Importing your own character and tile art (not to mention music, scripts and various types of background art) is an important part of turning the games you build with RMVX into personalized creations. The limited instructions on the English-language site for RMVX means a lot of people are always asking how to do this. Here are my tips for importing art of any kind. First, we’ll start with preparing images. Then, we’ll move on to actually importing them in RMVX.

Tip 1: Get yourself a decent image editing program, either Photoshop or GIMP 2.4 (which is free and I have a link to in my blogroll under the Software category). Once you’ve done that, importing files is MUCH easier. I tried to do it without using an image editor and I wasted hours trying to figure out how to correctly align any resources I imported into a tile template. RMVX primarily uses .png files, so whenever you save something, save it with that file extension.

Tip 2: For characters, create either a new file with a transparent or single-color background that’s 96 pixels high x 128 wide for a single character or a template (which is the default size RMVX likes to import) that’s 256 pixels high x 384 wide for 8 characters. If you use the 128 x 96 template for your character sprites, make sure you put a $ in front of the filename. Here’s an example of a 128 x 96 template with a single-color background.

To import this sprite properly, you must go to the Tools menu, select Resource Manager and the Graphics/Characters tab and then hit the “Import” button. When you find the character, in the above format (9 tiles, 3 different animation frames per row, etc.), and you have a colored background, you’ll get a little menu that will pop up that has 2 colored bars at the bottom. Make sure you left click on the background color behind the sprite. This will tell RMVX that you want that color to be transparent. If you don’t do this, you will end up with a background-colored square behind your sprite everywhere it’s displayed in the game. The screen cap below demonstrates how this works. After you’ve selected the background color as transparent, hit the “Okay” button and you will now be able to access your custom characters whenever you create a new Event.

From there, you can easily import any recolored sprites you downloaded from either a website that offers sprite mix-and-matching or from a file in MS Paint. I’ll discuss “Frankenspriting” and recoloring of sprites in a future blog post. Even later than that, once I actually develop some spriting skills (with luck, before the end of the decade), I’ll do a spriting tutorial. Suffice it to say, if you’re going to make you’re own sprites, I suggest you visit the www.rpgmaker.net forums and look for PINEDAVX’s RMVX-style template for creating character sprites. It’s great.

Tip 3: Tiles and tilesets. First of all, RMVX has somewhat limited space for custom tiles. Although TileE is blank, that’s the only blank space you can really use without replacing tilesets A, B, C and D (yes, you can replace them if you want, but I advise that you export all of those files first and save them, just in case). To use prepare files to import them into TileE, you need to create a blank 512 x 512 template that has either a single-color or transparent background (transparent is preferable). In GIMP, you can do this by using the following menu:

It brings up a new menu that will look like this:

In that menu, you should turn on the Snap to Grid and View Grid options. You’ll see grid crosshairs appear on the blank template. Also, whenever you use the selection tool, you’ll notice that the program forcibly drags your box to the edges of each 32x 32 box that makes up the template. This is what you want because you want to avoid placing tiles and accidentally cutting parts of them off. The reason every object has to fit neatly within the 32 by 32 space is because of how the program’s tile selection system works. You can get creative with it to make some interesting tile effects, but for now, stick with getting each tile or series of tiles neatly into those 32 x 32 boxes.

To import a tileset, open the saved tile .png file and leave the template open. In the “Edit” menu, select “Copy.” Next, click on your open 512 x 512 template, go to the Edit menu and hit “Paste.”

Using the Move tool (it looks like a small cross and is on the right-hand side of the menu, below the scissors), drag it into place on your template. Because you have the Snap to Grid and View Grid options on, you should be able easily align it in place.

Afte you’re happy with its position, go to the Layer menu and select “Anchor Layer.” You have to do this for every tile and tileset you copy and paste into your template. GIMP can only save .png files if it has a single layer. Because the background layer is transparent, you don’t need to worry about there being any background colors around your tiles when you import it into RMVX.

Okay. We’re almost done. The last thing you need to do, which is one of the more confusing things about RMVX, is actually name the file with all your tiles in it TileE.png. Don’t use any spaces, make it exactly like that. When you import the file into RMVX, the program will recognize it as TileE and will then display it in the tile selection menu on the left-hand side of the RMVX editor. Here’s my TileE ready to go (with some custom roads I made and some custom roofs that I downloaded from www.rpgrevolution.com).

Here’s the last step. Open RMVX and go to the Tools menu. Under Tools, select the Resource Manager. Next, go to the Graphics/System menu and select Import. Find the folder you saved your custom TileE in, select TileE and hit the “Open” button. TileE will now appear with a red dot in front of it, which means it’s your custom tile. Close the Resource Manager out and click on your TileE tab. All your tiles should now be there.

Tip 4: The IconSet (and yes, to import your own IconSet you have to name the file IconSet.png) can use just about any size template you want. I have no idea why the tile editor is so limited but the icon menu isn’t. They should have just used both systems for tiles and icons. It would have made the program a lot easier to use with custom tiles.

Well, I hoped those tips helped those of you who are new to using the program and to using GIMP 2.4 (or other image editors with similar functions, for that matter). If you have any questions, as usual, feel free to post a comment.