The VG Resource

How do some people make the thumbnails to their submissions look so smooth, like these?




While mine all look choppy and pixely and ugly?

Anti-aliasing!

I don't know what program you use for rendering and wouldn't be able to help you anyways, but you should ckeck if there are anti-aliasing options for the image renderer.
Of course, since the resulting image will have alpha-transparent pixels, be sure to use the newest version of the icon maker (or a program with alpha support when making them manually).

Well people usually render their models in their modeling programs like Blender and 3DS Max and so on.
The easier way to do it though is to just make sure that anti-aliasing or smooth resize is turned on when you shrink your model images. I take screenshots of the model zoomed in and then downsize them to the exact dimensions of the icons and previews (95 x 79 and 354 x 353 respectively) to make them nice and smooth like this:



Of course you don't have to follow the exact dimensions if you don't want the model touching the edges of the icon/preview, I just do that so it shows as much of the model and as big as possible.

I also wrote about this is my model ripping guide but this is the basis of what you need to know regarding making decent icons/previews.

What I've been doing is just making the background transparency-pink, then resizing it so it fits the thumbnail. Uhh...

Yeah well you just need to make it so it resizes smooth. Do you use MS Paint? It should be able to make it not pixely.

I actually can't manage to replicated how you shrank yours :/

If you're using GIMP, then it could be one of the resize methods that is making it blocky (probably "None", since that just reduces pixels without aliasing them out to make the final result look smoother).

(12-29-2012, 05:36 PM)Ploaj Wrote: [ -> ]I actually can't manage to replicated how you shrank yours :/

Oh my god it's beautiful, I hope someone replaces mine with those. Are these done with the icon maker itself or pasting the icon in an image editor? I've been using Paint.NET, using the transparency color, then shrinking it to fit.

Well in Paint.NET the resize should be on Best Quality and it will anti-alias it.
By the way, you can also save the model images and load them (ctrl + L) into the icon maker to preserve transparency.
Although I personally prefer doing it in an image program yes.

notice mario and luigi i used to like mario

(01-18-2014, 03:25 PM)modelman22 Wrote: [ -> ]notice mario and luigi i used to like mario

One more spammy post from you and I'm gonna have to give you a time-out.