Help on sprite ripping?

[Kangaroodle]

I see A LOT of potential avatars from the game sprites, mainly victory and intro animations. However, I am having a lot of problems trying to figure out how to rip the sprites. Is there a way to do it? Google didn't help much.

Thanks in advance.

[Robot]

There is a program i think called 'AnimGet' which is a very old school way of ripping sprites by taking an insane amount of screenshots whenever the screen changes. Unfortunately you will have to edit out the sprites you want as of course screenshots involve backgrounds. *there are other newer programs that do this to my knowledge but I haven’t ripped any sprites for ages now.*

Hopefully this is what you meant by ripping the sprites else, you will have to dig through the game folders and try to salvage anything possible from encrypted files... *near impossible*

*when you do get the sprites, keep in mind that if you want to distribute just the raw sprites, ask for permission from the people who made the game before doing so, *high chances that they wont though.* as copyright and such... I think.

[Chrono_Tata]

That method probably won't work too well with Skullgirls since the sprites in this game has dynamic lighting.

[DixiE]

I believe the sprites are also split into multiple layers (as a result of the dynamic lighting that Chrono_Tata mentioned), and potentially different body parts (as, in case you have not noticed, there are multiple layers for the sprites so some things such as Vice-Versa's furthest arm appear behind the opponent's sprites), this would make ripping them a strenuous task and you'd be better off just screenshotting stuff with F12 and cutting out faces for your icons.

[Krackatoa]

Reverse engineer the game's custom file format, which divides the assets up into their individual parts:
- Lineart.
- Greyscale Fills.
- Hue values so the Grey Fills actually have colour. Will have to be applied after-the-fact. You'll have to do this with a program of your own design, likely one that samples grey values and replaces them with the proper hue values.
- Do you Want Lighting? I sure hope not. I think the game uses a mesh overlay over every frame for real-time lighting, and it's different for every level, so it can't be replicated without rendering software of your own.

You're honestly just better off hacking out the background and lighting, then putting the game to 10% speed and capturing raw screenshots, then cutting them out in Photoshop. Someone did a super-basic Valentine for Mugen already this way.

Good luck.

[Kangaroodle]

Guess I'd have to use a series of ingame screenshots.

Strangely I am now interested in the idea of assembling the character sprites like a complicated puzzle, haha.

[DixiE]

Originally posted by DC Krackatoa:

- Hue values so the Grey Fills actually have colour. Will have to be applied after-the-fact. You'll have to do this with a program of your own design, likely one that samples grey values and replaces them with the proper hue values.

Photoshop can actually do this bit for you, it has multiple options for how to use the layers, such as overlays, screen, multiply and other such filters and these are the same ones the artists themselves will have used when producing the sprites in the first place.

[Gongfuren]

I've managed to extract the sprites of Cerebella's animation during the character selection screen using a GFS file unpacking tool I found on the internet. Here is the raw extracted file:

http://i.imgur.com/anvTzIC.png

As you can see, the sprites are split into rows of 512 by 16 pixels. After some simple image manipulation, I ended up with this for her first frame:

http://i.imgur.com/PCX9zYk.png

The colors that you see in-game are stored in a separate color palette file. For Palette 1 in the game, this is that file:

http://i.imgur.com/xJbE9DU.png

I didn't bother coloring the sprite because it would take quite some time to do. This is just to show how the sprite is organized.

There may be a better-organized sprite of her in some other file. I didn't bother to look very hard, though, because that would also take quite some time to do.

[Kangaroodle]

This looks so complicated it may actually be fun! I shall look into this one day.

[JasonS]

Yeah SG uses a custom file format, custom data compression and in-engine palette/colour editor. Getting at the raw sprites will be a lot of work. It would probably be easier to capture them from the game.

[Robot]

Originally posted by Chrono_Tata:

That method probably won't work too well with Skullgirls since the sprites in this game has dynamic lighting.

Darn, I completely forgot about that, I guess im just stuck in the old times of sprite ripping... But yea, alot of photoshop work should be able to fix that. But teh hell if anyone would want to do that!

[Krackatoa]

Originally posted by Gongfuren:

I've managed to extract the sprites of Cerebella's animation during the character selection screen using a GFS file unpacking tool I found on the internet. Here is the raw extracted file:

http://i.imgur.com/anvTzIC.png

As you can see, the sprites are split into rows of 512 by 16 pixels. After some simple image manipulation, I ended up with this for her first frame:

http://i.imgur.com/PCX9zYk.png

The colors that you see in-game are stored in a separate color palatte file. For Palatte 1 in the game, this is that file:

http://i.imgur.com/xJbE9DU.png

I didn't bother coloring the sprite because it would take quite some time to do. This is just to show how the sprite is organized.

There may be a better-organized sprite of her in some other file. I didn't bother to look very hard, though, because that would also take quite some time to do.

That is awesome.