Hey guys and gals,
I wanted to make a quick guide on how I create my cards in case somebody else wants to make cards of their own. The way I see it, the more people we have creating card variations, the less work we all have to do to get the perfect art collection for our Hearthstone. I'm going to be using GIMP since its free and it's what I'm comfortable with but if you use Photoshop it probably wont be too hard to follow along.
Disclaimer: I'm self taught in all this so if any of you artists out there see me teaching incorrect info or if my technique is inefficient please reply so I can be accurate and helpful in this.
I'm assuming you already have Special K working but in case you don't, there is a great guide starting on post #415 of this thread that makes it much easier.
Next you will need
GIMP
For this demonstration I'm going to use this piece by
grechko55 to replace the texture of Illidari Felblade.
View attachment 123686
Ooh la la!
Download this image if you want to follow along or choose some art you think would be more appropriate.
First thing you will want to do is open Hearthstone with Special K running. *note - I know everyone gets SK running in their own 'special' way, some people have to launch it after their game starts so whatever you have to do just make sure you are able to get it working properly.*
Once Hearthstone starts, go to your collection and type in the card you are trying to replace so its the only card showing. In this case, it will be Illidari Felblade. *Note - If you dont own Illidari Felblade, you will have an extra step of going to your crafting menu. The card will be greyed out but you can still replace the texture of cards you dont own.* Then hit Ctrl+Shift+Backspace to open this menu:
Click Render Mod Tools to open another window. This new window can be resized with the bottom right corner, I usually get mine looking like this:
I've drawn a big red box around the important bit here. These are all the texture names for every texture on screen. I like to hit refresh textures (Blue Box) just to make sure I'm looking at the CURRENT textures on screen. The smaller red box is your scroller, you will need this to find your Illidari Felblade texture (usually near the bottom). Once you click the correct texture you will be able to see the texture on the right side of the window and the texture will blink (see below).
Again, the red box is what you want to click. *Note - If you have already done a mass dump this will already have been done and you will instead see a button that says Delete Texture From Disk. If you see this, click Delete Texture From Disk and then click Dump Texture to Disk. That way, this texture will be the most recent file in your dump disk and you can easily find it by sorting newest to oldest (more on that later).*
You can now close Hearthstone.
Next open GIMP. I've attached a file to this post that includes card templates for easy minion, spell, hero, and weapon creation. Download them and open Minion Template.xcf with GIMP. *Note - If you are using Photoshop, I've included a .zip called PS Templates that should work for you.* It should look something like this:
Next, open the folder containing your preferred art and drag the art onto the center of the open gimp window. It should look now like this:
Uh-oh! It's Huge and on top of our template! Don't worry sweet thing, there's another red box! You can click and drag that red box between the Minion Template layer and the Background layer so it looks something like this:
Make sure the move tool (red box with arrows) is selected for this next step so you can move the art layer to your preferred position. Try moving it around behind the template now. As you can probably see its a little too big to get the character in frame so lets size it down a bit. *Note - You don't EVER want to size your art up! it will make it grainy and ugly, if you have art you want to use but its smaller than the template, try using reverse google image search to find the original, higher resolution art.*
To size the art down you will want to right-click on the layer and click Scale Layer
This will open up the scaling window as shown below:
This step involves some guesswork but make sure you only adjust one value, either the height or the width. The other value will adjust to keep the images dimensions. *Note - Again, NEVER scale an image up! If you adjust the value too small you can use Ctrl+Z to undo your scaling. If you Scale the image down and then scale the image back up you will lose quality.* Play with the scale until you find the size you like, I ended up liking 500 width with the character centered in the frame so that's what I'll be using.
Next we need to export the image as a JPG. Click File in the top left menu and then click Export As.
This will open a directory for you to name and place the JPG. This part is up to you. You can either put it in a folder that you will purge later if you don't want to save your JPGs, OR you can put it in a Demon Hunter folder so you and others considering your art pack can preview your art before they download it. There are two reasons I like the second option, 1. We have to make the JPG anyway so putting it in a permanent folder really doesnt add an extra step and 2. If someone likes some cards in your pack but not others, it makes it easy for them to see what art goes with what cards in the directory, rather than having to cross reference the game that may have other art packs installed already.
For those reasons I have two folders one called Final, for the finished product, and one called Final Preview. Here is a screen of my path to my Final Preview folder in case you want to copy:
Open the folder you want it to go in and name it Illidari Felblade.jpg make sure you add the .jpg to the end since we are exporting. Then click Export at the bottom of the directory.
A new window will pop up and you will click Export without changing anything.
Great! now that we have the JPG we just need to open it in GIMP. Click File in the top left corner and then hover your cursor over Open Recent. This will bring up a list of recent files, Illidari Felblade.jpg should be top of the list so click that to open the JPG. Here's a step by step:
Now that we have the JPG open, we need to flip the image upside down because that's how Hearthstone likes them. In the top menu bar click Image then hover over Transform. From the drop down select Flip Vertically. Here's a step by step:
Now that the image is flipped we can go ahead and export as a .DDS which is what Hearthstone needs to apply the texture. Before we do that we need to get Hearthstone's naming tag for Illidari Felblade. This can be found by navigating to your SK_Res Dump folder. I'll post my path (Red Box Below) so you can see how to navigate there:
*Note - If you mass dumped and this folder is full of images click View (Blue Box Above) and sort by date. This should show you the most recent image to be added as explained earlier in the guide.* The important bit here is inside the red brackets above. If you right click the image you will see an option to Rename. Click Rename and then highlight everything past the underscore including .dds as shown below.
Once highlighted hit Ctrl+C on your keyboard to copy. Then we are going to head back over to GIMP.
In GIMP click File and then Export As just as we did before when creating the JPG. This time though you will want to navigate to a folder that is more permanent. I'll post my path (Blue Box Below) in case you want to copy but what's important is that this file ends up somewhere past the Textures folder in your Inject folder. Here's mine:
The important part here is to paste the file name (the one you copied earlier) using Ctrl+V into the name box shown as Red Box 1. Then hit Export and a new window will appear (Shown Below). THIS WINDOW IS IMPORTANT! There are two boxes that need to be changed here. First, Compression needs to be set to BC1 / DXT1. Second, Mipmaps needs to be changed to Generate Mipmaps. *Note - As long as GIMP remains open it will remember these exporting preferences but if you close GIMP you will have to set these settings agin for your first card you make. If you create a card and it shows up as black in Hearthstone these settings are probably the reason.* I'll post step by steps below.
And that's it, we've done it! Open up Hearthstone and you should see this when you search for Illidari Felblade:
Yay! I hope this was helpful to anyone who has been wanting to make their own custom cards and again if I gave unclear or inaccurate instruction please let me know and I will fix it. If this isn't working for you check below for a couple troubleshooting techniques I use.
Troubleshooting
If the original card art is still there you probably exported your art to DDS before exporting to a JPG. If you forget this step your art wont be the correct size and Hearthstone will default to the original art.
If the card is just black then you probably didnt set the Compression and/or Generate Mipmaps settings while exporting your DDS.
Much Love,
-Vel
