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Howdies!

This here is an attempt to show some of the more advanced patching techniques that you may find yourself needing as you delve deeper into creating custom patches and objects to go with your dream. Often times, patching can be simple, like just chopping something off an existing image, or adding to that image, or even just recoloring that image so it fits the motif of your dream. But sometimes, you get into a project where the things you're making, or made, won't behave properly without resorting to some really strange work to make the look you want to appear. This here is one such project I got myself into and seeing as it took an approach which was rather involved, I've decided to make a page demonstrating how I made one of the objects in the patch. My log cabin walls did not take me very long to make the entire patch, and I'll probably add some more wall types to the basic patch later on, but when it came to making roofs to go with these walls, I ran into some interesting obstacles, mainly that the walls did not stack and blend.

So, in order to get from the raw arrangement that you see to the final product, I had to do some overlays of the base that you see on the left with current shapes from the patch. There was also one other interesting fault with doing this, because the current bug in dreamed won't bitmap the WALL_# images properly, so there was a bunch of screenshots done with making the wobjects. One of the elements in making things line up right is the use of specific colored tiles to mark out the grid in dreamed, generally, just get floor-161 a couple of times, then paint each shape with a different color. It is a pain dressing out the dream full of alternating colored tiles like this, however, if you do it once, then save a copy of that dream, it's done, you have a patch making dream.

Roof Shape 2 Log Wall 0 Log Wall 1 Log Wall 7 Log Wall 17

The actors used in this particular lesson are as you can see above, is a single wall, both cornering elements from the wall patch, the overhead beam wall, and the roof. The wall is only referenced here for later on, in dreamed, you arrange the corners, the beam, and the roof as shown, then make a screenshot. Open your favorite paint program, and paste it in there, then crop out about what the wobject will take up, and then some, give yourself some working room.


First thing I did was figure out where my alignment points were on the raw image so that I could paste the rest of the actors in place and make a coherent whole from all the assorted parts, first order of business was to emplace all the wall that the shape was mimicking in place so that I could fill in the space above the top of the "visible" wall.


One problem which came to light was that to properly make it work, I needed to zap the left end off the wall so it would paste up properly without having artifacts left behind which I may have to edit off the picture later on. After this was done, I located my first alignment point, and put one row of the logs over that point, making sure it overlapped the current beam properly.


After getting it in place once, repeat again, not that it looks necessary, but it looks cleaner that way. :-) I'll be trimming all that excess anyway. You may notice a hole in the image, it just needs a small chunk of wood to fill it in.

Next I located my next two point to align the next two part of the image to, the corner parts were to be done next. The "right" side, wall 0, needed to be trimmed slightly at the top to avoid overlapping the wall that was pasted into the wobject from the above step. It should be noted that I had to paste the "left" side, wall 1, first because the "right" side overlaps both that and the wall I pasted into the image to begin with.

Almost done, last few steps is getting the roof onto the image so that it looks like it's in the foreground, painting the background Furcadia Purple, and trimming the wobject to size. I should mention that all my pasting was done in MSPaint and using the transparent background paste with Furcadia Purple as the selected color. In order to get rid of the logs that ran "above" the roof, I first took the roof element and filling the upper right hand section with another color, actually, white, but don't think that will show up too terrible well here, so, blue! After pasting that onto my shape, I then resized it, and you will note that the bottom logs "stick" out further than the roof's right edge, so there was a bit of additional trimming which need to be done at the top end. Finally, I filled in all the odd ball colors with Furcadia Purple, and got my finished wobject.