Tony Kramer's Portfolio

     With each picture that comes out I am becoming more familiar and comfortable with Adobe Photoshop.  I have already created custom backgrounds and pictures for this website along with numerous textures and load screens for my maps.

     My backgrounds were taken with "r_showtris" enabled so I could get the polygon outline in-game.  After I had my picture I would adjust the levels until I had a mostly white background and black lines.  After this I would convert the picture to a graysscale and add a new solid black layer and change the opaqueness to 50% to get the flat gray color.  My goal was to create a diffrent background on each page but keep them all similar.  You would only notice a change if you were looking for it.

     For my picture at the top of the page I took a picture of my office map with and without "r_showtris" (outlines).  I would load both images as a layer and use the graident with alpha to blend both pictures.  Once blended I would adjust opaqueness for the top picture to get a nice even blend.  Then add a little brightness and save.

Creating the loading screens for my maps is one of the most enjoyable thing I do other than mapping in itself.  Here I have freedom to make it look interesting, stunning, and creative.  One of my favorite things to do is create a screen with a partial wire frame across the map or on a certain object to highlight it, usually an objective.  When I do a certain object it usually grabs the player's attention in-game and are naturally curious about it.  I take two different screens in-game and merge, select, cut, fade, and adjust until I can get the desired results.  Here are two of Unbound Force's loading screens to show you.




This screen of "UF_Office" is not going to be a load screen but it is to show you a fade of the whole map.

This wedding picture was taken myself and I made two layers of the same photograph.  I shrunk the top layer to about an inch on each side, blurred the background and added a border.  It was pretty simple but effective because of the border giving an accent to the original photograph.