Before Anyone dismisses this as a waste of reading time, here is what it could look like when you are done... read further for the instructions: Okay guys, this is relatively simple, and most people probably can do a basic preview, but this is sort of an FYI, or if someone says they DON'T HAVE A PREVIEW, or DON'T KNOW HOW, you can just link them here to save time... Let's get going... Earlier I did a preview for Matt L. (If you would like the link to his render pack, click here: http://www.gamerenders.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=110967 **NOTE** Before you get started, you can change your MONITOR RESOLUTION to be MUCH HIGHER or LOWER depending on the quality that you want to have the thumbnails. This tutorial was done with my native resolution of 1600x1200. ** 1) Save all of the renders from your pack into a single folder with nothing else inside of it. 2) Open the window for that folder, click on VIEW [in the menu @ the top od the window], then click on THUMBNAIL (Also can be done by RIGHT CLICKING anywhere inside of the window, and selecting VIEW then THUMBNAIL in the submenus) . . . . *Now all the images will be viewable as small thumbnail images inside of the folder. 3) With that window of thumbnails open, go ahead and resize the window to whatever size fits the number or render thumbnails you want into it. Once you are done with that, make sure the entire window is on your screen. Keep in mind that the following step will take a screenshot of only the parts of the window ON SCREEN. 4) Press the PRINT SCREEN button (located above the NUMBERPAD on a standard keyboard), which takes a screenshot of your entire desktop, and saves it to the clipboard. 5) Open your favorite graphics program, in my case, CS2, and open a new document, then EDIT > PASTE (or CTRL+V), and you should see your screenshot now 6) Edit the shot down to the proper area, and host it... DONE!!!! Okay.... Now you have a BASIC RENDER PACK PREVIEW... read on for FURTHER simple instructions on make a simple preview into a GOOD preview! 1) Your image probably looks something like this, as it should for a basic Render Pack Preview: 2) Open up any Magic Wanding program, in my case, Photoshop CS2, and use the settings shown in the image below, then click in the whitespace that is outside of the thumbnails. It should look like the image below: (If you don't have a magic wand in any program, this is still as simple, just delete all of the negative space that's outside the light grey boxes outside of the thumbnails, including the text, look to the image in the next step to see how it should look). 3) Now delete that selected area. You will see that it has missed the text, so go ahead and completely erase all of the text from underneath the images, you should now have something that looks like this: 4) Now, you have a few options at this point. First I suggest that you arrange the boxes as you see fit... I do this very simply by turning on my GRID in CS2, and arranging the images along that grid how I like it. In most cases, your thumbnails will already be evenly spaced, so you can just leave it how it is if that is the case. A lot of times, there is an odd number of thumbnails, and inevitably one of those images needs to be moved to make the image look better. In the case of this preview pack, the images are in 2 rows of 5, with one spare one on the last row. It will look much better if the one in the bottom row were in the center. TO do this do the following: 5)With the layer of the thumbnail images selected, use the MARQUEE tool (CS or CS2 shortcut key: M), set as RECTAGLE, and use it to create a selection that contains the images you want to move. In my case, the one image on that bottom row. Now, select the MOVE TOOL (CS and CS2 shortcut key: V) and click on the selection. It is now a cutout, so HOLD DOWN THE SHIFT KEY, and drag it appropriatly to where you want it. Using the SHIFT KEY makes it move ONLY IN STRAIGHT LINES, which makes it easy to keep it aligned with the rest of the thumbnails. In my case, I held down shift, and dragged the selection to the right until it lined up with the center row. It now looks like this: 6) Using BLENDING OPTIONS, Select a STROKE in a color that matches your images nicely. Set it to 1px, 2px, or 3px thick, and set it to OUTSIDE, or CENTER depending on your tastes. 7) Now, using the TEXT TOOL, and any STYLE OPTIONS and COLOR SCHEMEs that you like, add in a few peices of text that include your Forum Name, the name of your render Pack, and some other information, like the SIZE of the Pack, or the Number of Images in the pack, ETC. Up until now, you could have something that looks like this: 8) As a final note to this tutorial, it's always a good final touch to toss ina render from the pack into the BACKROUND of the RENDER PACK PREVIEW. This gives a good indicator of the quality of your randers, and adds some flare to the preview. There are also many other things you can do, like add transparency to the preview images, and arrange the thumbnails into shapes around a render. 9) To add a RENDER with transparency to it, you can do somethign VERY SIMPLE. Simply create a BACKROUND GROUP a RENDER LAYER and a FOREGROUND group of images. The backround group will be 100% fill and 100% Opacity, and contain all thumbnails and text and things that are NOT the RENDER you want behind the thumbnails. It will be the FURTHER LAYER BACK to the back of the whole project. The foreground set will bet an exact duplicate of the BACKROUND SET, only it will have 50% - 90% Fill/Opacity on it depending on what looks best to you. It will be the LAYER FURTHEST TO THE FRONT. The RENDER LAYER will be set between the FOREGROUND and the BACKROUND layers, and be 100% fill and 100% Opacity. MAke sure you resize the render to fit well into the thumbnail preview. It should now look something like this: Please enjoy this tutorial, and give me some cred and/or rep if you use it, or find it useful. -Priest
Thanks for the comments guys.. I noticed so many bland looking previews that I figured someone would be able to sell their products easier when they are presented nice and pretty like this. Keep the comments coming in, hope to hear more!
I appreciate the comment KoolKidd... I have seen your work on DA... Very good stuff, especially the brushes.
This is really a good idea, it does make the previews a lot better than the plain old background, nice job!
LoL Yah I think ther eis a 5 post limit or something to that effect. Keep the comments running guys... If anyone happens to use this tutorial, and has a preview they did with it, please post it here, I would like to see other people's renditions of this sort of stuff... I just haqppened to think this up one night and have never seen anyone else use it with their previews, so I'd like to know when someone does! Thanks! -Priest
