Splicing Questions

So I’m new to the hacking community, started making a rom hack and I ran into some issues while splicing. Many were answered by the community, but some I have yet to get, as they’re kind of specific to my splice. I was told that I needed to AA, and that the right cheek needed outlining. Any tips on how to get started on that, and is there anything else I could fix?

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It’s a simple splice, if it’s good enough for you that’s all that matters.

If you want technical advice, wait for someone more qualified than I to answer.

Welcome to FEU! We’re all a welcoming group who’s more than happy to teach peeps over everything we can.

I’m not exactly the greatest portrait maker, and I’d recommend hopping onto our Discord server to talk with someone like BuskHusker, ObsidianWasp or anyone else in the Spritans room for better advice than me, I can try helping out here.

When taking images of portraits, be sure to export a 1 for 1 image of it instead of screenshotting your screen. This allows us to take a better look at it or to edit it ourselves to create suggestions.


On the left side of his face (for us), you’ll need to have shading underneath the hair and to have the bottom of his chin have the dark grey outline.

Beruka-2.png (2)
Take my Beruka (at 3x view for readability); the entire left side of the face (for us) has the dark outline surrounding it, which makes it distinct from the hair. Especially if we’re implying that the hair would be behind the head, this is important to do as one of the first steps.

Sigune (2)-1.png
Here I added FE8 outline to Sigrun’s head, and you can see the line on the sprite where the entire head on that half is outlined.

Another thing you might want to do is to take a look at this image, which has a bunch of FE8 skin colors. Pick a set of colors you think suits the character and go with it. FE8 colors tend to be more accepted thanks to a weird outline color and imo show off the skin shading nicer.
image

Antialiasing I can’t help you on though, sorry. I still have issues with that. I think that might refer to Sigune’s hair, and in that case Busk/Obsidian would probably be the best for that.

also i love the choice in hair even if it’s… silly. Sigune’s hair is great.

Ah, alright, thank you for the suggestions and the skin sheet. image here is a 1x version of the sprite work. This is the first ever splice that I’ve ever done, and I wanted to use it for the hack I’m making. I’m not great at outlining, so that’s where my biggest issues are arising.

When doing outline for the face, reference all vanilla FE8 sprites. Most of them use a tried formula of the very edge of the face being the dark purple outline, then the darkest skin shade 1 above it, then the 2nd darkest skin shade above that.

Bone-1.png (1)

Bone isn’t a perfect because of his chin hair, but you can see on the edge of the face there’s a lot of the darker shades of skin.

Your sprite also has more than 16 colors; thanks to gba being a shit we’ve only got 16 colors to work with (15, actually, because the green is transparent.)

Another note I found is that the placement on the image, where the mouth/eye frames, the minimug and even the portrait itself, were all in the wrong spot, so I went ahead and fixed that because thats what heroes do

Bone-1.png (3)
You’re free to take this, which has reduced colors, and correct eye frame shenanigans.

Portrait Editor FE7.gba_3@03 _C965D8
I couldn’t find what the original eyes were for your sprite (since I always make sure the eye closes like the original for splices), so I left them blank. Feel free to replace them at your leisure.

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Oh wow, thanks a lot! I’ll have to take all this in mind for future splices. I do plan on making more, so all tips do help. Also, the eyes belonged to Raven, so if you could tell me how to make blink frames that’d be nice

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image-1.png - 2020-10-07T174832.642

This is the last I’ll help ya here because this is about the extend of which I can do portraits, the only portraits I’ve done I’ve had help on for a majority of the way through, but I added the eye frames manually. It really is a thousand times easier on Discord, both bc more talented people than me are there and because I respond faster there.

I’ll start with the more basics…

Eye/Mouth move frames all have fixed positions which can be shifted 8 pixels left or right. I usually reference a vanilla portrait’s eye/mouth move positions and just copy the same region (so, on Bone’s portrait, I’d note which sect of the face is where the eye frame is, highlight that specific region, swap to the portrait I’m actually working on then copy that region.

Then, when doing the Eye and Mouth frames, I always copy the same look as the vanilla eye/mouth I’m using, and if I need to do further edits I do that. So, for Raven, I just copied his eye, his half closed eye, and closed eye and placed them over where the current eye is. Usually, I just eyeball it pun not intended.

I’d also pass this on to FEU because they can handle the giant forehead and the really not great eyebrows.

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Alright thanks, last thing is could I have an invite to the discord? or is there somewhere I can get it? I’m also on the subreddits discord so i’ve been getting some help there

The discord server is pinned.