WIP Republic Commando Sniper Scope

[Botdra]

Just for fun I decided to try my hand at recreating the sniper's scope from Republic Commando. I didn't see that anyone has made it before but I'm sure someone has at some point... anyways. I decided to do it just to try my hand at creating graphics from scratch in Photoshop. I must say it's paying off a lot so far, considering it requires different things than my typical Photoshop usage (basic map textures, mild photo editing). Plus if anyone wants it I will probably release it once I finish it. I started a couple hours ago and it's going well. I'm using a screenshot I took in-game as reference, and then matched the stretching/ratio to that of the stock sniper scope and just used the screenshot as a template.

 

Fun Fact: The text from the game in the upper right corner actually says "October 11th - However, I will still be out on riday, September" And yes, it does say "riday" and not "Friday". Interesting stuff, I'm guessing they either were just messing around and making stuff up as they went or they had some text file they just copy/pasted from for the sake of time. Here's the reference shot versus my recreation so far:

 

 

 

 

The base scope is 512x512 so I went 1024x1024 for mine, just to keep it polished. I'm assuming it scales everything down - which has been my experience with the gfx folder so far. The only thing missing is a few small dash marks on the inside of the outer circle, which you may have noticed. Those will be on the OTHER part of the scope... in Republic Commando there's a few of those dash marks that freely move around the circle, so to make that somewhat realistic I decided that the circular part of the scope that turns as you zoom in will have those dots on it, though it may not work the way I want so we'll see. As of now I'm almost done version 1, but version 2 will have some variants as to the outer edges of the scope. I'll make one with blacked out edges like the base scope, one with blacked out edges and the edges of the scope itself (similar to Inyri's Mass Effect scope), etc. just so you have some choice. Comments and crits are welcome, thanks.

 

 

[Horatio Culver]

http://jediknight3.filefront.com/file/RC_Style_Sniper_Scope_and_Effects;115333

 

Yours looks a lot better, though. Nice work!

[Botdra]

Yeah I saw that just after I started and just kinda went "Meh." haha. I wanted to just do it for the sake of learning some things in JA and Photoshop anyways. I've got it in-game and working but I'm going to continue refining it another day. I've worked on it all day and now it's time to game!

 

EDIT: Alright, just one more.

 

 

 

 

Defs some issues... the rotating hashes are a complete fail as the angle changes so those will be removed. I'm still not getting the glow effect that I want so I'm gonna tweak it a bit more tomorrow, as well as experiment with some scan lines, maybe clouds effects... we'll see what happens!

[Botdra]

I'm having issues with this... I can't seem to get rid of the faint whiteness around part of the crosshair. If you look closely in the in-game shots, there's a very small white border to everything... I'm guessing it has something to do with the Alpha Channel not being set properly? Any help would be great. Maybe @@Inyri knows after doing her ME scope?

[Inyri]

I'd have to re-learn how to do it and I don't really have time to do that at the moment. My best suggestion would be to disassemble and study an existing scope mod to see how it was done.

[The One and Only]

Quick fix to the white borders you're seeing, leave the alpha channel as it is, change the colour channels so that you've got 'splodges' of colour, rather than trying to line up precisely with the alpha channel.

[Botdra]

Quick fix to the white borders you're seeing, leave the alpha channel as it is, change the colour channels so that you've got 'splodges' of colour, rather than trying to line up precisely with the alpha channel.

 

Not sure what you mean... can you post a picture of the "splotches" you're talking about? I just used Ctrl + Click on the layer with the crosshair on it, then went to the Alpha channel and deleted that area.

[The One and Only]

Exaggerated a bit to make it clearer, left is colour, right is alpha:

 

You pretty much just want to overlap the edges of the alpha channel a little bit.

[AshuraDX]

@@Botdra get xnormal's filters for photoshop , the dilation filter does pretty much what you need

[Botdra]

@@Botdra get xnormal's filters for photoshop , the dilation filter does pretty much what you need

 

Downloading now... mind telling me how it works/how to use it?

[AshuraDX]

I guess you could figure that out yourself as it's really not that hard :

take your scope layer in photoshop and make sure the parts you want to be transparent are transaprent in the layer

then go to filters/xnormal/dilation , a dialogue asking for a radius will open , pick that radius depending on your resolution

I wouldn't go over 16 px with a 1024² texture , hit okay or apply and the filter will clone all border pixels of oyur layer 16 times around the visible parts to create a border

this is also called "edge padding"

[Botdra]

I can't get the plugins to work so I'm going to have to do it manually. Anyone know an easy way to do it manually? I can't imagine doing it by hand, especially not accurately... at least not without taking a week.

[Botdra]

So, because I'm a f---ing idiot, I saved the flattened version of the file overtop of the original PDF. It's at the point where all I have to deal with is the Alpha Channel which I'm almost done with but oh holy mother of god there is a lot of hatred going on right now. >.> It's done, just needs to be polished a bit with the Alpha Channel then I'll upload it just in case anyone is interested.

[Corto]

Can I also suggest you do a radial blur to the mask that represents the scope tube? Right now is scissors cut, make if fade away so it looks like you are not making focus on the edge of the scope.

[Botdra]

Can I also suggest you do a radial blur to the mask that represents the scope tube? Right now is scissors cut, make if fade away so it looks like you are not making focus on the edge of the scope.

 

Not sure what you mean. I think you mean the gray graphic around the edges? If so I just copied that from the original to be accurate, I was hoping to make a version with a REAL edge as if it were a REAL scope but... well see previous post. *facepalm*

[Corto]

I guess you'll have to do it all over again.

[Botdra]

I guess you'll have to do it all over again.

 

That won't happen any time soon. It will be easy to do since I've done it once already now, but it will be time consuming. I have enough to release it once I get the Alpha Channels right but other versions will have to wait unfortunately. ):

[Botdra]

So update, I'm even dumber than we all thought!

I found a .PSD of the scope without the flattening, apparently I did make a backup of it once it was finished. Perfect! I'm going to polish this up for release over the next few days hopefully, then I'll start on another scope mod.