Supreme Commander Talk

Check out this site’s header image. Pretty cool, eh? At least I thought so. Grokmoo and I were talking last night before we launched this site and he mentioned that it’d be cool to have a Galactic Colossus on a rampage as the site’s header image. I couldn’t possibly have disagreed. So I set out to take a great screenshot.

I fired up a skirmish game as the Aeon against two AIs on the triangular desert island map. I quickly destroyed one of the AIs by catching his commander outside of his based. Thus, I controlled the majority of the map, and was easily able to contain my remaining Aeon opponent. So I built a Galactic Colossus and sent it in on a rampage. The end result is the picture of the Galactic Colossus tearing through energy generators in the rear of the enemy’s base. Look closely and you’ll see that he’s sucked up a Tech III engineer into his hand, which he’s just about to destroy.

I took the screenshot using the image and video capture program Fraps. I had all of the graphical detail options in Supreme Commander set to maximum and I was running at 1600×1200 resolution. To capture a good action shot like this, it’s important to slow the game down to -10 and watch carefully for just the right moment. Then, pause the game when the moment arrives (in the case of this image, exactly when the Colossus destroyed the power generator). You now have as much time as you need to get the perfect camera angle. Zoom in a bit and hold down space bar. All of the icons and health bars over the units will disappear and you’ll be able to freely rotate the camera to catch that perfect angle. Don’t feel shy about taking as many pictures as possible, as you can just go through them later and select the best one. I took about thirty different action shots of my Colossus rampaging through the base, and then picked the best one from those.

My best shot ended up showing the Galactic Colossus on the right. Using Photoshop, I mirrored the image horizontally, cropped it to size, and put in two fade-to-white gradients to make it mesh with the white background of this site. That’s all it took to generate this site’s header image. It’s quite a nifty image. I especially like how the explosion is pure white, so it merges perfectly into the rest of the page, thus looking almost like the Colossus is firing at and destroying the rest of the page.

Click here for the original image that the header was cropped from.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 4th, 2007 at 11:29 pm by Cyde Weys and is filed under Meta. Keywords: Tags: Galactic Colossus, header image, Photoshop, screenshots, site header, Supreme Commander. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.