Tool for Character Creation

[super3]

In one of your very old post you said you wanted to make a tool to allow you to automatically generate characters rather than have a gimp file. Did you ever start on that?

If not I think that would be a great tool to have and something I could put together rather easily.

[silveira]

I never started. The extract_layers.sh created all the assets in /layers. Someone started something using html/javascript, checkboxes and divs as layers, but it doesn't exported (save) the results. I would crete probably I would do something URL oriented, e.g. example.com/char_generetor/body_green+eyes_default+cloths_blackdress.png and I would get a png. This would create a character service for avatars or javascript games. Then, a web UI would generate these URLs.

[super3]

Do you have a link to the code that someone started on? Seems like would
need two simple solutions.

The first one you could code using a little html/javascript, using
transparent divs, and buttons between choices. Good luck getting this to
work in IE. This would work for display, but it would not allow you to save
the image because it would just be a bunch of layers of images. That is
when you could have a server side script(maybe in python) to quickly
generate an actually .png for download when you are done. What do you think?

On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 6:11 PM, Silveira Neto notifications@github.comwrote:

I never started. The extract_layers.sh created all the assets in /layers.
Someone started something using html/javascript, checkboxes and divs as
layers, but it doesn't exported (save) the results. I would crete probably
I would do something URL oriented, e.g.
example.com/char_generetor/body_green+eyes_default+cloths_blackdress.pngand I would get a png. This would create a character service for avatars or
javascript games. Then, a web UI would generate these URLs.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/7#issuecomment-11428410.

Shawn Wilkinson
Student, Morehouse College
Independent Web Developer
me@super3.org
http://super3.org

[silveira]

No, I have been doing a bad job in keeping track of what projects are using the openpixels. I should have a file with links to these. :(

Yes, this is a good approach to the server side. With Python I would recomend the PIL http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/. Let me know if you tried something.

[super3]

If you could find that it would be helpful, and maybe save some time.

That would finally give me an excuse to learn how to use the PIL, although this could be put together with PyGame too if I was lazy. I think the best thing to do is make a little command line app that can generate large amounts of characters sets that you can release.

If I put together this tool do you mind if throw some of the sets I generate up on my website (to exploit them for some traffic of course). If it turns out that the automatically generated assets are pretty awesome then I could put together a whole site just for them. All with your permission of course.

[silveira]

It seems possible to just generate and cache all the possible combinations of characters, but we have currently 76 layers. If we maintain the current fixed order used in Gimp (e.g. the body comes before than the eyes, hair, etc), this gives us 2^76 different png images. If we could choose any order for the layers we would have 76! (76 factorial) different png images. A single image have about 5.8k today (or about 8kb with 2x zoom). Either case, it is too much space.

Another approaches could be:

• 1. Generate images as needed.
• 2. Generate images as needed but cache the already generate images.
• 3. Generate images as needed but cache the most recent and/or most used images.

[super3]

Yeah the first two would be something that could be easily implemented. First you make the actual function to generate the images(1). Then you add a little script that will check if it has generated it already first, then generate it if not(2). You would implement (3) if you we really processing a large amount of images and needed to optimize.

This function actually could have other uses too. You can now procedurally or explicitly generate characters for a game. You could have 1,000s of unique characters, but not actually have to have art assets rather than just the layers.

[silveira]

Oh, there is a few rendered characters at https://github.com/silveira/openpixels/tree/master/examples/characters

[super3]

Thanks. I saw that while browsing through the repo. Ok, I am going to play around with the script, and I'll keep you updated.

[super3]

Do you want me to continue working on my own fork?

[silveira]

I can give you permissions here if you want. Do you want it?

[super3]

Auto generated guy. This is why I love python. This was done in like 20 minutes.

Sure I could work on a separate branch for my auto generated script.

[super3]

Now I'm just randomly generating them. Need to define some logic for creating a char, so they have stuff like pants. Here are some good ones from an autogenerated set of 50:

Mr.T?

[silveira]

Amazing! I guess you could have a mandatory body and eyes, to start with. I just gave you permissions as a collaborator. Fell free to create another branch or just do anything you want. Looking forward to see this code. :)

[super3]

Some of the things in clothes are just pants or shirts. We might need to work out how to attach some logic to each item. The helmet it just not going to work well with the afro. Then again maybe we should just ignore the logic part and just make the script generate whatever is passed to it.

The ugly code is in my fork. It needs to be cleaned and doced. Mind if I throw some of these on Reddit so people can see the project?

[super3]

Tool is done. Still need to document it a bit.