Tutorial: Guild Wars Green Screen Texmod effect from start to finish

SOFTWARE USED: Texmod, Guild Wars, Fraps, Photoshop/Paint,

Making and watching machinima is always intersting. Seeing what people can do with a game is always very entertaining. One of the most machinima’d games (besides Halo 3) would be Guild Wars. With a huge choice of locations, characters and actions, it makes a great movie-making platform. But the game can only take you so far. If you want to create some real master-class entertainment with the game, at some point or another, you’re going to need to use the texmod chroma key effect. What you do with it is up to you, but here’s how you do it.




Downloading Texmod
Well, first thing’s first, we need to get Texmod. Which can also be found here, if the previous link doesn’t work for you.

So, open the rar file and extract it to wherever you want. I recommend a Texmod folder somewhere in your document area.

Using Texmod for the first time
The first thing we need to do is to select Guild Wars as the target application. Click the empty folder icon, and browse to where your Gw.exe is saved. This will most likely be in C:/Program Files/Guild Wars/
for most Windows XP systems.
Texmod has three modes: Package Mode, Logging Mode and Package Build. Logging mode is the mode we use to get our textures to edit. Package build is what we will use to build our Texmod package, to use in the Package Mode section. In the package mode section we will load the package with Guild Wars for filming our green screen.
So firstly, we want to go to Logging mode.

You won’t really need to bother with the check boxes. What they do is show the texture in the corner while you’re scrolling through them, as well as showing some info about them and highlighting in-game the texture that you’re selecting. The two ones on the right don’t need to be checked.
Your output format can be whatever you want. I’ll be using the default BMP but if you’re planning on using paint or a simple editor then JPG will probably be best. This is the file format the textures will be saved as. The ‘Log With:’ key is the button you will press to log the texture. I chose F9 as it doesn’t really do anything in Guild Wars. I don’t recommend ‘Enter’ or F12 as you’ll end up sending lots of strange characters to people and logging yourself and all sorts of shinanigans.
Make a new folder to store all your textures in. DefFile can be left blank. Then click ‘Run’

Logging Files
Guild Wars will now load up as normal, but with some red text in the top left corner. This text explains what you need to do. Using the + and – keys, scroll through the textures (the texture will appear in the top left corner, as well as be highlighted green in the game world). Then hit your chosen key (in my case, F9) to capture the texture. Nothing will happen when you do this, but it will have worked. You can press it again if you really want to.
The important part here is choosing a location to do your green screen. I recommend a guild hall, especially one with lots of high walls and blank hills. Nomad’s Isle works great. Don’t choose one with lots of grass, or reflective surfaces as you’ll have to capture a lot of different textures and you may miss some out. Try to choose a sunny place too as they are well lit and are good for lighting your characters. Some isles have strange colour correction that won’t be good for your filming.

So, once you have got the textures you want, you can close Guild Wars and open the directory that you saved the Textures in.

Creating the Green Screen Texture
This bit is quite simple. First, browse to the folder where you saved the textures. Next, open each texture up, one at a time in your chosen image editor, I’ll be using photoshop but for something this simple, Microsoft Paint works fine. (I never thought I would say that…)

So, open each one up in Photoshop/Paint, and all you need to do is paint green over it or put a green box over the top so that it completely fills the area. Then save over the file (make sure it is the same file type and name) and if it asks to replace or overwrite, say yes. #01cc34 works well for green screen and #0157ba for blue screen.

Once that is all done, we’re ready to build the package.

Building our Green Screen package

Now, get back to Texmod and open up the ‘Package Build’ tab. This is relatively straight forward. Browse for the Definition File in the area where your textures are saved. You don’t need to add a creator name or comment unless you plan on uploading your package somewhere, so you can leave it blank. When you’re done, click Build.

Clicking build will open up the browser where you can choose a place to save the .tpf file to use in Package Mode. Give it whatever name you want and head over to the Package Mode tab.

Package Mode
When in package mode, simply click the little folder icon and select the .tpf file you just made. It should already be at the top of the list. Browse to if it not. Once that’s loaded, click the package name in the list and then click Run.

Once you hit run, Guild Wars will load up again. This time it should look normal, no red text at the top. Go to the location where you captured your textures, and you should find that it has been replaced by your green or blue texture.
Note: Some people experience a problem with a “D’OH” message or a virus warning. This is because many anti-virus softwares think that Texmod is a virus, which, in a way, it is. It is modifying and making changes to another piece of software without permission. But it’s not a worry, if you can find a way to accept the program with your virus software then do so. If not, you’ll need to temporarily disable your anti-virus. Don’t worry, you can turn it back on again once you’ve done your filming in Guild Wars, no viruses will come through the game.

Filming the scene.
This part is mostly up to you. You can choose what to film against your green screen backdrop, and you can choose what backgrounds to put on it and all the rest of it.
But here are a few tips for effective green screen filming:
1. Turn off shadows in the options menu – shadows can be a pain to get rid of in your video editing software so it’s a good idea to turn them off to save the hassle later on.
2. Turn off post-process effects – Post-process effects create a glow of the environment around your character. And, as the character is stood near a big green wall, it will give the characters a green glow outline, which can make the edges blurry when editing. Turn it off for a crisp line around your character.
3. Don’t use green armor – if you have green parts on your armor it’s going to go invisible, or at least semi-transparent. If you have green armor, use a blue screen texture instead. If you have blue armor, use green. Dark armor works best.

I’ll now be showing you how to use the green/blue screen effect in Sony Vegas. I’ll be using Sony Vegas Pro 8.0 for this example, but any of the latest versions should work just the same. It’s also worth a read even if you use different editing software because some of the tips will be useful, no matter what program you use.

Getting started
I will be showing the chroma key editing using Guild Wars footage, but this applies to any green screen footage. So, begin by placing your chroma key footage on the top layer, and a background scene underneath. This will be so that when we remove the green from the top layer, the background will show through.


Applying the Chroma Key effect
With the top layer selected. Go to the Video FX tab and then choose ‘Chroma Keyer’ from the list on the left. Choose the Green Screen preset, and drag this onto the green screen footage.
note: if you are using a blue screen, use a blue screen preset. You’d probably have guessed that yourself, but nevermind.


Once you have done that it should have started working already. The background should be showing through, but we’re not done yet. The settings are going to need tweaking to make the effect work well.

Tweaking the settings
Firstly, drag the slider for ‘Low threshold’ up, keeping an eye on the preview. Keep sliding up until the background disapears. Try not to make the character start going transparent, but if it needs to go transparent for the background to be transparent, then that’s fine.
We then need to drag the high threshold down a little bit until the character is fully solid and not transparent at all.
Make sure the Blur amount is set to ‘0′. If there is a blur on, the edges won’t look and it will look very cheesy, unless it’s a certain effect you’re going for, I don’t reccomend it.



A good way to check that you’ve done it right is it to check ‘Show mask only’ which will show you what part of the scene has been kept, and what is gone. What we want is the character to be completely white.



As you can see on this scene, I purposefully chose a shot that wasn’t completely green (it had a rock in the top right corner). Sometimes, this will occur if you can’t get a good filming location, or if the grass shows up or some other problem. Thankfully, we can get rid of this part using masking.

Masking
Right click on your chroma key footage and go to ‘Video Event Pan/Crop’



When the Event Pan/Crop window opens, we want to click on the mask layer at the bottom. There should be two tracks, Position and Mask.
Note: If this isn’t there, try hovering your mouse at the bottom of the Pan/Crop window and it may give you the option to drag upwards, bringing this timeline with it. It likes to hide at the bottom sometimes.
So, click on the mask layer and make sure the box next to Mask is checked if it hasn’t done it automatically.
Then, select the Anchor Creation Tool (D) from the toolbar on the left. It looks like a pen, under the normal edit tool.
With this, we can then click to make points, or anchors, around our character, leaving out any unwanted parts of the scene. Join up the shape at the end to create the mask.

You can then close this window, and the unwanted parts of the shot should be gone.

Colour Correction – Matching the character with the scene.

So, the character should now be stand in our scene, but the character may not look like he quite fits in yet. This is becuase, in Guild Wars, each area has a different ambient colour, and the colour of the character may not match the colour of the scene. This goes for normal films too.

Drag the ‘Reset to None’ preset from the Color Corrector Video FX onto your chroma keyed footage.

You should now get a Color Corrector window open with three big coloured circles and lots of little sliders and other fun things. There really isn’t a right and wrong way to do this as it depends on what sort of scene you have and what colours you need to change to.

In my scene, the colours were a little more desaturated, so I’ve brought the saturation down a tad, as well as boosting the Gamma and Gain to get a little more brightness. My character was very orange-looking and the scene was still using warm colour, but less desaturated. After desaturating I put the mids back in the orangey colour and the lows and highs more towards the blues and green, to make it look a little bit cooler.

Really, all there is to it is trusing your eyes. The lows are the darker parts, highs are the lighter parts, and the mids are the middle bits. Fairly straight forward. Just have a play around with the sliders and see what works best for you. Have a look at the scene and try to see what the general ambient colour of the scene is, and match that with your character.

Before/After

The changes are really quite small and hard to see looking between to pictures, but you can tell by turning the effect on and off what you have achieved. Take a look at the lower part of the coat on my character. To begin with it was a very dark and bold brows, and now it is a lighter, softer colour which matches the environment much better.

 

Conclusion

So, now you have learnt how to successfully green screen a character on to another background, it’s time to have a play around. See what effects you can create.

You can even add shadows, here I added a slight shadow under the character using Photoshop to create a radial gradient and then squashing it, and putting it under the chroma keyed layer.