Intro
Lots of FM players, seasoned or new, like to have graphics in their game; it gives it a sense of quality and realism. There are several types of graphics to improve your game: logos, skins, and kits. Logos and skins are pretty easy to put in, but kits are a bit more difficult. If you’re skilled with Photoshop, you can even create your own kits based off templates or from scratch.Today we’ll be giving you a tutorial on how to create your own kits with the use of templates. If you have some basic knowledge of Photoshop, you’re good to go as the only thing you have to do is mix and match and change the colours of several layers. The screenshots you will see are from Photoshop CC, but the process will be similar whatever version you use. We will also be using Windows 7 for this tutorial.
Templates, Styles & Where to get them:
Templates are what you use to make the kits in Photoshop. It comes with the shape of the shirt and the texture to make them realistic. There are many different styles of templates which all have different shirt shapes and textures: FC12, SS, LS, 3D Kits, FBKits, tSS and RK. Below are some examples of each type.The most popular one is the SS style, which is the default style you see in-game. To get these templates, you download them off the forums at FM-View, which can be found here. A new style that is becoming popular fast is FC12. You can grab templates for that on our forums here.
Once you have downloaded them and extracted the file, you are ready to get making! In the pack you have downloaded, there are thousands of kits for the current season and seasons gone past, to give you the complete freedom of doing what you like, and letting your creative juices flow. They are sorted alphabetically in manufactures, and include huge collections of Nike and Adidas kits.
Layers:
Once you have loaded up one of the .psd files that are in the folder you’ve just downloaded, you’ll be presented with a white, empty shirt. There are however, lots of folders in your layer bar (bottom right), you can make one of them visible by clicking on the greyed out eye to the left of the folder, this will make the eye more visible and it’ll reveal the design of the template you’ve clicked on.But, you don’t actually have to individually go through every single one of these until you find a nice template. In the folder where you can also find the .psd files, there is a picture of every available kit from a specific manufacturer in basic colours. For example, if you have selected an Adidas .psd file, you can see how every kit looks in the pictures surrounding the .psd file.
Changing Colours:
When you’ve selected a template that you like, you can open the folder and you’ll see three more folders: collar, logos, design. We’ll start by looking at the collar map, here you’ll see the actual parts that make up the kit. There are several of small parts of the kit that can be edited individually. The colour of the collar is probably not to your liking just yet, to change this you’ll have to edit all of the parts individually. The way you do this is as follows:1. Right-click on the part of the collar you want to edit.
2. At the top of the list that now pops up, you can see “Blending options…”, click on it.
3. Now you’ll see a pop-up. On the left hand side there’s a menu, click on the header that says “Colour overlay”.
4. From here you can select your colour by clicking on the coloured box in this menu. If you’re not familiar with all the codes, you can copy a HTML colour code (for example: BD2F2F) from this very useful site: HTML codes.
Mixing Templates:
You might have found the perfect template, but you don’t like the collar or the design. This can be solved easily by mixing and matching several templates. By smartly making use of the (in)visibility of several layers, you can make your kit have the design of one template, and the collar of another. This is how you can make your perfect template:1. Make the two (or more) templates you want to mix visible by clicking on the eye.
2. This will cause three templates to overlay each other, so make all the parts you don’t want in your kit invisible. For example, I have template A which has a neat collar and I have template B which has a nice design. Now, deselect “design” from A, and deselect “collar” from B. You’ll also have to deselect one of the two “logo” maps, because these will also overlap.
3. Now, colour in the two templates to your liking as was explained in the previous part of this article.
4. If parts of one template are overlaying the other, adjust the order in which the two selected templates are in. To do this, drag the lowest map above the highest map with your left mouse button. This also works if you have more than two templates selected, just fiddle around with them until you have found the right order.
Putting On Images:
Now you have made your kits using various colours, templates and layers, you need to add logos and sponsors to make the kits as realistic as possible! The logo of the kit manufacturer is already on the kit, but you could change this. If you were making the kit out of a Puma template and wanted it to be a Nike kit for example, all you have to do is open up a Nike Photoshop file, open the folder of a template inside Photoshop and then right-click on the folder that is titled ‘Logos’ and duplicate the group to the other Photoshop file, as shown below. You then go back to the original file, and click on the eye symbol of the other logo folder, and it will simply hide them.Now, you need a club crest. We are making a kit for Chelsea, so you want the Chelsea logo. On Google Images, search Chelsea Logo and copy one with a simple background. Now, flick back to Photoshop and hit Ctrl+V to paste the image. Now you need to select the background remover tool, called the Magic Wand, which looks like this:
Once you have this tool selected, you need to click on the background and it will appear like this:
Then click the inside any letters that have holes in the middle and repeat the steps. To resize, hit Ctrl+T and use the squares, while holding shift, which keeps the image in proportion, to resize.
Adding them to your Game:
Now you have made your fabulous kits, you need to add them into your game. For starters, you need to know the teams unique ID. You can find them by going to Preferences screen in-game and ticking the "Show Unique ID" option. Once you have found this, follow this guide by our own or.dabool (ignore the bit about the Unique ID as you have already done that). Once you have done everything on the guide, go to documents>sports interactive>football manager 2015. Inside there create a folder called graphics. Then inside that, create one called kits. Now, copy and paste the folder with the kits and config file inside into that folder.Now you need to put them in game. To do this, launch up FM15, go to preferences, and then interface. Unclick the box saying 'Use caching to decrease page loading times' and click the box saying 'Reload skin when confirming changes in Preferences'. Then click confirm, and your kit should be in game!