit). There is a mention of it here: http://www.battlechronicler.com/docs/symboltut.html ("symbol size" 2/3 down the page) - the dragon is clearly overlapping its base. I've tried to follow the instructions there, but it seems impossible to get the same results. I've tried every setting for the image (fill, uniform, uniform to fill, tile) and for the colour definitions for the unit (above unit, within unit, actual size) - no matter what settings I use the symbol is scaled down (or up) to match the unit's base (except for the "tile" setting). The "offset" setting doesn't seem to do anything at all, which is also frustrating.

Here's what it looks like when I try (obviously I'm going to use pictures of actual models later on):
Image <-- 50mm symbols using "actual size" on 25mm bases. The symbols are scaled down to fit the base. ("test" is the unit name)
Image <--- 50m symbols using "actual size" on 90mm bases. The symbols are scaled up to fit the base.

In don't want the symbol to scale in either case, and I want it to overlap the border of the base (so that arms, weapons and other things can stick out from the base when I use actual models).

Anyone know how to do this?

Thanks

Re: Avicii's Tips - how to create your own components on BC

Posted: Wed Aug 07, 2013 2:54 am
by Avicii
Hey Lestern sorry for the very late reply I have been very busy with work the last couple of months. I will have a look into this on my BC over the weekend and see if I can find a solution for you.

Avicii

Re: Avicii's Tips - how to create your own components on BC

Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2014 9:48 pm
by Nicene
Thank you so much! I just made a custom set of comps for my Loremaster, which I hope to showcase in my upcoming reports!!

(assuming she doesn't cascade too much)

Re: Avicii's Tips - how to create your own components on BC

Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2014 11:45 pm
by Swordmaster of Hoeth
How can we share the pictures we made for particular special effects? Upload them on photobucket and simply post them here so that every one can copy them?

Cheers!

Re: Avicii's Tips - how to create your own components on BC

Posted: Fri Mar 21, 2014 1:31 am
by Nicene
I've posted a pack of the ones I just made on Google Drive, by way of experiment. Hope this is okay.

***
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bys8CR ... sp=sharing <-- nicene's loremaster comps (zip archive). just click file -> download.
***

I considered Photobucket but it seems a bit clunky--and might eat too much bandwidth? maybe if I shrink the files down to 24x24 pixels. I will experiment with this.

edit: it occurs to me I need some sort of portal/vortex comp for all of my Dimensional Cascades.

Re: Avicii's Tips - how to create your own components on BC

Posted: Fri Mar 21, 2014 2:42 am
by Nicene
Okay, here's the comps from Photobucket. I made them all 150x150 which is practically zero bandwidth, I believe.


Image
wyssan's wildform

Image
iceshard blizzard

Image
earthblood

Image
fireball

Image
melkoth's mystifying miasma

Image
searing doom

Image
shem's burning gaze (this looks fine when you load it up in BC)

Image
spirit leech

Image
ring of fury

Image
1-3 dimensional cascade

Re: Avicii's Tips - how to create your own components on BC

Posted: Mon Apr 21, 2014 9:26 am
by Avicii
Thank you very much for sharing these fantastic components with us Nicene! Keep up the great work :D