INTERACTIVE PAINTERS

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The Bolter and Chainsword Space Marine Painter

T

he B&C Marine Painter was created by Brother Argos with madscuzzy's artistic skills so that members of the Bolter and Chainsword would have a more robust way to display their Space Marine Chapters to other users. However like all tools there are some tricks to using it and that is the purpose of this tutorial.

Important note : The painter was written for use with the most recent versions of Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2.03 running on a PC. Brother Argos would have loved to be able to test and develop this tool on other operatings systems and alternate browsers, however he doesnt have a Mac and his only Linux box spends all day running the Bolter & Chainsword. He apologises for this and if anyone wishes to give him a Mac or Linux box to work with he will gladly put this time in to get it working. If the Space Marine Painter works in those environments, please count your blessings, if it doesnt, there isn't much we can do unless you can afford to give us a new Mac or Linux Box.

Creating a Space Marine

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We will start with the painters main page. Here you can see the Marine "blank", the various areas that one can change and your options for a full scheme, half scheme or quartered scheme. You can also select to have an IA style grid background. At this stage you should try and visualise how you would like your chapter to appear and what colours are going to be used on the model.

[Please click on the image to the right for a screenshot]

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You can begin skinning a marine by going with the default "Normal" scheme. This means we will be doing standard marine who isn't split down the middle or into quarters. The image of a spacemarine is blank and waiting for you to choose the colours for the appropriate locations.

Next simply select the are you wish to start coloring by picking the appropriate location from the choices to the left or

right of the Marine image.

You now have two ways to change the color of that area. The text box color picker works with your standard 6 digit color codes that you would find in HTML and CSS. If you know the number of a color you like simply type it in.

Now this won't change the color of the area selected until you click another box to type in. But once you do, the selected

area (backpack exhausts for this tutorial) will change.

The other way to change the color is by using the blank square next to the text field, clicking this will bring up the colour chooser.

Choose the color of your choice and then hit select within the pallette. This will not only add the 6 digit number to the text boxbut will also change the selected area at the same time.

Now it is just a question of going through and filling in all your fields. However for a "normal" marine you can ignore the last two boxes, Half color and Quarter color.

Once you've finished filling in all the fields you are ready to get your Marine Code that will give you results like so:

Imperial Chapters like the Dark Angels or Ultramarines:

or not so Imperial Chapters like the Death Chickens or Emperor's Pointy Sticks:

Doing a Marine with a half or quartered scheme is easy with the B&C painter. Everything works the same as with creating a normal marine skin. The only difference is where you start.

For a half scheme Marine you simply start by clicking the Halved Scheme option just under the Marine.

Halved Marine Scheme

Quartered Marine Scheme

Then start at the bottom right of the section options and select Halving Color. This will divide the Marine down the middle of the head and torso like so:

Quartering works in the same way only you select Quarter Scheme and Quartering Color which will then quarter the marine with the color chosen:

After that you simply fill in the other color fields as necessary to match your desired scheme up to that of the painter.

Some example Chapters:

Once you have your scheme selected you can either keep the background color you have entered into the text field or you can simply check the Gridded Background box:

Now it's time to present your color scheme to the world!

Displaying your Marine

There are several ways in which you can display your finished Marine skin.

Obviously you could simply take a screenshot and then display it as a standard .jpg or .gif file on the board.

You could also "right click > properties" the images and get this monster of a URL:

http://bolterandchainsword.com/smp.php?bpe=0E05B5&bpj=0E05B5&bp=0E05B5&bpc=0E05B5
&hdt=0E05B5&hdm=0E05B5&hdl=0E05B5&ey=4DFF00&er=0E05B5&pi=666666&nk=0E05B5
&ch=0E05B5&eg=DB9B04&sk=DB9B04&abs=0E05B5&bt=0E05B5&cod=0E05B5&ull=0E05B5&
lk=0E05B5&lll=0E05B5&lft=0E05B5&url=F00000&rk=F00000&lrl=F00000&rft=F00000&slt=F00000
&sli=F00000&srt=0E05B5&sri=0E05B5&ula=F00000&lel=F00000&lla=F00000&lw=F00000&lh=F00000
&ura=0E05B5&rel=0E05B5&rla=0E05B5&rw=0E05B5&rh=0E05B5&bg=FFFFFF&rb=333333&gr=8D621E
&qu=FF0000&grid=true

and slam it between some image tags. However this won't work unless you change the smp.php to sm.php.

But there is a more "board friendly" way to do this. First you can click the "GET URL" button just under the Marines feet.

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This will open a new page that looks like this:

and gives you a URL code like so:

http://bolterandchainsword.com/sms.php?bpe=0E05B5&bpj=0E05B5&bp=0E05B5
&bpc=0E05B5&hdt=0E05B5&hdm=0E05B5&hdl=0E05B5&ey=4DFF00&er=0E05B5
&pi=666666&nk=0E05B5&ch=0E05B5&eg=DB9B04&sk=DB9B04&abs=0E05B5
&bt=0E05B5&cod=0E05B5&ull=0E05B5&lk=0E05B5&lll=0E05B5&lft=0E05B5
&url=F00000&rk=F00000&lrl=F00000&rft=F00000&slt=F00000&sli=F00000&srt=0E05B5
&sri=0E05B5&ula=F00000&lel=F00000&lla=F00000&lw=F00000&lh=F00000&ura=0E05B5
&rel=0E05B5&rla=0E05B5&rw=0E05B5&rh=0E05B5&bg=FFFFFF&rb=333333&gr=8D621E
&qu=FF0000&grid=true

Click the GET URL link under the Marines feet and the page will change to look like so:

Now this may seem like a lot of clicking but it serves and important purpose. First of all it gives you the proper link code that you can use to display your Marine. You will probably want to store this link in your Favorites or on a notepad (it is

generally too long for most IMs). The following is an example code

http://bolterandchainsword.com/sm.php?bpe=0E05B5&bpj=0E05B5&bp=0E05B5
&bpc=0E05B5&hdt=0E05B5&hdm=0E05B5&hdl=0E05B5&ey=4DFF00&er=0E05B5
&pi=666666&nk=0E05B5&ch=0E05B5&eg=DB9B04&sk=DB9B04&abs=0E05B5&
bt=0E05B5&cod=0E05B5&ull=0E05B5&lk=0E05B5&lll=0E05B5&lft=0E05B5&url=F00000
&rk=F00000&lrl=F00000&rft=F00000&slt=F00000&sli=F00000&srt=0E05B5&sri=0E05B5
&ula=F00000&lel=F00000&lla=F00000&lw=F00000&lh=F00000&ura=0E05B5
&rel=0E05B5&rla=0E05B5&rw=0E05B5&rh=0E05B5&bg=FFFFFF&rb=333333
&gr=8D621E&qu=FF0000&grid=true

The second reason for this is that now your marine colours are cached on the server and will load much faster when you display it in the future. This will also play into future plans for the painter that will be discussed later.

Now you can copy this code and place it in the following BBCodes to get it display on the Bolter and Chainsword:

[img][/img]

or if you remove the bit like this: -

http://bolterandchainsword.com/sm.php

you can put it into this code

[spacemarine][/spacemarine]

You can also further alter this image by making it smaller if you like. This requires you to add the following to the end of your URL: -

&small=TRUE

This will make your full URL look like so:

http://bolterandchainsword.com/sm.php?bpe=253BCC&bpj=253BCC
&bp=253BCC&bpc=253BCC&hdt=253BCC&hdm=253BCC&hdl=253BCC
&ey=EB0707&er=253BCC&pi=000000&nk=253BCC&ch=253BCC&eg=DEDEDE
&sk=DEDEDE&abs=253BCC&bt=253BCC&cod=253BCC&ull=253BCC
&lk=F5E553&lll=F5E553&lft=F5E553&url=253BCC&rk=F5E553&lrl=F5E553
&rft=F5E553&slt=F5E553&sli=F5E553&srt=F5E553&sri=F5E553&ula=253BCC
&lel=253BCC&lla=253BCC&lw=253BCC&lh=F5E553&ura=253BCC
&rel=253BCC&rla=253BCC&rw=253BCC&rh=F5E553&bg=CCCCCC
&rb=000000&gr=000000&grid=TRUE&small=TRUE

This will give you an image like so (please note the GRID option doesn't work in the small setting and so it automatically

turns off. You can still display this in the standard img tags but in order to display it in the new spacemarine tag you need

to use the special small version:

[smallspacemarine][/smallspacemarine]

The Future of the B&C Marine Painter

Plans for the future in NO particular order include:

• Chaos Marines
  
• Terminators
  
• Sister of Battle
  
• Vehicles
  
• Shoulder pad side display
  
• Shoulder pad display with the option to include a Chapter emblem
  
• Power armor variants
  
• Weapons: Bolters, Chainswords and more
  
• The ability to store and display your marine skin based off your user #. For example you would post something along the lines of [marineskin]{membernumber}[//marineskin] and it would pull up that persons Chapter skin.
  
• area click to get a color rather than using the pallette or text fields
  

Just a reminder:

Important note : The painter was written for use with the most recent versions of Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2.03 running on a PC. Brother Argos would have loved to be able to test and develop this tool on other operatings systems and alternate browsers, however he doesnt have a Mac and his only Linux box spends all day running the Bolter & Chainsword. He apologises for this and if anyone wishes to give him a Mac or Linux box to work with he will gladly put this time in to get it working. If the Space Marine Painter works in those environments, please count your blessings, if it doesnt, there isn't much we can do unless you can afford to give us a new Mac or Linux Box.

If you have questions, comments or concerns feel free to post them in the tutorial discussion thread or PM

Brother Argos.