Anyone familiar with Gimp here?

Hardware and technical stuff
1

I’d like to take an image that is square, and make a decal for a ship in the game Surviving Mars. But the decal must be round and have transparency around the outside so there’s no black or white boxing.

If anyone can help me figure out how to do that it’d be great! I’m sure this would be easier to do in Photoshop, but I don’t have it.

2

Something like this should work:

  1. Create a new, blank (transparent) layer in a new image.
  2. Use the select tool to select the region of the image that you want to be your decal
  3. Copy.
  4. Go to your new, transparent layer in your new image and paste.
  5. Mess around as necessary.
  6. Export it as whatever format the game wants, hopefully PNG.
3

big_1471509359_image-1
big_1471509359_image-1.jpg1280×720 64.1 KB

4

It’s pretty cool. Once you’ve mastered Gimp, you are half way to making your own Dominions modnations

5

Paint.NET

6

Yeah, personally I’d also recommend Paint dot NET over Gimp.

7

Damn it! Beat me to it.

8

Also a solid choice for this simple of a task. Certainly a lot less to deal with than learning the GIMP for the first time.

9

If you are on a mac Pixelmator does all this stuff very well too.

10
  1. open image
  2. right-click on layer and “add alpha channel”
  3. round select tool
  4. select over the whole picture
  5. invert selection (from the menus, not sure which one)
  6. press del
  7. save as PNG or something that supports transparency

You can mess with the select tool options to have a “soft” transition to transparent instead of a hard cut. I guess that’s it…?