What you will need
- Ghost Recon
(Desert Siege / Island Thunder) v1.3 or higher
- Adobe Photoshop,
or Paint Shop Pro
- RSB Plugins
that shipped with Island Thunder.
- Know how to
set up a working mod (can be found here)
Now that we have what we need
let’s jump in. Making an effective Ghillie suit is a
very basic idea and is almost a lost art. Not many modders
do much with the Ghillie suit because the one that comes with
GR is effective enough; but take a look at this and see if
you can find the sniper:
If you can, the government needs you! Anyway, to start off
we’ll apply simple logic as taught by our grade school
teachers. We want our sniper to be almost invisible in his
surroundings. So for GR (which I will be using in this tutorial)
that means a woodland area. More dull browns, greens and the
occasional black. Camouflage makes you blend in, but you can
still be seen. What better way to be concealed than actually
using your environment. Basically what I’m getting at
is we’re going to use the GR environment to make our
Ghillie.
Start off by opening up ica_us_sniper_body.rsb
in your InstallPath\Mods\Origmiss\Character\Allied folder,
and then follow up with character_trans.rsb.
In front of you, you should have the sniper uniform, a Ghillie
and some goggles. So far, we’re good. Now we’re
going to pick an assortment of textures from GR and use them
on our Ghillie. Since most of the sniper’s time is spent
on the ground, we want him to be concealed with a ground texture
(we don’t want a rocky laying around on the floor).
So, go ahead and pick a texture form one of your maps (Origmiss\Map)
I used one from the caves map (Map\M01_Caves\M01_overgrowth.rsb).
This texture is a little tricky, but done right we should
have a beautiful Ghillie.
Go ahead and minimize your character uniform, we don’t
need it right now. Next, go to our texture. Switch over to
our Alpha Channel, and then use the
Select>Color Range tool. Select
the white area. Go back to RGB and copy the selected area.
Paste it over onto the Ghillie suit several times. Don’t
worry just yet about where it belongs. Paste it so it covers
EVERYTHING (merge the moss into one layer). Then, you’ll
have this:
DO NOT MERGE THE LAYERS YET!
Before you continue, take the layer with the moss, right-click
it, then hit duplicate layer. There should be a drop down
menu, that says: ica_us_sniper_body.rsb;
character_trans.rsb; mo1_overgrowth.rsb;
New. Obviously, we’re going to move it to the sniper
uniform. Okay, now continue.
Here’s the easy part.
In Character_Trans.rsb, go ahead
and go to the alpha channel. Select>Color Range, again,
and click on the black. Now go back to RGB and select the
layer with all of your moss on it. Hit delete. Don’t
forget to make it so the goggles can be seen like this:
Now the Ghillie is done. So
minimize it for a bit. Now switch over to the uniform. There
should be a big layer of moss. Hide it. (click the eye ball
next to the layer). Select the area with the boots, gloves
and goggle; then move back to the layer with the moss and
delete that area. It only gets easier. Change the moss opacity
to about %50 - %65 at most. This still gives us the moss look,
but it won’t make us go through hours of work to preserve
the uniform. So, we still gain the concealment by the moss
texture, and we still have the wrinkles and the other parts
of the uniform.
Well here’s the brandy
dandy new uniform in action:
The Weapon
Not bad huh? But what’s the weird
part about it? The gun! Its camo is different and it doesn’t
work. Possibly the one thing that can give him away. We can
fix that. Open up the M24 texture file located in Origmiss\Textures\iw_srifle_m24_camo.rsb.
Assuming you still have the moss open, do another copy and
paste over top the camo that’s there. Don’t worry
about alpha channels or anything of the sort, just fill up
the entire thing. It’ll work out. Now, open up iw_srifle_m24.rsb.
Make a new layer with only moss camo. Hide it. Select the
camo on the gun. Select>Inverse (Ctrl+Shift+Alt+I) and
then hit delete. You’ll now have this:
And, with the gun, Ghillie and uniform all camoed we get our
final result:
For those of you who are curious,
here’s
the answer to the first shot I showed you.
Additional Notes
-I used only GR active to get my Ghillie to work. For some
odd reason with DS/IT activated it refused to work. I would
suggest editing all of the ghillies before panicking. However,
I wrote over the original GR files (I do NOT recommend doing
this! AT ALL!), which may be part of it. If used as a mod,
I’m %99.9 certain it will work with out a flaw.
-Choose your textures wisely. As I said earlier, you don’t
want a stone or a tree laying around on the ground. When your
sniper needs to be concealed the most is when he’s shooting;
which means he’s on the ground. Pick shrubs, bushes,
sand, grass anything but something that would require him
to be crouched or standing to be concealed.
-To make your ghillie about 10 times
more realistic. Get a bunch of leaf and/or branch files; I
used 4. Then as I said; make them cover the entire 512x512
canvas. So you should have about
4 layers that cover the canvas. Start playing with the blendings;
duplicate layers whatever. I duplicated two of my layers;
left one as a base texture and it came out BEAUTIFULLY!
If you have any questions or comments, please, don’t
be afraid to e-mail
me
|