[Gallagher]

Gasp! Surprise! It's ITEM TIME, SUCKAS!

[Illusion]

I quickly ran to donate, I love these items <3

[ml1201]

I'm going to have to try donating again before the end of the month to get a few more of the celtic one and a few of the other one. >>;

[Batty]

Looks a lot like the one I did.

Is it?

[Tiva]

FenFen made Celtic and the new artist, Him, made La Muerte.

[Gallagher]

It's not, Batz. Yours is waaay different and still needs to be made. I checked the designs before this one happened. It's just that this one I could flat for Fen, and yours I couldn't.

[ml1201]

.-.
Galla has hoofs, where did Galla get those hooves? x'D

And what was Batty's item? :o

[Gallagher]

Batz has a few designs left to be used from when she was an artist with us, and one of these is the same theme as La Muerte, being Day of the Dead. But, Batz' design has a lot more intricate parts, some more traditional male clothing, and she made a lovely layered asymmetrical skirt instead of a full gown.

My hooves are from Fenrir's Companion, but there are also hooves in Enki and Guardian of the Fallen, as well as an entire leg mod including hooves in Phaunos Spirit.

[ml1201]

I don't believe I have any of those. ^^; Guess when the time comes I'm going to have to look through the older items and make a list of what I want. x'D

And by the description of the set it sounds pretty neat. :3

[Gallagher]

It is very neat, with lots of parts I would have loved to have included, but I'm not good enough at pixeling to fit the design into flats.

[ml1201]

Just because I'm curious but what do you mean by 'flats'?

[Coda]

The way our artists divide the labor often involves having separate people creating the base layer (called "flats" because they're flat-shaded with no details) and doing the coloring and shading. It reduces a lot of the mundane work for the colorist.

[ml1201]

Ah, so its kind of like a factory line in that case then. And I take it each color palette has three tones for color option for the items?

[Gallagher]

All of our items are made entirely in greyscale, then have colors applied through a gradient map. We have a special set of gradient maps made specifically for this system, and it lets us have relative uniformity with the 208 colors we have available.

Items typically look like this without their colors:

Which allows us to do lovely combinations like y'all saw in the final release, oorrrr...

My usual job is to turn those 1,478,256 possible combinations (for the average monthly item, and no that's not an exaggeration) into the 4 final sets you lovely users get to see. As I do that, I save the individual files and sort them for our uploader to understand. That's what a recolorist does around here.

Flats are an extra job that just sort of happens sometimes, especially when we're running too close to our deadlines. In more usual circumstances, the pixelist does those as well.

[ml1201]

Ah! You're using photoshop for them! No wonder why I was confused. I haven't used photoshop since 2008, so about seven years now. I did try using it about three years ago but the layout was different and I didn't understand it. I'm not sure if I can do that with GIMP or at least the version I have.

[Coda]

GIMP can pull it off although the procedure is different.

For common items, I wrote a program that takes the grayscale images and auto-generates the entire common item set from them. It's got some upgrades needed to really be super-duper useful, but it's there.