Custom SOS Card Tutorial

Biscuit · #1 (**permalink**) 03-31-2010, 10:08 AM

Final Outcome

Introduction:

SOS Cards are powerful tools rewarded in Sellbot HQ, but only a select few toons have had the honor of being on one of these powerful cards. Today is the day that changes!

This guide will show you how to make your own custom SOS Cards, so you too can join in on the glory.

First off, I'll say that Custom SOS Cards are surprisingly simple to make. I will be using Adobe Photoshop CS3 in this tutorial, but any image editing software should do. Now, let's get to editing!

Step 1: Getting the Toon's Head

What good is an SOS Card without the picture of the toon that helps? The head of your toon needs to be in a certain position. That is, facing straight forward at you. The easiest way of getting this position is from ToonTown's login screen. Once you get to the login screen, wait for your toon to face forward toward you and press the Print Screen button on your keyboard to take a picture of your screen like this:

As you probably guessed, I'm using Biscuit as my Toon. All you have to do after that is open your image editing software such as Photoshop, Paint, etc. and paste the image of your screen into it.

Step 2: Cutting Out the Toon's Head

Sweet, now we have the picture we need to cut out. This step is probably the most difficult part of the tutorial. All we need to do is to cut out the head of your toon from the background. There's many methods to doing this, but in order to keep this tutorial brief, I will point to other guides for how to do this.

For those of you who have the fortune of a quality image editing program like Photoshop, simply follow Slate's guide on how to cut a toon out of an image. It should be on the second post of the thread.

For those of you who have limited image editing software, such as Paint, you can follow my MS Paint Guide.

Make sure to only follow the steps that cut out your Toon, as that is all that you need for this guide. Once you have your Toon's head cut out, it should look something like this:

Step 3: Which Star Card?

The only thing this step requires is a decision on your part. How many stars would you like your SOS Card to have? I have templates for each type of card, so choose the one you like and bring it into your image editing software.

Step 4: Placing Your Toon's Head On the Card

From here on out, it's simply placement and positioning. On this step, place your Toon's head on the card and align it's in the middle of the card. For these steps, I would use a real card or my outcome from this tutorial as a reference to where to place the head and words.

Here is my outcome from this step, I used a 5-star card.

Step 5: Placing Your Toon's Name On the Card

Each font is different on this card. For your Toon's name, use the following font attributes:

Type: Impress BT
Size: 16
Color: #584c41

Don't have the Impress BT font? Download it at the bottom of the post.

After you have created the font, place it in the middle of the card underneath your Toon's head. Once again, I suggest you use a real card or my outcome as a reference to where to position the font.

My outcome looks like this:

Step 6: Placing the Type of Card It Is:

Now we need to place the font on the top of the card that specifies what type of SOS Card it is. For example, usually Sound, Lure, Cogs Miss, Toons Hit, etc. goes there.

For this font, use the following font attributes:

Type: Minnie
Size: 16
Color: #4d4033

Don't have the Minnie font? Download it at the bottom of the post.

After you have created this font, place it in the middle of the card above your Toon's head. Once again, using a real card or my outcome as a reference to where to position the font.

My outcome looks like this:

Step 7: Placing the Number of Cards Remaining

Welcome to the last step! We are almost done! The last thing to do is put the number of remaining SOS Cards of that type you have left. This part is pretty self-explanatory, we will just do what we have done the last couple of steps.

For this font, use the following font attributes:

Type: Impress BT
Size: 17
Color: #584c41

Don't have the Impress BT font? Download it at the bottom of the post.

After you have created this font, place it to the left of the "Remaining" text. As always, I suggest using a real card or my outcome as a reference to where to position the font.

My Final Outcome

Compared to a real card:

Saving Instructions

If you are using Photoshop, I highly suggest saving it as a .psd file first. This will enable you to easily change the font and pictures used rather than having to start all over.

After that, or if you are using any other image editing software, I suggest saving it as a .png or .gif. Although any common image file type will do.

That is the end of my guide. I hope this helped and if you have any comments/suggestions/problems, feel free to post them here.

Fonts Required in this Guide: