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KISS Walk-through: How To Make KISS Data Sets by Dov Sherman First Released on the Ides of March, 1996 Contents: Some Definitions Selecting Your Subject Matter Drawing Your Base Doll Breaking Things Up Into Levels Viewing the Base Doll Making Some Clothes Positioning Objects Locking Objects in Place Restricting Objects to Specific Pages Setting New Default Palettes Gambatte! Appendix Some Definitions: Since KISS is designed to be portable to a wide variety of platforms, KISS cel files are always 8 characters long followed by a three character extension. KISS data sets are made up of a configuration file (*.CNF) and a series of palette (*.KCF) and cel (*.CEL) files. The configuration file defines what cels and palettes are used by a KISS data set. An object is a group of one or more cels that act as a single entity such that when the user moves one of them, all cels in the object move together. Usually, an object is something singular like a shirt, the doll itself, or a hat. Sometimes an object might be more than one item which move together like a pair of shoes. The cel files describe sections of dolls and clothing and other KISS objects. Each cel is an image which may show part of an object or the whole object. The palette files define the colors used by cels. For the most part, most KISS artists draw the dolls and clothes as picture files in other formats like PCX, PPM, or IFF. If you are using an Amiga, Chad Randall's PlayFKISS archive includes several conversion programs for making KISS sets. PC users will be interested in Mian's KISS Utilities for converting PCX files to CEL and KCF formats. (This is what I use.) Selecting Your Subject Matter: The first step in making a KISS data set is selecting your subject matter. The majority of KISS data sets are people and little clothes to put on them. Dolls. While there are a few more unique KISS sets like the Battleship Mogami, a Go board, and a map of Japan, for the purposes of this walk-through, I'll assume we're making a doll. It's very popular to choose a character from manga or anime. Three out of my own four currently recently released KISS data sets are based on anime/manga characters. But not all KISS data sets have to be. Be creative. You can make a data set based on anything you like from celebrities to movie characters to mythological characters. Invent your own characters and have fun with it. You may want to keep in mind what kind of clothing you'll be drawing when you select your subject. It might be good to select a character for which you can draw a variety of max-and-match clothing pieces. If outfits are all a single piece, playing with the doll might not be as much fun. (For example, I considered drawing Kurenai Tsubasa from Ranma 1/2 but how much fun is it to stick a one-piece mailbox disguise on a character and then take it off again? Fun for about five seconds and then you look for something else to do.) Once you have selected a character, the first step is to draw the base doll. Drawing Your Base Doll: Once you have chosen your subject, you should draw the base doll, the doll without any clothes on. You may choose to draw the doll with underwear on. Drawing the base doll can be difficult, even if you are a skilled artist. There are several approaches that may work well for you: 1) Direct Drawings If you're really good with a mouse, you may choose to simply draw the doll from scratch with your favorite paint program. This can be difficult and I avoid it when possible. 2) Scanned Drawings If you have access to scanning equipment, you can sketch your doll on paper and then scan it in. You'll probably need to retouch it but it's easier than just drawing it from scratch. 3) Transparencies If you don't have access to a scanner but you have a sketch you want to use as your base, you might try tracing the sketch onto a transparency. You can then tape the transparency to your computer screen and trace it with your paint program. The results will probably by blocky and will need to be retouched but it's still a lot better than drawing from scratch. For transparencies, I usually use plastic sandwich bags which I draw on with a magic marker. 4) Borrowed Drawings and Pictures You may choose to use an existing image file as a resource. For example, when I made my "Two Ranmas" KISS set, I used a scanned image of character design sketches. The originals were in black and white and were drawn with clothing but they provided a good base after I did some retouching to edit out the clothing and add color. Try any of these techniques or any combination of them. Some Important Guidelines for Drawing: * Your drawing needs to be in 16 color mode with the first color (usually called palette number 0) as the background. Be sure that any part of the doll that is supposed to be transparent is that color. You should probably set that color to whatever you want the background of your data set to look like in operation. (KISS does support a 256-color palette mode but, for the purposes of this walk-through, we'll stick with the simpler 16-color mode.) * Don't make your doll too big. A good range is somewhere from 100 to 500 pixels in height depending on how much detail you want to draw. A larger doll can allow you more detail but that can take longer to draw and will require more memory and disk space in the finished data set. * When you draw your base doll, keep in mind what sort of clothes you'll be drawing on it and what restrictions that will put on the way parts of your doll overlap with other parts. If your doll is going to wear a large, billowy shirt, you might not be able to draw the doll with her hands on her hips. * Crop the finished image down until the edges of the image come very close to or even touch the doll. Later, when we turn the doll into a KISS object, the edges of even the transparent parts will define how close to the edges of the screen we can place the doll. * Save the image in a format for which you have a KISS conversion program. If you don't have a converter to turn TGA files into KISS cels, svaing in TGA format won't do you much good. * When you finish drawing the base doll, make a back-up copy of it in a different directory. You don't want to lose it when it took so long to draw. Breaking Things Up Into Levels: KISS objects like the doll and her clothing are made up of one or more cels. Each cel contains part of the image for the whole object. Each cel has a set height and any cel that is above that height will always appear to be in front of it. Many objects will be interwoven so that cels in the first object appear above and behind certain cels in another object. This is why it's a good idea to know what sort of clothing you'll be drawing on your doll. Take some time to plan ahead. Let's look at an example... Imagine we have a doll of Emi-chan from Sailor Moon. We've drawn this doll so that she's holding her right arm up in front of her body so that it crosses in front of her. We've also drawn her legs so that her right leg crosses behind her to be hidden by her left leg. Now we want to choose the sections of her body to be split up into levels. We know that we'll want to draw a tiara that will appear on her head but be hidden by her bangs. So the bangs and her face will need to be seperate levels. We know that her shirt should appear to cover her body while being hidden by her right arm as it crosses over the shirt so at least part of her right arm will need to be a seperate level from her body. Perhaps we've drawn her to that only her forearm crosses in front so we can decide to make the break right at her elbow. We want her left shoe to be hidden by her right leg since her left leg appears behind he right leg. So her left leg will have to be a seperate cel from her right leg. A good place to make this break is right at the hip at the panty line. We now know three places where the doll will have to be split up. But we can choose to do it so that we end up with only three cels in total. Since the bangs and right forearm are both in front of the body and face, we can make the bangs and forearm the same cel. Then we can make the left leg another cel. In the end, we want to have three cels: one with her bangs and right forearm, one with the parts of her left leg that are visible, and one with the rest of her. You can split the doll up into as many levels as you like but the more levels you use, the more complex and time-consuming it will be to finish your doll. Once you have decided where to split your doll up, load up your drawing of your base doll and edit out everything that is not part of the first cel, the part that is most toward the front. (In our above example, we would want edit out everything except her bangs and right forearm.) Each cel has a different filename. Choose a name that describes the first cel and save your edited image under that name. Now load up you base doll image again and edit out everything that is not part of the second level. You may choose to leave in things which are hidden by the first level. If you're not careful, you might accidentally edit out the joints between levels incorrectly and wind up with gaps. (Personally, I like to edit out everything except what is specifically part of a given level but that takes planning and is often more trouble than it's worth. The main benifit is that you'll be able to get a higher compression ratio for your finished set since you'll have larger blocks of single-color areas.) Repeat this process for each level of the doll until you have seperate image files for each section. Remember, if you choose to change one of the palette colors in one level of the object, you must change it for all levels. Now you're ready to turn the image files in KISS cel files. Let's go back to our Emi-chan example... Mian's PCX2CEL converter is a DOS program and it's what I use to make my data sets. Let's go back to our Emi-chan example... Suppose we saved Emi-chan's bangs and forearm in an PCX file called "fore.pcx". We're going to want all three cels to use the same palette so we've decided to call the palette "emi.kcf". At the DOS prompt, we type: PCX2CEL fore.pcx emi.kcf /t The first argument is the name of the image file. Our cel file will have the same first 8 characters and a filename extension of "cel" (fore.cel in this case). The second argument is the name of the palette file. We'll use the same palette name for all cels that we want to use the same colors. By default, PCX2CEL clips off any transparent blank space above and to the left of the image. Since we are working on an object that has several levels, each with different amounts of blank space, we don't want it to clip any extra blank space away and we use the "/t" option to turn off the automatic trimmer. KISS format GS/2 and above allows you save space that would be trimmed by storing the amount of space trimmed as an offset value. PCX2CEL can make GS/2 cel files. GS/2 cel files take up less space on disk and in memory. To produce the same cel as above in GS/2 format, we would type: PCX2CEL fore.pcx emi.kcf /g /t The exact command and syntax will vary depending on what conversion program you are using. Just keep in mind these basic points: * All cels which use the same colors, should have the same palette name * If several cels make up a single object, turn off clipping * Use GS/2 format or higher when possible since it makes more efficient files * Don't delete your image files right away. You might decide to go back and make changes later. * It may be useful to print up a hardcopy of your doll and make notes on it about where you made the breaks between levels as a reference to use when making the clothing. Viewing the Base Doll: Now we've got the palette file and we've got some cel files and we want to see if they turned out okay so we need a configuration file. The configuration file will have 8 characters followed by a filename extension of "cnf". Pick something for the first 8 characters. Usually, it's good to use the name of your doll or just "kiss.cnf". Load up a straight ASCii editor. Don't use a word processor that allows special fonts and formatting since those will put special formatting codes into the text. You just want a very plain ASCii editor. PC users can use the built-in DOS program "edit" to create a configuration file. Decide how large you want the screen to be. It needs to be big enough to show the doll and her clothing. Be sure to leave room around the doll in which to put her clothing. Keep in mind the size of the screen your users will have. It's generally safe to assume they will have a screen larger than 640x480 but unwise to expect anything larger than 800x600. Keep in mind that we'll need to leave some space for the control bar and edges of the window. The largest I would recommend to use would be a screen size of around 790x518 which comes very close to maximum size. Once you have chosen a size, enter a line in your configuration file like this: (width,height) ...where "width" and "height" are the numeric width and height of your screen. If you want a 320x240 screen, the line would be... (320,240) Don't leave any spaces to the left of the line. Next we need to tell the configuration file about the color palette we made. Enter a line like this: %palette.kcf ...where "palette.kcf" is the filename of our first palette file. In our Emi-chan example, it would be... %emi.kcf This is our first palette, palette zero. It will be the default palette for all cels in the data set but we can add more palettes later. Each additional palette we add should appear after this line and be preceded by a % symbol. Next we need to tell the configuration file about the cel files we made. Each object in a KISS data set has a different number to identify it. The numbers don't control the height of the object or its importance but it's generally a good idea to start with object #0 and count up as you make more objects. Since all the parts of our doll's body are the same object, we want to give them all the same object number. We list them in order from the part that is closest to the fron to the part that is in the back. In our Emi-chan example, this would look like: #0 fore.cel #0 body.cel #0 back.cel So our finished configuration file for Emi-chan would look like this: (320,240) %emi.kcf #0 fore.cel #0 body.cel #0 back.cel You can leave extra blank lines wherever you like for better readability. You can also add lines that start with a semi-colon (;) for comment lines. These comments can also come at the end of non-comment lines. For example: ; Emi-chan (320,240) ; Palettes %emi.kcf ; Cels #0 fore.cel ; Bangs and forearm #0 body.cel ; Head, body, right leg #0 back.cel ; Left leg Note: KISS format is case-insensitive so capitalization of filenames does not matter. Also, when adding comments, be careful not to make the lines too long. No single line can be more than 255 characters in length. The configuration file should always have the declarations in this basic order; screen size, then palettes, then cels. Save your configuration file and load up KISS. In KISS, load your configuration file. Click on the doll and try moving it around. Do all the parts move together? Are there are gaps between parts where you accidentally edited out too much? If the colors look all messed up, you may have failed to create the palette file correctly or else put the wrong filename in the configuration file. When you have it looking good in your KISS viewer, select `Save' in KISS. Load the configuration file in your ASCii editor and you'll see that KISS has added some new lines to the bottom of your file which look something like this: $0 125,11 $0 * $0 * $0 * $0 * $0 * $0 * $0 * $0 * $0 * This page information tells KISS where the various objects will be positioned when the user loads the data set. If you edit these lines, be sure to keep them at the end of the configuration file. Making Some Clothes: Now we have the base doll drawn and we're ready to make some clothes for her. The shape of the clothing will have to exactly match the shape of the doll. Think of an outfit to draw on your doll. Load the picture of your base doll into your paint program again. The colors we used for the base doll probably won't be suitable for drawing clothes so we'll want to change the palette. Be sure to stay in 16-color mode. Think about what colors are in your doll's outfit. I like to use around three shade of each color for an outfit. You may choose to use a single color for outlining or use the Disney approach and use a different, draker version of each color to outline those areas. Be sure to keep in mind that color zero is still the transparent color. You can make color zero anything you want but it won't appear visually in the KISS data set. When you have the new palette set, you may wish to save a copy of the base doll using the new palette. Don't overwrite the old picture. We only want the new picture as a template to draw outfits using the new palette. Now we're ready to draw the outfit. This is the method that I use but you don't have to follow it. It's just a good starting place which you can feel free to expand upon: * Use color substitution to get rid of all the darker colors in your template, replacing them with similar, lighter colors. * Select a dark color and sketch in the new outfit. You may want to use the old sandwich-bag overlay technique to help you get the lines just right. Go ahead and draw in some of the backs of the outfit, as if the character were a translucent ghost wearing solid clothing. * Use color substition again to get rid of all the colors except the one you used for outlining. * Save the image in some temporary file. You may wish to use a name that refers to the outfit as a whole but it's still just a template. * Now concentrate on just one article of clothing out of the outfit. Edit out all the lines that don't apply to that article and fill in lines of that article that would have been hidden by other articles of clothing. Be sure to draw the backs and insides of the clothing. It's fun to see the care label on the back of a shirt when the character isn't wearing it. * Clip your image so that the single item of clothing appears as close to the upper-left corner as possible. * Now fill in all the colors and details of the article of clothing. * When you have a single article of clothing finished, break it up into levels. Keep in mind the way that you broke you base doll up into levels. A good method is to consider each level as distance from the viewer with the front as one piece and the back as another piece. It may take some experimentation to decide just where to make the breaks. Now we have a single article of clothing and we want to add it to our data set. Use your image to cel conversion programs to turn the different images into cels. We want to make a new palette this time so be sure to use a new palette name. For example, if we were making a skirt to go with Emi-chan's sailor suit, we might type something like this: PCX2CEL skirt1.pcx sailor.kcf /g /t PCX2CEL skirt2.pcx sailor.kcf /g /t Don't forget that objects that are made up of more than one cel need to avoid having blank space to top and left of the images clipped away or the cels won't line up together properly. Now load you configuration file into your ASCii editor. First, we need to tell the the configuration about our new palette. Find the section where you told it about the first palette and add another line with the new palette name *below* the old one. In our Emi-chan example, it might look like this: %emi.kcf %sailor.kcf This new palette is palette number 1 because it is the second palette listed in the configuration file. Now we want to add the different cels for the clothing. Look at the list of cels the configuration file shows for the base doll. Think about where each cel of your clothing item fits between the cels of the base doll. In out Emi-chan example, the front of the skirt would go in front of the body but behind the forearm and bangs. We want the new object to be a different object from the doll itself (so that it can be moved around seperately.) Let's use the next available number, #1. Add the cel declarations to you configuration file. In Emi-chan, this might look something like: #0 fore.cel ; Bangs and forearm #1 skirt1.cel ; Front of Skirt to Sailor Suit #0 body.cel ; Head, body, right leg #0 back.cel ; Left leg #1 skirt2.cel ; Back of Skirt to Sailor Suit It isn't necessary to put those comments at the end of the declarations but it may be helpful later as you add more clothing and makes the file easier to understand. But wait! How does KISS know to use the new palette for the skirt instead of using the default palette (palette zero) that it used for the body? You have to put that in you cel declarations too. Immediately after the filename for the cel, add an asterisk (*) followed by the number of the palette. Going back to our Emi-chan exmaple, the declaration for skirt1.cel might look like this: #1 skirt1.cel *1 ; Front of Skirt to Sailor Suit If you want to, you can add a *0 to cel declarations for cels using palette zero to make the file easier to read but it isn't always necessary since KISS will use palette zero as the default palette when no palette is specified. It is possible to define different default palettes for each page but palette zero is the default default palette. More detail on setting alternate default palettes later in this document. Our configuration file should now look something like this: ; Emi-chan (320,240) ; Palettes %emi.kcf ; Palette 0 - The doll %sailor.kcf ; Palette 1 - Sailor Suit (red, white, blue) ; Cels #0 fore.cel ; Bangs and forearm #1 skirt1.cel *1 ; Front of Skirt to Sailor Suit #0 body.cel ; Head, body, right leg #0 back.cel ; Left leg #1 skirt2.cel *1 ; Back of Skirt to Sailor Suit $0 125,11 $0 * $0 * $0 * $0 * $0 * $0 * $0 * $0 * $0 * Next load your modified configuration file in KISS and test your clothing item. If there are problems with where you made the breaks in the cels or the order of the cels in the configuration file, go back and make the changes now. Once you have the item just the way you want it, go back to your template and make the other items of clothing. Again, it may take some experimentation to get the levels right. As you make more outfits, you may find you need more colors. Make new palettes as needed and add them to the configuration file. Try to re-use old palettes when possible because you can only use up to 256 colors. Palette zero counts as 16 colors and each additional palette counts as 15 more (since the first color of palettes one and are ignored). This means a maximum of 17 palettes. Positioning Objects: Unless you set the positions of your objects, they'll all start off clustered up in the upper-left corner of the window. After you design the objects, load them in KISS, place them in the positions you want, and select `Save'. KISS will update your configuration file. You can position everything on just the first page and then use your ASCii editor to copy the position declarations at the end of your configuration file. KISS will use the first ten lines it find that begin with the dollar-sign ($) as the declarations for the pages. You may want some of the objects to stay where they are so that the user cannot move them. To fix an object in place, you use the lock field of the cel declarations. Locking Objects in Place: You can lock an object into place so that it can't be moved by the user. This is useful when you don't want the user to be able to move the doll itself or if you use more than one object for the doll and you don't want the user to pull the doll's arms off. You can also make an object difficult to move but not permanently locked in place. This is useful when you want the user to only be able to move a given object after repeated attempts. (Some KISS artists use this method to fix underwear in place so that you have to yank on the underwear several times before it comes off. A little ecchi if you ask me. ^_-) Let's suppose we want to lock the doll itself in place in our Emi-chan example. We would need to edit the declarations for the cels defining Emi-chan's body. For example... #0.32767 fore.cel ; Bangs and forearm The number 32767 appearing after the period following the object number is a lock value. Since we have used a very high lock value, the doll is permanently locked in place. Any number over 100 is permanently locked in place. If we use a number lower than 100, the object can be used after the used yanks on it several times. The higher the number, the more diificult it is to move. Objects which are locked permanently in place will never even twitch from their starting position. Objects which are difficult to move but not permanently locked will shift a short distance when yanked on but will snap back to their starting position almost immediately. If you give different lock values to different cels of the same object, whichever lock value is highest will be used for that object. Lock definitions are common to all cels of the given object. If no lock value is given, the object is assumed to be freely moveable. Behavior for a specified lock value of 0 is undefined. Don't do it. Results will vary widely depending on the program. Restricting Objects to Specific Pages: Suppose we want to organize our Emi-chan data set so that the objects for her school uniform only appear on page zero (the starting page). To do this, we set the page field of the cel declarations for those objects. For example... #1 skirt1.cel *1 :0 ; Front of Skirt to Sailor Suit The number following the colon tells KISS on which pages the objects appear. You can set the cel to appear on several pages. For example... #1 skirt1.cel *1 :0 3 7 ; Front of Skirt to Sailor Suit This would define the cel skirt1.cel as appearing only on pages zero, three and seven. You must always list the pages in numerical order from lowest to highest and page definitions must appear after any palette definition if one is used. If no pages are specified, the cel is assumed to appear on all ten pages. If a page has no cels defined for it, the page can not be accessed and will appear as a dimmed button in KISS. If you specify some but not all of the cels for an object to be on a given page, only the specified cels will appear on that page. Page definitions are specific to each individual cel. Setting New Default Palettes: You may wish to have the default palette change for different pages. This is useful when you want objects using palette zero to change color when a new page is selected. For example, maybe on page zero, Emi-chan looks normal but, on page one, she has a tan. To do this, we edit the page declarations. Let's look at an example... $0 125,11 20,45 145,40 * * * All page declarations begin with a dollar-sign ($). The number immediately following the dollar-sign, with no seperating space, if the number of the default palette for that page. When there is no declaration for a page, KISS will assume the default palette is palette zero. You can change that number to the number of a new palette and any cels which do not have a specific palette given will use that palette as the default on that page. Gambatte! That's Japanese for "try your best." You should now know the basics of creating your KISS data set. Don't be disappointed if you can't turn out a new KISS data set overnight. Making a good KISS data set takes time and patience. You may need to retouch cels many times before getting them just right or you may even need to scrap all the cels of an object and draw it again. Just keep at it, give it your best shot, and, above all, have fun doing it. If you really put your effort into making your KISS set, your users will enjoy it and that's the best part of making KISS art. Gambatte! Appendix: Here's a recap on the syntax for those configuration lines. Screen Size Defines the size of the screen. Appears once in the file. Syntax: (<width>, <height>) <width> - the width of the screen. Required field. <height> - the height of the screen. Required field. Palette Declarations Defines palettes used by the KISS cels. Up to 17 palettes may be defined. Palettes will be zero to seventeen in order encountered. Syntax: %<filename> <filename> - the full filename of the palette. Required field. Cel Declarations Defines each cel used by the KISS set, its object number, its palette, and the pages on which it appears. Syntax: #<object number>[.<lock value>] <filename> [*<palette number>] [:<page> <page> <page> ...] <object number> - the number which identifies the object to which the cel belongs. Range is 0 to 255. Required field. <lock value> - the `fixedness' of the object. 1 to 99 is difficult to move. 100 to 32767 is permanently fixed. If ommitted, object is freely moveable. Optional field. <filename> - the full filename of the cel file. Required field. <palette number> - the number of the palette used by the cel. Palettes are counted from 0 to 17 based on order of appearance. If omitted, the default palette is used (palette zero unless specified otherwise in the page declarations). Optional field. <page> - the numbers of the pages on which the cel appears. Range is from 0 to 9. More than one page may be specified but multiple pages must be listed in order from lowest to highest. Optional field. Page Declarations Defines the default palette for each page and the positions of objects on those pages. There should be 10 page declarations appearing at the end of the configuration file. Declarations will be used for pages zero to nine in order encountered. These declarations can be generated by KISS if ommitted. Syntax: $<default palette> <position #0> <position #1> ... <default palette> - the number of the palette to be used as the default on a given page. Range is 0 to 17. Required field. <position #N> - an X,Y position for the Nth object. Each page declaration will have an entry for every object from #0 to the highest numbered object. If the object begins at the origin (0,0), a * will indicate default starting position. If no cels are declared for an object, default position will be assumed. Range depends on the size of the screen and the size of the objects. It's best to use the KISS viewer to set these values. Required fields. If you need more technical information about the format of cel and kcf files, see the KISS/GS General Format Specifications.