Help Placing NPC's On Furniture - Holding Furniture, Sitting on it, ect.

[ZeroAffex]

Greetings,

I am relatively new to RPG Maker MV. I have completed the in-game tutorials and have started down the path of making my first game. I have created some fun cut scenes that auto play out while you watch though in the process, I wanted to have one of my NPC's be able to sit on the sofa for one instance, sleep in a bed for another and lastly, have another NPC appear in the scene carrying a box, animal or something along those lines

I have gone into System>Tilesets and made sofas, beds, ect. below character (playing "O"'s), while this kind of works, it looks awful still. Changing tiles above character was worse looking. I am curious what the best way to go about this is? I wasn't able to find much online so decided I'd break in my first forum post for this issue. I've been trying to refrain asking questions in the early stages as I am sure lots of newcomers like myself instantly run here and ask rather than seeking out the answer before. So thanks in advance for your time in helping me out.

I did find a discussion on Steam forums similar to my issue where you can use Gimp to edit tilesets but it makes no sense to me how to make that work. I have no qualms using Gimp though, if only I understood how to do it. Thanks again. Cheers!

PS: Just thought of another thing that kind of relates to this post, what is the best way to have a NPC use items like phones? Is it possible to program/edit an character to appear like they are holding a phone? What about holding a phone with a coord to the wall? Is that possible to do? I figured if I could figure out how to do the above, I could use it for other scenes like a player getting a new weapon, raising it in the air or giving a friend a gift.

Sorry for length of post.

-Zero

 

[mlogan]

No amount of programming will accomplish this without the drawn graphics. Programming/eventing can only manipulate the images you have to make it appear the character is doing these actions - phone included.

Avery has some tutorials on making simple edits, you might check those out and see if it helps you understand better.

 

[ZeroAffex]

I was able to find some stuff from Avery, going to go through it. Thanks for placing me in the right direction! I appreciate it.

-Zero

PS: For others interested in seeing what Avery has created, see here https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?tags/avery/

 

[ZeroAffex]

Ok, so I figured out a couple ways to place characters images onto objects, right now I got it set for beds and sofa's. Using gimp, I opened up the "Walk Character" images that you'd use in Character Generator for the character you want placed on furniture in-game, then cropped off their heads as well as flipped the some images to give me a variety of images that can be placed on furniture for different views. Save it, export it into Documents>Img>Tilesets, (make sure it's .png) then load up RMMV, go to System>Tilesets, I used the empty "D" option, loaded it up. Double click in-game where you want your image, for instance, on the sofa. The event creation will spring up, click "Image", scroll down to your Custom Tileset (mine was named SF_Inside_BA.), click it, pick your image and done!

At this time I have it for back and front facing furnitures, working on side to side facing as well as editing them into furniture like chairs viewed from the side, that will take more time as I will have to tinker on legs we can view as well as make sure they fit nicely into RMMV. Speaking of which, only issue I've had so far is sometimes placement of image doesn't correlate into the "Image Block" that you would pick from within Event>Image>Custom Tileset, so say you bring up your edited image in-game, when going to place it down, if it isn't within the "Imagine Block" perimeters, it will cut off some of your edited image when you lay it down. Nothing too big, just take a little trial and error, until you get the image on gimp to line up perfectly for you to use in RMMV.

Thought I'd share my findings here for others who have had the same issues and wanted an easy way to fix it without going too overboard. Hope it helps some out. Cheers!

-Zero

 

[whtdragon]

@ZeroAffex
If you still need some help getting edits going, I have a bunch of stuff that might help ya
https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?threads/base-sprites-emotes-and-animations.56332/

 

[ZeroAffex]

Oh I did forget to ask, how do I add custom tilesets to use in editor? Do I need to remove one and replace it with the modified one I want? Grabbing images from Event Creation is fine for now but I may want to use Custom Tiles down the road. As of now, I have A, B, C, R. Can you make it have 5 or more tilesets to choose from? Or will I need to swap out tiles from B or C with custom tiles, use the customs, then swap back defaults? Hope that makes sense. Other than that, pretty happy that I was able to get what I wanted done. Really appreciate the tipoff to reading Avery's post. Lots of good information!

-Zero

 

[ZeroAffex]

@ZeroAffex
If you still need some help getting edits going, I have a bunch of stuff that might help ya
https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?threads/base-sprites-emotes-and-animations.56332/

Wow, nice! Thank you for this. Insta-bookmark! haha. Really appreciate it. Cheers!

 

[mlogan]

@ZeroAffex , please avoid double posting, as it is against the forum rules. You can use the "Edit" function on your posts to add additional information you've forgotten or respond to multiple people. You can review our forum rules here. Thank you.

You can go back and edit your last post if no one else has posted.

You can place up to 9 individual tilesheets to make a tileset. A1-A5 and B-E. A1-A4 are autotiles and have very specific construction per sheet, so please take some time to learn those before replacing them with custom stuff.

B-E are all 768x768 and can be interchanged with one another, meaning a sheet labeled "Outside_B" can also go in slot C,D or E and function fine.

To add new tilesheets, place them into the tilesets folder within the image folder in your game file. Then you can go into the database and set up your tilesets how you want them. When you go into the tilesets tab, it will only show you 10 slots for separate tilesets, but you can change the maximum number to create more if you wish.

Also, since this is getting into how to make sprites and such, I feel it really should be in Resource Support, so I'm going to move it there.

 

[ZeroAffex]

@mlogan Sorry for breaking the forum rules, I did read the link you provided and will do better not to do so again Oh and thank you for giving me a step by step instruction on how to change/use more tilesets withing the RMMV editor. Really mind blowing the amount of stuff I can add into my game now that I know this. Great stuff, thanks a bunch!

@whtdragon You have created some really, really fantastic works and I intend on experimenting around with a lot of what you provided. I do have a question pertaining to the sprites you showed me. I am planning on incorporating them into my current game, just wanted to make sure the way I intend to do so is the correct way or if I am making harder on myself doing it this way.

I was going to take your "Walk Character" sprites, open them in gimp along side a "Walk Character" file from one of my characters that will be used in-game. I'd crop the image of their hair, clothing, accessories, ect and place them on your naked sprites, save it, export it and then load it up in game to use. Is this the best way to do it this?

Also, you have some really awesome monsters in another post I found that I am dying to use, do I do basically what I just described above, pulling up monster images and crop them out to be replaced with your images? Can't believe how much cool stuff you had to share with us though, I didn't think to see such quality without forking out more money! lol. So a big THANK YOU!

Hope everyone has a great weekend. Thanks you guys for humoring this newbie xD Talk more soon. Cheers!

-Zero

PS: Kind of off-topic, sincere apologies! Just remembered though, are there any plug-ins you guys would recommend for me to use? I haven't used any yet (other than the one at end of the tutorial) and am not sure how necessary they are at this time, so thought i'd ask your opinions on those as well if it's not too much trouble. Thanks!

Edit 5-12-18 3PM: @whtdragon Hello again. I have been working with the sprites you uploaded for us and it's been very slow going for me, partly due to my lack of experience using Gimp and lack of experience drawling pixel art. Here is what I have so far, it took me around an hour and half to finish drawling on 2 sprite images and I am not very happy with how they look honestly, especially of the girl sitting facing forward lol So yea.. I admit it, I am terrible at this! xD

Is there another method to doing this that isn't so hard for the inept? I have little reference on how the girl character I have would appear when sitting so trying to image it with her dress has been headache inducing. Just thought I'd share what I've come up with to see if this is the right direction to go or if you'd recommend another method. Thanks.

 

[whtdragon]

Edit 5-12-18 3PM: @whtdragon Hello again. I have been working with the sprites you uploaded for us and it's been very slow going for me, partly due to my lack of experience using Gimp and lack of experience drawling pixel art. Here is what I have so far, it took me around an hour and half to finish drawling on 2 sprite images and I am not very happy with how they look honestly, especially of the girl sitting facing forward lol So yea.. I admit it, I am terrible at this! xD
Is there another method to doing this that isn't so hard for the inept? I have little reference on how the girl character I have would appear when sitting so trying to image it with her dress has been headache inducing. Just thought I'd share what I've come up with to see if this is the right direction to go or if you'd recommend another method. Thanks.[/QUOTE]

yep that's basically how ya do it ( o 3 o)-b just chop up the bits and work 'em into the sprites~ I like to encourage folks to try their hand at stuff if possible, but if you're having a really hard time or don't think you can do them all, you might find someone on the site that could do some of the work instead. Because the base sprites are already there, half the work's done, it's just a matter of someone sitting down and doing it

I think you can do it though /)( o w o)/) the sprites look fine so far~ the only thing I'd recommend is maybe add a few more pixels around her feet on the front facing sprite, just to show her dress flared out a little bit-- also if the pixels aren't aligned to the grid you might have to re-adjust for those