Now load the selection area for the area that you want to be reflective, in this case starting with the "white" portion of Micromax's costume. Then fill that area with a mid grey shade (set the "Fill" tool to a Match Mode of "none" and the program will fill the entire selection in one click, whether the areas touch or not). The reflected light takes on the colour that you apply to the _refl TGA, so if you fill it with yellow you would have golden highlights.

Save the file and view in the Character Tool to check whether the hero is too shiny or not shiny enough. Simply lighten or darken the colour to make it either more or less reflective.

Load up the next selection and fill it with a darker grey.

Micromax's visor is reflective but the chest emblem should remain matte. Load the "red" selection and then deselect the chest and back areas as before. The shape of the mesh affects the reflections, so to keep the nose from appearing to noticeably where the visor should be flat, the area is filled with a radial gradiant to keep the highlights at the edge.

And that's it for the reflection map. You can take the same approach with the Glow map if you resize it to 256x256 before you open the Character Tool. You can also copy and paste from your main skin into the special effect files if you want the glow or reflection to vary.

When creating an alpha channel for a hero one simply saves the Template selection to the disk, load it into the skin and then "Save To the Alpha Channel" on the Selection menu. TGA files support a single Alpha Channel so if you the skin already has an Alpha Channel you will need to overwrite the existing one. The selected areas should then be the only parts of the skin that are visible.





Finally, there is just the matter of the portrait. Use the Shift and Control keys to zoom in close to the head of the hero and position it for the angle that you want.

Take a screenshot by pressing either the Print Screen (Prt Scr) button (for a full screen shot) or ctrl+Prt Scr (for a shot of only the active window) on your keyboard. The image is stored on the clipboard so all you have to do paste it as a new image.

To make this into a portrait you need to select the part of the image that you want. The final image must have dimensions of 64X128 pixels. To make it easier for you look in the lower left corner of the screen as you drag the selection tool across the image. It tells you the height and width of the selected area as you move (beneath the big red arrow :D ), so choose an area that is twice as high as it is wide.

Copy the selection and paste it as a new image.

Select any white background areas in the image and fill it with any colour of your choosing, then resize (Shift+S) the image to 64x128.

You now have a portrait!

All that remains is to save it. Chose the Save As command (F12) and, ensuring that the selected format is Targa/TGA, name the file "portrait.tga"

Your Hero is now ready to use in Freedom Force. Simply select the appropriate mesh in the Character Creator and cycle through the skins until your hero is selected and create whatever powers you want.