Magnolia Road

Welcome to Magnolia Road - this is a companion blog to my main site over on Neocities. This is where I post longer-form writings about petz things.

[magnoliaroad]

Lavish Living + Other Updates

New playscene release! Lavish Living is now available for Petz 4 and Petz 5. I'm so excited to share that these playscenes feature a brand new, fully animated fireplace with an ambient glow that flickers. Read on for other updates as well as a behind-the-scenes look at the creation process.

First, there are some other small updates on my site: I've added a FAQ page in the About section. I've also fixed a few pieces of Petz 4 content that may not have been displaying correctly for some folks. These were mostly petz-palette related tweaks. Old versions are still available if preferred.

Petz 4 Celestial carrying case

Petz 4 Frost carrying case + door

Magenta pixels fixed for 4 Seasons Backyard (Petz 4 version)

Creation process

This is one of my longer walkthroughs, since it covers how I created the fireplace animation, which isn’t easy to explain in a few words lol. I also write these notes for myself so I can remember the process later. I wish I could have made a video tutorial, but my laptop would probably burst into flames if I tried.

Though I used Photoshop and AI tools in this project, the techniques shown here can be adapted to a variety of workflows and toolsets. Back in 2024 I did a Petz 5 Family Room remake (Luxe Living):

It was mostly just a recolor and used the original fireplace animation.

When creating these new Family Rooms for Petz 4, I wanted to try something more ambitious. As iconic as the default petz fireplace is, the animation sprites sort of lock you into one fireplace style. So I put together a new fireplace, complete with a fully redone fireplace animation!

I'll cover the animation later, but first I'll go over the construction of the scene.

The final PSD for this had 315 layers (45 of them were fire sprite layers that were handled within the PSD). Wallpaper

I think I must have tried a dozen different patterns and styles before finally settling on the more neutral grey floral print. I took a stock image pattern from FreePik (now Magnific) and did some editing to add shimmer. CREDIT: [ link ]

Sliding patio door

AI was used to generate a set of family rooms with a sliding patio door. The door was then separated into its individual components using the selection tool, with a bug screen added beneath it. The backdrop was replaced with the spring version of my 4 Seasons Backyard. In-game, the sliding door is interactive and can be clicked to open.

Fireplace

Fireplace concepts were generated in Gemini using the original Petz 4/5 Family Room scene as a base. From those, I selected one that was closest to what I had in mind.

While this was a strong starting point, it needed significant editing. I wasn’t happy with the masonry extending beyond the mantel frame or with the firebox design, so I reworked it using the polygonal lasso tool to break it apart and rebuild a modified version. AI was used to refine the mantel, generate missing stonework, and replace the old firebox with a new one.

An ornate fire screen was generated with AI, then cut out, positioned over the fireplace, and given a pixel mesh layer. I liked how it turned out, but it later complicated the animation process, since I had to constantly toggle the fire screen layer on and off while working with the sprite frames to see what I was doing.

Fireplace switch The fireplace switch can be moved by changing the X, Y coordinates in Tinker.

I decided to add a pawprint between the ornamental scrolls. I took a simple paw print and applied layer effects (Bevel & Emboss and Color Overlay) to make it blend into the mantel, then created a gold version that appears when the fireplace is turned on. This functions as the switch for the Petz 4 versions. Unfortunately, I discovered something the hard way when porting this to Petz 5. Petz 4 and Petz 5 layers the fireplace switch sprite differently. In Petz 4, the switch can overlap animation sprites and still remain clickable. In Petz 5, the switch sits underneath the animation sprites, so if the animation covers it, the switch becomes inaccessible and unclickable.

(The white lines represent the shape of the animation sprites. The switch is positioned to OVERLAP the animation zone.) So I made a last-minute change to the Petz 5 version and added a wall switch. So unfortunately, there is no gold paw in the Petz 5 ones, as this would require editing about 90 frames of animation (day + night) to add it. At this point in the project I was very done and over it lmao.

I took a look at an IDA editor (though I have no clue what I'm looking at) to see if there was a way to change this. Sadly, this is beyond my technical skillset. If anyone knows how to fix this, I'd be so grateful.

Notes about the Petz 5 version

Because the switch was moved, it clips into the hangable space. So maybe...don't put a picture there lol. The outlet was also moved due the chair and wainscoting. It still works, but placing the nightlight may be tricky. (Aim toward the top right corner)

Although Petz 5 has a day/night cycle, these have been made as two separate playscenes, since the day + night versions each require a different set of animations.

No weather effects. I may add them later, but given the extra time this takes, I've skipped them for now.

Creating the new fireplace animation This is one of the more complex playscenes I’ve worked on so far, requiring 45 individually edited frames and separate day and night animations due to lighting differences. The fire animation was a lengthy process, but I hope these notes show it is possible.

Understanding how the fire animation works The fireplace animation looks daunting at first, but is more approachable when you analyze it.

45 frames seems like a lot, but there are some frames you can reuse, cutting down on the number of unique frames you need to make. (There's technically more than 45 but I don't count the 3 that are the same)

BurnA-000, DoneA-005, and FireA-000 are the same (OFF state).

BurnA and DoneA can mostly reuse the same fire frames, just uploaded in reverse in Tinker. BurnA is the ignition sequence where the flame ramps up (4 frames). DoneA, where the fire turns off, is slightly longer, but you can reuse a couple of standard burn frames at the start and then run the BurnA sequence in reverse.

BurnB and BurnC are the active burn cycles, with 18 frames each. The numbering can be misleading since it starts at frame 0. Once the fireplace is turned on, the game randomly alternates between BurnB and BurnC so the fire doesn’t loop in a single repeating pattern, adding a bit of variation to the animation.

(So honestly, if the repetition doesn't bother you, you could technically make just 18 frames for BurnB and reuse them for BurnC in Tinker instead of creating two full sets. That said, I went ahead and made all 36 for added variation.

Creating the fire Once my fireplace was made, I isolated just the firebox itself and asked Gemini to generate an animation sheet for me.

This was the image I gave it along with a prompt that looked something close to this (just cleaned up for grammar/clarity):

See this fireplace box? I need you to generate an animation sheet consisting of sequential frames. The animation should include 4 frames showing the fire turning on, 18 frames of a seamless looping fire animation, and 6 frames showing the fire turning off. Do not alter the scale or proportions of the provided fireplace, as any change will make the result unusable. The fire must look realistic, burning around the logs rather than just on top of them, and it should include a natural flickering glow throughout the animation. Frames must not be numbered.

It took a few tries but it finally gave me something that was of workable quality:

It wasn’t bad, but it needed a lot of cleanup work since it didn’t fully follow my instructions. The frames were slightly squished, so I had to resize them. It also didn’t produce a full set of 18 usable frames, but that was fine since I could reuse a few. Finally, after much cleanup, I was able to put together a collection of frames in the correct size and sequence for all the burn phases. You may notice in the prompt that I only asked for 18 burn frames (even though we need 36). It was because I knew Gemini wouldn't be able to generate a sheet that big. This brings us to the next section - I made some tweaks to the animation to extend it.

Tweaking the animation When I tested the animation, the fire looked choppy, so I added a tween frame between each frame for a slightly smoother animation.

As you can see, the first frame blends with the next. Adding one tween frame between the 18 burn frames doubled the frame count to 36. I now have enough frames to spread my animation across both BurnB and BurnC.

There you have it. Not perfect by any means good enough lol.

Putting the fire into the scene

Now that I had my fire frames it was time to bring them into my playscene PSD and put it all together.

I lined up the 45 frames in the scene as separate layers, labeled each with its frame name, and grouped them into a folder called Fire Sprites. Once set up, this folder can be reused in other projects.

Adding an ambient glow to the scene

I wanted to do something truly special with this animation by having the fire cast an ambient glow to the room that would flicker over the course of the animation.

I used AI tools to add realistic fire glow lighting for the scene. After editing it, I placed the glow layer over the composition and set the blend mode to Lighten. I also added layer effects to the fire screen so it appears backlit when the fireplace is on.

Just be aware that if you create an ambient glow covering a large part of the playscene, it increases the sprite size and may increase the .env file size. My Petz 5 night version is about 88 MB.

It also means you’ll need make the animation twice for a day/night playscene. Below you can see why the day animation can’t be reused for the night version.

You do not 'have' to do a glow effect, as it can complicate the animation project.

Establish the 'Sprite Area'

Next, I needed to establish the “sprite area,” the boundary within which the animation takes place. The original fireplace animation is confined to the fireplace box, but my version includes ambient glow spilling into the room, so I needed a larger area to accommodate it.

Below shows how I traced the silhouette of the animation region using a non-anti-aliased selection tool to capture all areas affected by the warm orange glow. (It is super important that your selection tool has anti-aliasing turned off, or your sprite images may end up with ugly seam lines. You want crisp pixel edges.) I then masked the glow layers to ensure the effect did not extend beyond the sprite area.

Because the glow is more pronounced in the night version, the sprite area needed to be larger.

In Petz 5, precise silhouette cutouts aren’t as necessary because it supports full-color images. Petz 4 required tighter silhouettes, since the Petz palette may produce visible seam lines with pixel speckling during animation. My animation has a bit of this in places, but it’s difficult to fully avoid with the Petz palette. When defining the sprite area, avoid including areas where other interactable features are (chair ledge, hangable wall space, window, mouse holes, P5 outlet, etc.), as the frames may interfere with their appearance or functionality

At this point, I measured the position of the sprite area (red bars), since the X and Y coordinates would be needed later when importing the sprites into Tinker. You can use the selection tool to measure pixel distance from the edges of the canvas Once I established my sprite area, I created a new layer named “Sprite Stencil” and painted the area outside the sprite area black. This will act as a stencil later during the frame capture process.

NOTE: My day version has a "window" where the switch is - it ended up not being necessary. I was just too lazy to edit it out later.

Making the animation

Now that all fireplace components are set up (fireplace, fire sprites layer folder, fire screen, ambient glow layers, and sprite stencil), it’s time to begin capturing the fully composited animation frames.

The following sections are tricky to explain without a video, so apologies if anything is unclear. You’re always welcome to DM me with questions!

Understanding how the ambient glow flicker works.

Before moving into the frame capture section, I need to explain how the flickering glow effect works, otherwise the next part won’t make sense.

The flicker was achieved by adjusting the opacity of the glow layers over the course of the animation. As opacity decreases (100%, 95%, 90%, 85%, 80%, 75%), the glow gradually dims; as it increases again (75%, 80%, 85%, 90%, 95%, 100%), it brightens. Repeating this creates a pulsing fire flicker effect.

This took some experimentation. My first attempt used 10% increments, but the result looked like a strobe light. Switching to 5% increments produced a gentler effect. I also avoided going below 75%. If you dip too low in brightness, it can cause that strobe light look.

Below is a chart showing the opacity values for each frame. The glow starts at 0% when the fireplace turns on, ramps up in brightness, pulses through the burn cycle, and fades back to 0% at the end. During the burn phase, I introduced variation in the up-and-down cycles so the flicker feels more natural rather than a perfectly repetitive breathing pattern. In some sections, it stays within a narrower range like 100–85% instead of dropping all the way to 75%.

(You are welcome to save this and follow the opacity settings I used here)

Capturing each frame There are two main things that change from frame to frame: the active burn sprite and the opacity of the glow layers. For each frame, you turn the previous fire sprite off and the next one on, adjust the glow opacity ±5% according to the chart, select the sprite area using your stencil, use Copy Merged to 'screen grab' the result, paste it into a new document, and save the frame. It is very easy to lose track of which frame you are working on, so having a spreadsheet was handy for marking which frames I had already done. Although you'd be starting with BurnA-000, I'm demonstrating the BurnB set because it's easier to see what I'm doing. However, the same steps apply for all 45 frames. Note: I had multiple glow layers. Make sure ALL glow layers are selected together when adjusting opacity frame by frame. To simplify this, you can group them into a folder so the opacity can be changed for all glow layers at once. In my case, some layers needed different blend modes or effects, so they couldn’t all be grouped.

I’m only showing the process for two frames just to demonstrate the general concept, but the same steps are repeated for all frames. First frame - BurnB-000: Step 1: Toggle on the fire frame you need to work on (BurnB-000).

Step 2: Set your ambient glow layer(s) to 100% opacity (see glow chart). If you have multiple glow layers/folders, hold SHIFT to select them together and adjust their opacity simultaneously.

Step 3: Use the black cutout sprite area stencil made earlier to select the entire sprite zone area. Use Select > Inverse to select the area OPPOSITE of the black zone.

Step 4: Go to Edit > Copy Merged or (Ctrl + Shift + C). This copies the appearance of your document as if all layers were merged. It is as if we're screenshotting this frame exactly as it currently looks.

Step 5: Paste your sprite into a new document. If you used your stencil, your image should be in the cutout shape of your sprite area. Make sure you remove the default white background layer. Then save this as BurnB-000.png.

This is what a single frame looks like when copied from the PSD. For Petz 4, Tinker will apply the Petz palette for you when imported, but you may get better results by indexing the frames yourself. I didn’t index the images as I went because this involves extra cumbersome steps, and there was a chance I would need to redo the animation anyway. (In any case, I needed a non-indexed master copy for Petz 5.) I let Tinker do the indexing, but I ended up having to make a few tweaks later to fix some miscolored pixels.

Next frame - BurnB-001: Step 1: Go back to your playscene PSD. Toggle OFF BurnB-000 and turn ON the BurnB-001 layer.

Step 2: Set your ambient glow layer(s) to 95% opacity. (See glow chart)

Step 3: Use the black cutout sprite area stencil to select the entire sprite zone area.

Step 4: Go to Edit > Copy Merged or (Ctrl + Shift + C).

Step 5: Paste your sprite into a new document and save as BurnB-001.png. Repeat this....for all frames

There's no other way to put this lmao. This part is very tedious. It takes me about 30-45 minutes to capture all 45 frames at a rate of about 1-2 frames per minute. There are probably ways to optimize this workflow, but this was the method that worked for how my PSD was structured. Of course, feel free to adapt this workflow as needed for your project. And load up your favorite podcast because you'll be here a hot minute lmao. (As mentioned earlier, depending on your project, some frames may be reused, which can reduce the total number of frames you need to process.)

I wish this could be automated with Photoshop actions or batch processing, but there isn’t really a viable way to set something like this up because each project is set up differently. Import sprites into Tinker

If everything during the frame capture process went according to plan, you should have a folder of sprites you can now upload into Tinker! Don't forget to change the X + Y coordinates for every frame.

I'm now at my 30 image per Tumblr post limit lol. Perfect timing because...we're done LOL! That's it. Once your frames are uploaded into Tinker and you've changed the coordinates, the animation is complete. Bear in mind that this process took me multiple attempts to get right. I hope these notes and findings help you avoid some of the mistakes I made along the way. The glow chart should also prove useful for future projects now that I’ve got the flicker pacing dialed in.

Future plans:

Now that I have a reusable fire animation, I'm excited to explore doing magical colored fire for other playscenes. It is easy to take a gradient mapping layer + clipping mask and set it above the entire folder of fire sprites and recolor them all at once.

Before / After + Final thoughts

Bless you if you've read this whole thing and have suffered through my terrible grammar and verbosity. I promise I tried to keep this succinct but writing isn't my specialty lol. Moving forward, I probably won’t do day/night versions for every family room playscene I make, since the fire animation might burn me out lol (ba dum tss~~). Without further ado, my playscenes are available over at my main page on Neocities for both Petz 4 and Petz 5.

[magnoliaroad]

4 Seasons Backyard - Petz 4 Edition

At long last my Petz 4 Back Yard remasters are finished! Petz 5 editor versions are also available for download. Keep reading to get a behind-the-scenes-look at the creation process.

Nearly one year ago (edit: two years ago in 2024), almost to the date, I created the 4 seasons remastered versions of the Petz 5 Backyard. Though my site has focused mostly on creating much-needed Petz 5 content, I was eventually going to make content for Petz 4 as well, since I play both versions.

Though the backyards in P4/P5 are similar, there are key differences that meant a full-rework had to be done to make them work as hexed playscenes in P4.

I was able to reuse some assets from my P5 remasters, such as the bushes, garden lights, landscaping rocks, and houses. However, the grass, dirt, skybox, tree, fence, string lights, seasonal decor, all had to be redone to work with Petz's 4 layout and palette. (Speaking of the petz palette, you'll hear me complain about it a lot. It was half the battle when doing these scenes.) Before diving into these further, I will disclose that I did use AI generated components and tools in the creation of these playscenes. I respect that this may not be everyone's cup of tea. I will not be offended if you opt to not use these playscenes for that reason. Nonetheless, I wanted to share this behind-the-scenes journal to demonstrate the amount of love, work, and care that went into the making of these scenes. I also hope that this post proves inspirational for those who want to push the envelope on what is possible when making playscenes.

Some stats:

The 4 playscenes have a combined total of 1,207 layers across 4 PSDs. (Though the four PSDs do share many of the same layers, Fall and Winter required the most editing.)

SPRING: 231 layers

SUMMER: 240 layers

FALL: 312 layers

WINTER: 424 layers. AI TOOLS USED: I rotated between using Gemini, Grok, and ChatGPT. It took some practice to get a feel for which engine was better for certain tasks/prompts.

I used Clipdrop's AI background remover tool to cut out a lot of items. Clipdrop is a phenomenal tool for fast background removals. However, it sometimes doesn't give me the crispest, cleanest edges, so there were some things I still had to cut out by hand. SPRING

Spring was the version I started with first. Typically when I first work on a playscene, I section off the major zones. In this case, the grass, dirt flower bed, fence, and skybox.

Gemini AI was used to enhance the OG fence, fill in the holes and cracks, and to use generative fill to remove the OG tree from the fence. I then had to cut the fence out by hand with the polygonal lasso tool, including the gaps between the boards.

Grok AI was used to enhance the tiny flowers in the grass so they weren't as pixelated as the originals. This also allowed me to make the flowers removable for for the fall scene. I asked Grok to take the original Petz 4 backyard image, isolate the flowers, enhance them, then give them back to me on a black background so I could extract them and place them in my scene. It did a great job of keeping the exact layout and positioning of the OG flowers. ChatGPT was used to enhance the grass texture. This was particularly needed for Petz 4 because the grass texture I made for Petz 5 was too smooth and dithered poorly with the petz palette.

The new tree was created via a mixture of photobashing and AI. This part took a long time to get right because I had to maintain the overall shape of the tree, particularly that horizontal branch which serves as a ledge in the game. I prompted Gemini to turn the wound spot in the tree into a spiral. However it struggled to give me what I wanted so I had to do a bit of photobashing to achieve the best results. I also asked it to add more foliage to the tree because the original tree looked a little sad and wimpy. This does mean that in the new tree, petz will 'clip' and overlap the foliage of the tree unrealistically. Personally, I felt the trade off was worth it for a nicer, fuller looking tree. I removed the animation for the leaves in this playscene. I originally wanted to see if there was a way I could animate the tree like in P5. However, the animation was not really salvageable. And in any case, the original animation was barely noticeable.

I reused the same landscaping rocks from my Petz 5 backyard remasters but added some texture. Because the P5/P4 backyard has layout differences in the dirt area, I had to reposition each rock one by one to fit the shape of the P4's flower bed.

Then I drew in grass blades over the landscaping rocks and the base of the tree to get them to blend in with the grass.

I reused the houses I made in my P5 remasters. However, Tinker does not let me access the blind sprites from P5 (it gives you an error message). So as a workaround, I used ScreenToGif to record the animation from P5, extract the 7 frames, then reworked the blinds to work in P4. There's two versions, day time blinds, and warmer-colored blinds for the night version. The blinds had to be adjusted in the winter version because the snow on the fence clips into the window a little bit.

The game is a bit glitchy when running that animation in the P4 hexed playscenes. The blinds’ rollback animation doesn’t always work, and sometimes multiple frames layer at once. Oh well. It's a very minor animation and I wasn't going to lose sleep over it to make it perfect.

I couldn't reuse the string lights from my P5 version because the P4 fence is shaped a little differently. The P4 version has posts and also angles upward differently from the P5 version, meaning the lights didn't line up right. I had to draw in new ones, but I think they came out better than the P5 ones.

The night time scenes were tricky because of the petz palette. As usual, it hates certain shades of purple and blue, or quite frankly, anything that is overly saturated or vibrant. I did my best with it, but the petz palette applied versions did come out quite dithered. I know the moons are probably unrealistically large. I tried making them smaller but then the scene just didn't feel as 'magical' and 'dreamy' so I reverted back to the larger versions.

SUMMER

There isn't much to say about the Summer one. Like with my P5 version, I removed the floral decor to make the scene a little more "plain" so that people can decorate it themselves with toyz.

FALL

Fall is my favorite season, so it was joy to work on this one.

I used the polygonal lasso tool to section off the leaves from the tree so that I could recolor just the leaves with a gradient mapping layer. I did the same process for the rest of the trees in the backdrop.

AI was used to generate fallen leaves. These were then extracted and laid on top of my grass. I then went in and drew grass blades over them by hand to get them to blend in with my grass.

There are few details in the fall scene that I had fun with. I added a little scarecrow to the flowerbed. I debated back and forth whether or not to keep this scarecrow because I figured some people don't like scarecrows or might find this kind of decor kinda kitschy. But its smile warmed my heart and I couldn't resist the opportune placement; it's in the actual flower bed where you would actually plant stuff. In the end I decided to keep it. I had tried other things in that spot such as lanterns, signs, plants, and more pumpkins but they just weren't working. Then in the night time skybox I changed the moon to a full moon, a nod to Harvest Moon. All the other seasons have a crescent moon.

WINTER

The winter version was the most challenging as it required the most drastic changes. I had to edit the snow texture on the ground, flower bed, rocks, bushes, fence, and remove the leaves from all the trees.

Again, the Petz palette was a pain to work with. It really dislikes certain shades of blue, especially if they lean too teal or turquoise. This made creating the snow for the scene extremely difficult. It also meant that I had to make the nighttime scene a bit brighter than would be realistic, choosing a brightness that worked best with the Petz palette.

AI tools were used here to remove the leaves from the tree, add in branches where they needed to be, and then lastly to add snow to the tree.

AI was used to winterize the backdrop trees I used in the Spring/Fall/Summer versions. I then extracted the transformed trees and swapped out the green trees with the winter ones.

I added some shimmer to the snow for a bit of extra magic and to give it that Christmas card feel. I also did this to help counteract the Petz palette, since texture can work alongside the palette’s dithering to soften its harsher effects. I redid the string lights on the roofs of the houses to make them a little tidier. I did not add string lights to the tree like I did in my P5 version, but I think it came out better that way. It would have been tricky to pull off because of the snow on the tree. Bloopers time. Getting AI to cooperate with me was also a challenge on this scene. I asked Gemini AI to help tweak the snow in the tree just a smidgen. (The lighting of it was off and I was going to extract and photobash in the adjustments). It gave me this when I asked for that edit.

Holy nightmare fuel. It's like Thomas Kinkade meets The Nightmare Before Christmas. Definitely not what I asked for. Though it does provide inspiration for a possible Halloween themed backyard for the future. Maybe... BEFORE/AFTER

PETZ 5 vs. PETZ 4

Here's a comparison between the Petz 5 ones I made last year (edit: two years ago) vs these new Petz 4 scenes. I do think that my new ones came out better. It makes me want to go back and touch up my Petz 5 ones lol. We'll see. I think I need a decent break from these. For now, I've made Petz 5 editor versions.

ICONS

I also had to remake the icons for the P4 versions of these playscenes. I originally was just going to reuse the P5 ones (top row), but realized that I'd need ones to differentiate the day/night playscenes. So I ended making a new set with day/night versions featuring the seasonal trees. The icon is a bit crowded, but 25x25 is not a lot of space to work with. Though I do some pixel art, it isn't my specialty lol. FINAL THOUGHTS Thank you if you have read this far! I hope this helped to provide some insight on my creative process and methods. In total there 32 playscenes.

8 x Overwrite

8 x Non-Overwerite

8 x Petz 4 Editor versions

8 x Petz 5 Editor versions While I did my best to check my scenes for mistakes, this was a lot of playscenes to playtest on my own. Kindly let me know if you spot anything amiss! Without further ado, you may find the downloads for these over at my main page on Neocities under resources. DOWNLOAD

[magnoliaroad]

Frost Wolves

Frost Wolves

It's crazy how time flies but I actually haven't hexed in a few years. I had been focusing on making other petz content and consequently, hexing sort of fell to the wayside. I figured that doing a simple recolor/retexture was a good way to get my toes wet again. (And I was definitely rusty as I was working on these!) These frost wolves are recolors/retextures of a hex I did three years ago. The Wolf Pack was one of my earliest hexes and I remember it fondly. Even back when I first made the hex, I wanted to do arctic/frost type variations. However, by the time I had finished making the original six, I was kind of tired of working on it. Whelp. Three years later I finally came back to it and made my frost wolves. I had made a bunch of frost textures that were just collecting dust in my folders. I'm glad I could finally make some hexes with them! View their crew pictures on my main website!

Pup versions of the wolves.

[magnoliaroad]

March Update - Petz 4 Playscenes and Cases

At long last, I finally came around to making carrying case skins for Petz 4! Since they are more complicated to make than Petz 5 ones, I may be releasing these more gradually. I hope to convert more of my Petz 5 skins eventually, however not all will make the cut because of the layout differences and petz palette limitations. Additionally, I've created 2 new playscenes for Petz 4 as well with plans to make more in the future! Enjoy this update! Downloads can be found over at my main page.

[magnoliaroad]

Spring Updates

Hi there - I've been away from the Petz community for a while but since I was participating in the Easter Egg hunt this year, I figured this would be a good opportunity to post about some updates that have been sitting around for a while but I haven't gotten around to publishing formally. I've added a huge Petz 5 Carrying case + doors update along with some old textures that I made a couple years back but just never published. Enjoy!

DOWNLOAD:

[magnoliaroad]

4 Seasons Back Yard Remodel + Crystal Yard

My 4 seasons remodels of the Petz 5 Back Yard are now available for download! And because I went on a bit of a side-quest, I’ve also made a bonus version, a fantasy, crystal back yard!

You can read my creator's notes below:

I somewhat wonder if it's fair to criticize the original Petz 5 playscenes too harshly. It's possible that the development team faced tight deadlines or budget constraints, factors that may not have been entirely within their control. However, regardless of the circumstances, the end result was a disappointingly sloppy product, and it's difficult to ignore some of the glaring flaws. While I can understand that the developers were working with dated software, there are certain flaws that can't be attributed to software limitations. Rather, they seem to reflect a clear lack of attention to detail. Here's what I mean.

The more you look at it, the harder it is to decide which flaw is the worst. The blatant MS paint spray paint "touch-up" in the upper left, that there was no effort put into blending in the skybox, or that they neglected to add textures to the roof.

Alright, enough ranting there. None of this is to say my playscenes are perfect either, but they were a labor of love and I hope that this is evident in the final results.

SPRING

I smoothed out the grass texture to give it a more velvety, manicured lawn appearance. I brightened up the dingy looking fence to a more brighter white. The original playscene had a hole in the fence, and while it might add "character", I opted to cover over it for a more polished look. I added bushes behind the fence to cover up the skybox and to conceal the bottom of the houses.

Speaking of houses. Wow these needed a big work-up. The texture work (or lack of) on these is just bad. I'm no expert in house construction, but even mostly-brick houses will have some accents like trims to break up the monotony of a fully-brick façade.

Because of how fuzzy the brick texture is in the original, I drew in the mortar lines of the bricks to enhance the texture. I added roof shingles, siding, and trim boards to the house to make it look more like a typical suburban house. Despite these edits, it's still not a "great" house - the way it looks through the windows, it looks like the house is one room lol. I wish I could put better houses in the backdrop but because Tinker doesn't allow me to edit the animated blinds, I'm constrained to keeping them the shape that they are. Oh well. We can use our imagination.

I added landscaping rocks to make the flower bed look nicer. I also added some landscaping details like bushes, garden lights, and string lights for ambiance.

[ Enlarged picture of the garden light I made ]

I also worked to improve the skyboxes in all 4 seasons of the of the Back Yard playscenes. It would be lengthy to get into the details of all that but here's a before and after of the night skybox. You got to love them high-quality MS paint stars in the original.

SUMMER

I had a hard time with the summer one because it was hard to come up with ways to make it look different from the spring version. I did make the grass, bushes, and tree leaves slightly more vibrant. Originally I had some flowers by the bushes but I just wasn't really happy with them. At the last minute, I made the decision to remove them entirely. This makes the playscene a little more "plain" but I think some people may want a more "plain", undecorated version so that they can dress it up how they want with toyz.

FALL

Fall is my favorite season, so this was a joy to make. I toned down the color of the grass and added fall landscaping motifs. Recoloring the tree's leaves was done by using Photoshop's gradient map feature. If time permits, I may do a tutorial on this in the future.

Gradient mapping is a powerful tool for recoloring almost anything. It can give way better results than methods such as hue/saturation, replace color, etc. And thanks to photoshop actions, applying this recolor to all the animation frames took just a couple of minutes.

Unfortunately, the fall leaves look "bright" in the nighttime version of the playscene. There does not seem to be a way to implement a darker version of these leaves for the nighttime playscene. If you look at the sprites in Tinker, you'll see that there are two sets of animations for Leaves A, B, and C and they're labeled "PropsAd" and "PropsAn", which would lead you to think that the developers originally intended for there to be a set of leaves for the day time, and a darker set for the night time. I guess the developers scrapped this idea because this does not work in the actual gameplay. When I experimented with this, the game appears to randomly display the nighttime sprite even during the day time, effectively ruining the intended affect. I'm not sure why the developers scrapped this. Either they had issues coding this properly or were just didn't want to put in the effort to make two sets of leaves.

WINTER

Instead of doing recolored leaves for this scene, I made all the leaves transparent and added holiday lighting to the tree. I know the lights aren't perfect - it was kind of hard to make out which direction a branch was going, so it has hard to maintain 'perfect' perspective.

CRYSTAL YARD

This is a bonus playscene that I made because I got a little side-tracked as I was working on the 4 seasons back yards. This is inspired by the Suramar zone from World of Warcraft, so it has a bit of that fantasy, night-elf feel and color scheme. It's been years since I've played WoW but I still appreciate the enchanting aesthetic of the elven zones.

I used gradient mapping again to recolor the leaves to give it this lavender, shimmery, iridescent look. I did a little bit of gaussian blurring and layer effects to make them look a little more "glowy" than the originals.

As before, Tinker won't let me edit the blinds, so it limited what edits I could do to the houses. I would love it if I could have done curtains instead or something. I did my best to make these houses look a little less suburban and more elven. It's not perfect but it was rough working with what I had.

KNOWN ISSUES / THINGS I COULDN'T EDIT

As far as I'm aware, there is no way to turn off the snow effect for seasons like summer where it wouldn't make sense. This probably involves some code-editing that is beyond my technical skillset.

The winter playscene still has the green grass footprint when your petz walk. The sprites for these are not housed within the .env itself but in the Petz 5 Rez.dll file. It would probably involve a bit of tweaking in the code to switch the sprites to something else.

The fall leaves are "bright" in the night time version because there is no way to implement a second, darker set of leaves.

I cannot edit the blinds animation. Tinker gives you an error when you try to edit this sprite. This unfortunately limits what edits I can make to the house and the fence because of where the sprite is positioned.

If anyone does know of solutions to these, do let me know as I'd love to enhance these scenes further!

ICONS

Making the icons for these was also a fun little project. For some odd reason though, the game puts a stray pixel over them when I import them through LnzPro. I did my best to disguise them but there does not seem to be a way to fix that.

BEFORE / AFTER

With all that rambling out of the way, visit my main page over at Magnolia Road > Resources > Playscenes to download the goodies!

[magnoliaroad]

Luxe Living Kitchen + Family Room

Hello friends! At long last, I am ready to publish two playscenes from my Petz 5 makeover project. The Luxe Kitchen and Luxe Living playscenes are now available for download. Be sure to check out my blog post below for a behind-the-scenes look at my creation process.

OVERALL AESTHETIC

In making these overhauls, I was going for a luxury living aesthetic featuring gold accents, neutral beiges, and a touch of rococo. Understandably, this may not be everyone's aesthetic! I have ideas for future themes such as cottage core/witch core, dark academia, Barbie, etc. Now that I have done the ground work of making a reusable PSD template of this playscene, making future variations will be much easier because I can quickly swap out the wallpaper, flooring, rug, etc.

KITCHEN

I don't have a lot of notes on the kitchen remodel as it was a relatively straight forward recolor. The window backyard backdrop was replaced with my remodeled version. I added a tile backsplash for a touch of realism. Various components like the sink and its handles were recolored to gold to go with the luxury living theme. The ugly curtains, orange floor, wallpaper, and yellow fridge are all replaced with a more toned-down, neutral look.

I spent the most amount of time cleaning up the curtain and the window sprites as these were poorly done in the original. If you look closely, you can see several pixel defects that never got cleaned up.

BEFORE / AFTER

FAMILY ROOM

Making over the family room was quite the project as it involved editing several animation sprites. Here are my notes on the different parts of the room.

RUG

I know that the rug's perspective is not 100% correct but when I tried to adjust it to better match the perspective of the room, the results were actually worse. Somehow, the "correct" perspective ruined the "cozy, intimate" ambience of the room. It's a little hard to explain but I hope this design choice isn't too immersion-breaking for most people.

FIREPLACE

The boring old red brick was replaced with something a bit more contemporary. Where the brick texture meets the golden grate, I had to edit the edge so that there is a mortar gap. I also edited the fireplace sprites to remove some ugly pixel halos that the original assets had.

MOUSE HOLES

I replaced the default mousehole covers with golden doors to match the Luxury Living theme because I thought our little mice friends deserved an upgrade too! Tremendous thanks to Reflet from the Petz Hacking and Modding discord for helping me figure out how to do this. If you're making a non-overwrite hexed family room, then changing the mouse holes requires an extra step in a hex editor - it isn't enough to just swap out the sprites in Tinker. If you would like to learn how to do this yourself for your own playscene creations, Reflet's solution is posted in the Petz Hacking and Modding discord.

WINDOW + WEATHER EFFECTS

Oh my glob this was a whole project in itself. I swapped out the outdated backyard backdrop with my remodeled versions. But this presented a problem. Replacing the window backdrop meant that I couldn't use the animated rain and snow sprites that came with the original family room. These weather effects were pre-rendered against the old backdrop, making them incompatible with my replacement backdrop. So this meant that I had to craft my own rain and snow effects from scratch, frame by frame. *eye twitch* But if we're being honest, the original weather effects weren't that great looking anyway. The rain is so faint and barely visible and the snow animation left much to be desired.

Moreover, it always bugged me to no end that the original weather animations do not extend to the bottom of the window. Whenever the window is open, there is a noticeable gap where the rain or snow animation abruptly ends. I'm baffled on how this passed quality control testing (or if was there any).

I corrected this in my version of the weather animation by adjusting the size of the animation to extend to the bottom of the window and then fixing the X and Y positioning coordinates of all the frames in Tinker so that the animation was seated in the right spot. (I used the selection tool in photoshop to measure that the window sprite needed to be seated 858 pixels along the X axis from the left, and 56 pixels down the y axis from the top). Additionally, the original window has this odd 2-3 pixel gap at the top of the window which I fixed in my version so that the window properly extends up to the curtain rod.

Unfortunately, I had to remove the window shine from my window frame recolors. For some reason when you import the images into Tinker, Tinker recolors partial transparency to black and ruins it. If anyone discovers a solution to this problem, please do let me know!

I managed to create the rain animation by using an old video effects software called Particle Illusion. I tweaked a pre-existing rain preset and then recorded my screen using Screen-to-Gif to capture the animation, making sure that the screen capture matched the exact pixel dimensions of the window.

I extracted the exact number of frames I needed, made it transparent, and created a layer mask on the left side of the canvas to account for curtain, which clips into the window slightly.

Then I exported these frames as individual pngs and then imported them into Tinker. Thank goodness for photoshop actions and batch editing for performing repeated actions, or else I would have lost my mind.

The snow animation was much more challenging because I couldn't find a good video effect animation I liked - and even if I did, making the animation loop flawlessly would have been nearly impossible. So I hand-made my own using an old school 2D animation technique known as "parallax scrolling". Basically how it works is that I created 3 "conveyor belt" layers of snowflakes, each with a seamless repeating pattern. These three conveyor belt layers would each move independently of each other at a different pace. Conveyor belt 1 would move down slowly at a pace of 1 pixel per frame. Conveyor belt 2 would move down a little faster at a pace of 2 pixels per frame, and conveyor belt 3 would move down the fastest at a rate of 5 pixels per frame. The multiple layers of snowflakes give off the illusion of depth, making it look like some snowflakes are farther away.

In order for this animation to loop seamlessly, I had to calculate (yes, super serious complex petz math) the dimensions of these conveyor belt layers to correspond with the pace at which they would be falling. If conveyor belt 1 was falling at a rate of 1 pixel per frame, my repeating snowflake pattern needed to be about 30 pixels tall because there were 30 frames. The fastest conveyor belt, conveyor belt 3, had to be a pattern that was 150 pixels tall because it would be moving at a pace of 5 pixels per frame over the course of 30 frames so 30 x 5 = 150 pixels.

Once I made these three separate patterns I copied and pasted them downward to make the "conveyor belts" that would move down the window over the lifespan of the animation.

To animate this, I would make a new frame and then I would move layer 1 down 1 pixels, layer 2 down 2 pixels and layer 3 down 5 pixels. Then I created another frame and repeated this again and again until I hit 30 frames. If I messed up anywhere (which I did), I would have to redo the entire animation. It took some experimenting to finally get it all looking correct and looping properly.

I decided to enhance the snow animation further by addressing a longstanding issue with Petz 5's weather effects. It always bothered me that it could be snowing in the game, yet the scenery remained unchanged to reflect the seasons. To improve this, I overlaid my completed snow animation onto the winter version of my backyard backdrop. Now, whenever it snows in the window, the scenery actually shifts to a wintery backdrop. I mean that would just make sense right? It speaks to the sloppy/rushed development for Petz 5 that they didn't make it this way from the get go. If a solo amateur like myself could do it in one weekend, I don't know why a team of developers couldn't. (If I am allowed to humbly toot my own horn for a moment and say so.)

BEFORE / AFTER

If you've made it this far, thank you for reading this! I hope this journal proves to be useful and inspiring for future petz content creators who may want to get into custom content creation and retro game modding. It's been such a therapeutic pet project and I'm looking forward to making more playscenes in the future. The next playscenes on the release radar will hopefully be my 4 seasons backyards. I am still finalizing those and hope to release those as soon as life allows. Thank you for patiently waiting, real life is hectic!

To download the Luxe Kitchen and Luxe Living playscenes, jump over to my main page at Magnolia Road - the download link is under Resources > Playscenes.

[magnoliaroad]

Magnolia Road is Moving + Exciting Projects!

Hi there - Rizu here! It's been about a year since I last posted an update here. Life got really busy and pulled me away from Petz. As life calmed down I had the itch to return to some unfinished petz projects! Here's a look at some of the things I've been working on. The major one being the launch of my new home - Magnolia Road on Neocities! Keep reading for more details!

When I first launched this tumblr blog, I wanted a platform that didn't require a whole lot of set-up to get started. While it has served its usefulness as my first home in the Petz community, I need more room for the amount of content that I'm planning on making.

So I've been quietly working on a complete website overhaul and it's been such a blast. I think it will serve me better as a home for my crew and petz content. For the foreseeable future I am planning on keeping this tumblr for long-form write-ups on Petz things.

Without further ado, check it out here.

Not everything on the website is finished but I've put the 'good enough' stamp on it for now. I'm looking forward to fleshing out the pages more with some exciting content.

On that note...

Projects!

Something that I've wanted to do for a while is to create more custom content for Petz 5. Though Petz 4 is the community favorite, I feel Petz 5 has a lot of nostalgic charm and a lot of potential for quality of life upgrades. Despite Petz 5's glitches and bugs, I've by and large have learned to live around them without too much trouble and largely prefer some aspects of Petz 5 over Petz 4, such as the expanded color palette for playscenes, weather, day/night cycles, being able to carry all the toyz with you, etc.

With the new content that I am working on, I hope to inspire some more love for Petz 5 and make it a more welcoming home for your Petz!

So what am I working on? I've been working on a MASSIVE rework of the Petz 5 playscenes. They are quite dated and an eye-store in some instances.

So here's a sneak peek of what I've got going so far. These are not finished yet so these may change a bit!

I'm going for a Luxury Living theme based off of neutral beiges, greys, and gold, with a touch of rococo. I've painstakingly fixed the window sprites (they're a pixelized mess in the original), replaced the garden backdrop with my renovated back yard (see below), and gave the night scene some gentle spot lighting. No more ugly orange floor and yellow fridge.

Continuing on the Luxury Living theme, the family room gets an upgrade.

This one definitely needs more work before it is done but here's my Cozy Cabin themed room.

I've always disliked the original snow scene in that all the trees look like lifeless lumpy snow blobs. I wanted to bring back some greenery and make the scene look more vibrant. I replaced the really bland skyboxes with more realistic skies, with the night scene featuring an aurora borealis.

Inspired by my love for Lilly Pulitzer prints, this beach remodel is a more colorful upgrade over the original. I've recolored the sand to look more like....sand and less like this weird ugly yellow sand the original had. I'm planning to make a daytime one as well.

Salon upgrade. This one is very incomplete, so expect this one to change a bit. The original dresser is so hideous that it's hard to make it look "better".

And finally, perhaps my pièce de résistance and my most time consuming overhaul was the backyard. The original looks so junky with its broken fence, muted colors, and lack of landscaping. It definitely needed some more life to it. I hope I achieved that with my 4 seasons remake of the back yard. To say it was a challenge is an understatement. I had to make 3 versions for EACH season. Day, night, and stormy versions. So 12 BMPs along with the edited leaf sprites. The fall leaves are not stills - they are recolors of the original animated sprites and move in the actual playscene! I was excited to be able to pull this one off and I'm happy with how it turned out.

And lastly I've reworked the Petz 5 carrying case skin with a template that makes it easy to come up with new carrying case skins quickly.

Here's just one of the many carrying case skins that I have planned. This one matches the pattern featured in the beach remodel.

And there you have it! These are all works in progress and I can't wait to share more updates with you all. As always, thank you for stopping by!

[magnoliaroad]

Ultimate Eye Chart

Struggled with finding the perfect iris/pupil combination for hexes?  Behold the behemoth eye chart.  

Choosing iris/pupil combinations for my hexes is one of the things that I get hung up on when designing a hex.  I find myself resigning to regular ol' black pupil + lighter iris combinations.  So it sparked the idea to make an eye chart of iris/pupil combinations to help generate new ideas for eye colors that one might not have ever thought to try.  It helped me to find some hidden gems and some new hexing ideas!

CHOOSING COLORS FOR THE CHART: I had to be selective about which colors I was going to include because....obviously I wasn't going to do all 255 colors (I value my sanity, however little of it I have left).  In any case, a lot of the colors were the same/similar.

HOW TO USE:

The chart is a bit...overwhelming and a little hard on the eyes - no pun intended! The PSD eye chart is meant to be interactable with layers that you can toggle on or off for ease of visibility.  The eyes are separated into their different components (Eyelid, pupil, iris, sclera, and outline).  You can recolor the eyelid, outline and sclera layers to match your hexing project.  I've also included some rulers to let you look at one row or column at a time (hold down shift while moving so it moves in a straight line).

The top most layer is a “curated filter” to black out “dud” combinations.  (The curated filter is by no means perfect.) The filter was geared toward finding "traditional" combinations where the iris is lighter and the pupil is darker. You might be thinking why I didn't just limit the pupils across the top to dark colors and irises along the side to light colors.  Unfortunately, that would've eliminated a lot of pretty pale colored eye combinations.

Given the size of the chart, it might be a task to obtain the color number.  If you can get a copy - I highly recommend using Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8.  I’m still using my OLD CD copy that I got when I was a kid.  If you apply the petz palette to your image you can obtain the number of the color just by hovering over it with the eyedropper.  

I hope this proves to be useful in some way! Maybe in the future I'll compile an "abridged" version but I've been staring at these eyes for long enough!

[ DOWNLOAD ]

[magnoliaroad]

Realistic Furs Texture Pack

At long last, I have compiled my long-awaited realistic furs into a public release download!  Thank you for being patient with me as I put this together.  Because I made a lot of these textures in a rapid flurry of experimenting - things got messy and I had to reorganize and re-index these. Please read my rules before using and feel free to share what you have created with me!  

Cheers to Magnolia, my hexed base that was the model for all of these textures.

Rules

- Please credit these textures back to Rizu or Magnolia Road wherever it is practical to do so.  

- Please do not remove my name credit from the texture file names.

- Do not modify, recolor, redistribute, claim as your own, resell, etc.

DOWNLOAD

[ DOWNLOAD ]

[magnoliaroad]

Lullaby Dreams Oshie

A pastel lullaby hex inspired by my love for celestial aesthetics!

I actually had the idea for this oshie a while ago but I didn't quite have enough hexing experience under my belt to make this come to fruition.  I dabbled around with some colors and textures and this just wasn't coming together as I had envisioned.  So I decided to put this project on the shelf and move on to other hexing ideas thinking that I would get back to this one later.    

As I was working on my birthstone calicos, I came across some tutorials on YouTube on how to create textures in photoshop such as "marble, goldfoil, etc"  While I was on that rabbit trail I came across a tutorial on how to create an aurora borealis effect.  I played around with that and struck gold with this one.  

I thought to myself that this would be perfect for my lullaby dreams oshie project.  And so I picked this project up again and it finally came together.  I haven't worked with addballz since my wolf project and wanted to stretch my legs with it again.  It wasn't exactly smooth sailing but I got the job done.  I also haven't done textured irises since my Nebula cat and wanted to incorporate that into this project.  

I was going to do more variations with this, including a "nightmare" themed one, but nothing was really working.   Maybe in the future I'll revisit this project and add more variations as I develop more textures/ideas.  That’s it for now!

[magnoliaroad]

Royal Luxe Birthstone Calicos

Glitter catz....because why not?  Read on for more pictures and thoughts!

When I first started this project, I didn’t originally set out to make all twelve birthstones.  The original concept was to make “luxury” catz based off of materials often associated with luxury decor or jewelry:  abstract alcohol ink paintings, geodes, crystals, gemstones, marble textures, gold foil, etc.  As the project ventured into gemstone territory it sparked the idea to do the rest of the birthstone calendar.

Carmin was made after I made the ruby birthstone.  With ruby and garnet being so similar, it was tricky to make the garnet texture look a bit different from Ruby.  If you look closely there’s a hint more “pink/magenta” to it than the ruby one.

More purple catz.  I think I have the purple color down pat now.  

I’ve been working on a set of “snow/ice” textures and ended up pulling from that collection to make this aquamarine birthstone.

I knew diamond was going to be a challenge.  This was as good as I could get it.  

Emeralds have never really been a favorite gemstone of mine but Emily has made them grow on me a little bit.

June has 3 official birthstones: pearl, moonstone, and alexandrite.  Having failed to achieve pearl and moonstone, I went with alexandrite.  I named her Alexandra. *slow clap*

This one came along without much difficulty.  The petz palette seems to be fairly forgiving of reds.

Sincerest apologies to my fellow August-born comrades - the petz palette hates green.  I really seem to struggle more with greens than with purples - which is weird when you consider that the petz palette has more greens to work with than purple. 

Didn’t have too much trouble with this one but blues can still be tricky as they can come out more “vibrant” than intended.

Went for a blush / pink quartz look here.

My only lingering critique with November is that there isn’t that much of a difference between the orange textures. I just didn’t want anything to be too yellow or too brown.  

This one is a little different than the others in that it doesn’t use the gold glitter texture that the other ones have.  It resulted in a more matte but metallic look that worked well with turquoise.

I don’t know if anyone else grew up reading the children’s book series “The Jewel Kingdom” by Jahnna N. Malcolm but these four birthstones in particular were named after the jewel princesses, Roxanne, Sabrina, Emily, and Demetra.

These last two are not part of the birthstone calendar but are part of the original "luxury" concept. This pink one was actually the first one I made in this whole collection.  

Same thing here - another one I made before I turned this into a birthstone project.  I was going for a luxury marble look.

That’s it for now.  I was going to try to include some gifs because you really can’t appreciate the glitter effect of these textures without seeing them in motion.  However, I struggled to capture any and in any case, this ended up being quite a vertical blog as it is.    

As always, thanks for stopping by!

[magnoliaroad]

Lilac Catz

Because one purple cat isn’t enough.  Read on for more pictures and ramblings!

I think I might’ve found my hexing niche with my signature purple catz.  My first one started with my first hex, Nebula.  Since then it’s been fun trying to see what else I could do with purple.  (To be fair, I know a lot of these purples aren’t “really” purples but rather greys/pinks/blues with the dithered “illusion” of purple.)

Before there was the lilac siamese, I made a normal colored version by tweaking the OG siamese a little bit.  I thought he turned out cute on his own and named him Marcel :) 

Bonus picture of both of them doing their special pose at the same time!  I’m not great at taking petz pictures so I thought this was a lucky shot!

This may be more pinkish than purple but there’s some purple undertones that might be hard to see from a still shot.  I really liked the texture for this one.  I feel it matches the original mottled look of the oshie.  There’s even a bit of a moonstone-like iridescent blue sheen to it when she moves around.

Had my work cut out for me with this one.  To make my own version of the tabby, I essentially had to recreate all the textures.  There was something familiar looking about this hex - then I realized it looked like my 1997 silver tabby Beanie Baby - Prance!  I added blue eyes and pink whiskers to complete the look!

The pictures don’t do this one justice.  When this texture moves around there’s subtle pinks that come in and out of view and it’s a really neat effect.  This texture effect worked best as a “full-body” texture so the persian was the best breed to use this one on.

Hands down, the calico was a blast to make.  It was just so much fun to take the collection of lilac textures that I made and just swap them in and out to create a variety of calico looks.

A variation leaning more towards the blue side.

A coloration reminiscent of my Rosaline hex with pinks and greys.

I’m in love with how this one turned out.  The hot pink spots just made this one pop.  I thought the spots looked like rose petals.  So I named her Rose ;) Original, I know.

That’s it for now!  I was going to do the other breeds (B+W Shorthair, Russian Blue, etc) but it was bit much to do.  Maybe in the future I’ll do another round of these.

[magnoliaroad]

Fantasy Furs + Future Plans/FAQ

In my last blog post I shared some of the realistic furs I had been making.  I’ve also been dabbling with some fantasy furs as well!  Read on for more pictures + future site plans.

Once you start making textures, it’s hard NOT to experiment.  As I said in my last blog, one happy accident leads to another and before you know it....you have like a bajillion textures.  As I was making some of my realistic textures, sometimes the process would rabbit-trail off into “fantasy” fur territory.  I wanted to play around with a few themes - iridescent, rainbow, icy, stormy, sunset, etc .  

Yes - I know these are suuuuper “dithery” but they actually look much better in game when the pet is in “motion”.   It’s the still shots that make some of them look super pixelated.   (I am determined to beat the petz palette at it’s own game ;P)

Lastly, I wanted to briefly go over some future site plans as I’ve had a few people ask me some questions.  Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to comment with your kind words!  I do see them even if I can’t get back to them!

Will any of these textures be available for public release?

Hopefully in the not-too-distant future, I do want to offer resources to download.  If time permits - I might even write up a tutorial on some techniques that have resulted in fun textures.  There are a few hold-ups.  Reason #1 - I may need to rethink tumblr as my site platform because I’m already hitting limitations with what I want to share on here.  It’s already getting a bit cramped.  Reason #2 - A lot of these fur files are in big messy folders mixed with “duds/reject” textures that didn’t work out.  It’ll take some time to compile a curated collection and retest some of them - (some of them weren’t properly formatted/indexed and so they may not work properly in people’s games)

Will any of your hexed creations be available for adoption/trade/etc?

Possibly for certain ones, yes! I have a lot of questions about how adoptions/trading “works” in the petz community.  I’m not new to petz but I am new to hexing and the petz community so there are some things I want to figure out before I’m ready to do some adoptions!  I’ll definitely share when something becomes available <3!  

[magnoliaroad]

Magnolia Catz - A Texture Journey

My experiments with creating “realistic” fur textures for Petz.

There’s just something classic about an orange and white tabby. 

Out of a happy accident this silver tabby came out with some interesting colors. There’s a little bit of blue and cream mixed in there that gives it some personality.

I think mackerel tabbies are cute!  It might be hard to see from the pictures but I paintballed a thin dark stripe along its back and tail for that extra touch of realism.

Tortoiseshells/Calicos are another favorite of mine.  This one took a good bit of experimenting.  Every texture I tried showed up in the game looking too orange, too brown, too black, too dark, too light, etc.  

This one had 5 textures for different parts of the body.  If you look at a real bengal, the spots transition to stripes at certain parts of the body.  I know the coloring is not perfectly like a real bengal’s, but the petz palette was giving me a lot of grief :(

Couldn’t resist sharing this gif of Artemis being cute.  

This one sorta teeters on the edge of a “fantasy” fur because it’s slightly purple.  Nonetheless there are “lilac” cats that sort of have that mauve, rosy grey hue to them.  

I had a lot of fun creating these textures.  It was a little addicting!  As I was making each one, I kept tweaking things and one happy accident lead to another.  There’s too many to share - here’s some of my favorites that I hope to use for future hexes!  So many ideas - so little time.  Until next time!

[magnoliaroad]

The Wolf Pack

I’ve always wanted a wolf pack for my game and I set out to do just that!  Read on for more pictures of my wolf pack and progress pictures.

So I’ve been hexing for about two weeks now and thus far my creations have mainly been minor body modifications + texturing/recoloring.  This is my first project working with addballz and it was quite the journey!

 It’s hard to pick favorites, but out of all of them, I like that Lana perhaps is the most petzy looking one.  Sure it was fun to work with textures, but there’s something special about working with what the game already has.

Nonetheless, I did venture into texture territory with Kita. I had been designing some “realistic” fur textures in photoshop and I’m glad I was able to try them out on a hex project.  (Hopefully in another post I’ll go more into my adventures with textures)  

For wolves that are solid colors, you would think that these would’ve been a quick variation to hex but I was stumped on these for a bit - mainly with the eye colors.  I ended up just sticking with the same blue eyes for Archer and Kaya.

Ayla was a fun one to create.  I knew from the get-go that I wanted a cream colored wolf.  Once again the eye colors were tricky - it was hard to find something that was “matchy”.  

This one gives me the ‘big bad wolf’ vibe.  I thought it would be fitting to name him Havoc.  

Speaking of ‘big bad wolves’ - I love that they look especially ‘wolfish’ when they are angry!  It was hard to capture these shots as they don’t make this face very often!

Despite their wolfish appearance, they’re very sweet. On the inside they’re just puppies ;)

My wolf hex had very humble beginnings.  I started from scratch from a Great Dane and floofed up the body just about everywhere. I never realized how long the Great Dane’s tail was - I omitted some tail balls to make it easier to work with.

After quite a bit of tweaking I finally got the general “muscular/floofy shape” I was going for.  I added a couple of addballs for the white cheek fluffs and also worked on the claws.  The wolf was still looking a bit bare though.  This is where this project really got fun (eye twitch) with the adding of the spiky “fur tufts’.

My first attempt at adding tail fluffs didn’t look so hot.  With some experimenting I finally found a style that worked.  Recoloring the balls definitely helped me keep track of where I was working and which addballz I was connecting where.

After finishing the tail I made some final tweaks before I felt ready to call it a ‘wolf base’.  After that I played around with paintballing, texturing, recoloring, etc to achieve the different variations.

There are definitely some imperfections - even as I write this I’m seeing more ‘flaws’ that I didn’t catch while hexing.  Hopefully with time these things will smooth out as I get more practice!  I may add more variations in the future, but for now I think I’ve looked at this project for long enough!  I think it’s time to take a break and go back to hexing some catz. 

I want to thank the petz community for all the helpful tutorials that you all have put out there.  Especially Hexpedia - which I referenced heavily for this project! Also - a huge shoutout to the friendly folks over at the Petzcord discord for helping me with my newbie hexer questions!  

As always, I look forward to sharing more in the future - thanks for stopping by!

[magnoliaroad]

Valentine’s Oshies

My little trio of Valentine’s Day oshies! 

I’ve been seeing some really cute Valentine’s Day themed hexes in the Petz community lately and I felt inspired to make a set of my own!

Rosaline was the first one I made in the set.  I’ve always really liked the pink and grey color combination and had fun with it here!

Black and pink is, of course, also a really fun mix.  I think Annalise here would agree.

I didn’t know if I was going to be able to pull off a “red” kitty but I like how Ruby turned out!

I think Oshies are starting to grow on me a bit.  I’ll admit that they were a breed I haven’t previously given a lot of love.  How fitting that these Valentines kitties would make me fall in love with Oshies <3