Tutorial for team creation using CM07

[mrliioadin]

Rinaldo has made an incredible editing tool offering it's users amazing access to our game. To my knowledge no one has to this point made a tutorial to teach people step by step use for creating a team so this is my attempt to help new users better understand it. As well I'll add in comments about the rules of team creation such as how to go about using someone elses work.

I hope this helps.

I'm creating Israel tonight. I will walk you through my creation of this team and try to break things down to their most basic level.

Here's how we start:

This is the starting screen of CM07

Select File then "select lang.db"

Select the appropriate database for your native language. I'm american, I speak english, so I choose English. My good friend August (beibrich) would select German.

Be patient while it loads. Don't try to interupt it you'll just slow it down.

This is the CM07 Main Screen. It is under the "Countries" tab as a default.

Select the "Teams" tab.

Then click the dropdown menu next to FILTERS: select BY LEAGUE and in the next dropdown menu select the league you wish your team to be in.

For my purpose Israel participates in the UEFA Confederation so I selected my UEFA League (which is one I created previously).

If you need to learn how to make a league: Just hit the green plus sign in the "Leagues" tab and fill in the Database name, and other information. You can make your logos, or ask someone to make them for you.

Anyway. Once you select which league you want your team in you'll click the green plus sign to create the new team:

It will pop up a new window that wants to know whether you want to A) Create the players that will fill your team from scratch, or transfer existing players from the FIFA database onto your team.

If your players aren't already in the game (which in many cases they are not, though some national teams do have many of their players available for you) you would select YES, and the program would create 16 basic players for you that fill all of the positional needs your team will have. You may add additional players later if you wish by transfering or creating them from scratch.

I am making Israel ,obviously, who has a few players already in the game. I chose not to allow CM to create the players for me so that I could walk you through how to add more.

Ok first. Logos.

Logo making in itself is a bit of an art. you can have varying degrees of quality in your logos depending on exactly how it's done. I consider myself a fair logo maker personally. At present I use paint shop pro photo XI which has a free 30 day trial available online. You can purchase the full version from them for $120 or something like that, or you can go to Ebay and get it for $30 in most cases. Mine was brand new and sealed.

For the Israeli Team I have a few options. I can use the federation logo or the national flag. To remain consistent with the other teams I've created I'll make the federation logo.

If you have paint shop pro this portion should be helpful to new users. if you don't .... ignore it, you can use other programs with better or worse results. I'de suggest trying the trial version of PSP and seeing if you like it.

Here's how we'll start. Open internet explorer, go to wikipedia.org then search for the team you're looking to edit. If you can't find them it sometimes helps to go to the league they participate in and try to find a link that way. There is always a chance that the team you wish to create will not be found on wikipedia. At that point, finding a logo to use as a basis is a little difficult. You've got to search the net extensively and I can do nothing more to help you than to wish you luck. You will not have an issue finding national teams logos, though some of them are small.

Anyway on wikipedia's page with your team open. Click their logo

Click the link below the picture for the highest resolution picture available. Sometimes there is no increase in quality or size.

You want the biggest logo possible with the best quality 90% of the time sometimes downsizing a very very large image to make a very very small logo doesn't work out the best. Though small logos are quite tricky anyway.

To continue. You should now be on this page.

I'm out of images for this page. It will continue in the next post.


PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS POST YET.
PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS POST YET.
PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS POST YET.
PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS POST YET.
PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS POST YET.

 

[mrliioadin]

THIS IS A CONTINUATION OF THE FIRST POST

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Right click on the image above and COPY it.

Now open Paint shop pro and PASTE IT using Control V. if this doesnt work go into EDIT and select PASTE AS A NEW IMAGE.

This will post the image in it's origional size as a single layer.

Now hit SHIFT S to resize the image. It will bring up this window.

The sizes in this picture are wrong. You need to resize your image to 128x128. if you ever resize the height and the width changes automatically... deselect the button at the bottom that says "Lock Aspect Ratio" that's trying to keep the relative size of the image equal at all times. Meaning if I had a square that was 16x32feet. and I wanted it to be 2 feet tall, it would automatically make it 4 feet wide. If that didn't make sense, don't worry about it, it's not all that important.

After you resize your image to 128x128:

Hit <CONTROL+N> to open this window.

You need another image at 128x128 with a transparent background... make sure you have RASTER background selected and you should be in rgb 8 bits as the color depth.

Also make sure you have selected TRANSPARENT as the color.

hit ok.

it should give you an image that looks like this:

That checkerboard pattern indicates a transparent background. that pattern will not be seen once your image is saved and only serves to differentiate between a transparent and a white background (or some other solid color).

As a short cut you can hit <Control TAB> to toggle between all images within paintshop pro, much like <Alt Tab> works toggling through different opened programs. <Control Tab> will work in many other programs as well including CM07.

Now we have 2 images. One is our 128x128 Israeli Federation Logo. The other is 128x128 Transparent images.....

There are two types of Logos in FIFA07. GUI(menu) Logos and Game logos. We're going to start with our Game Logo.

First we need to decide if the image we have is ready to go or not. Rarely do you find an image completely perfectly set up for FIFA. Normally you have to snip some edges to get things working properly.

My Israeli Logo is not quite done yet.

First I do not want all of that white around the logo to show up in game. It matters a lot less for the Game logo but we are using the same image for the GUI logo so we'll go ahead and fix this problem now.

Without fixing this it would probably look something like this:

So here's what we need to do. Take the origional 128x128 image of our FA logo and select the MAGIC WAND TOOL shown below:

now we need to select the white around the image itself so that we can delete it. Click on the first of the four sections. then hold <SHIFT> and click the other three. this will give you four selected sections on this particular image. I'de suggest somewhere around 20 as a tolerance setting which is adjustable in the magic wand tool bar now at the top of your PSP window. Perseptual is in most cases the best selection mode in my experience though sometimes the others will work better for you.

You're image should look like this:

Now we need to make a new Raster layer. Raster layers can be colored in. in many cases when you see a continuous texture or color you're looking at a raster layer. this is in contrast to Vector layers which typically indicate you have drawn lines curves and smaller components. And again you cannot color in vector layers you will have to convert them to RASTER first.

To make a raster layer:

Click the small icon circled in red on the right to bring up the window on the left. If this does not give you a raster layer, simply click the dropdown menu next to the icon and select "New Raster Layer"

Your layer window should look like this:

Right click on the new raster layer and select PROMOTE TO BACKGROUND LAYER:

 

[mrliioadin]

Now left click and HOLD on the raster image and drag it underneath the origional image. Your layer window should now look like this:

now. Click the raster layer that contains the Logo. and hit Delete. If you still have all four of your sections selected that surrounded your image they should have been removed and the image will now look like this:

Now one other pesky little problem. It has to do with WHITE on logos. Any White on your logo that is perfect white (Red=255, Blue=255, Green=255) will be transparent in game. As it happens they fixed this problem when they created the israeli logo that i'm using currently and converted the white to Red=255, Blue=253, Green=255. If you come across any white in your images, try to select them using the Magic Wand Tool, and then FILL them in with an extremely slight off white. such as making the red green or blue 254. If you are confused about this let me know I'll go into more detail.

NOW we have one image that is 128x128 and we've removed the crap around it to avoid having any issues once we make our GUI Logo.

You can save this image as your Game logo now (PNG or BMP format):

To make your Gui Logo. Hit <Shift S> and resize your image to 94x94 (or something close, 96 high is too high) go to edit and copy or just hit <Control C> on your game logo.

Use <Control Tab> to toggle over to your empty 128x128 transparent image.

Hit <Control L> to PASTE AS A NEW IMAGE

Hit <K> to select your PICK TOOL.

Position your image in the upper left corner and use your Arrow keys to move it down 2-4 pixel rows, and over a few as well. Getting it perfectly positioned is never easy, it's a lot of trial and error. You should now have this:

This is a finished GUI logo and you can now save it.

Open Creation master. Go to your teams page, (if it's not still open)

Click on the Generic Tab. Click the load tab under the GUI Logo window. Load your Gui Logo:

Click the Assets tab and do that same for the Game logo (PNG or BMP format):

Your logos should now be loaded properly.

As a note I made my logos slightly differently to improve the quality. The process is complicated enough I really just wanted to get you guys started so that you can continue learning on your own. If you are really having trouble with a logo let me know I can give it a shot and see if I can improve the quality of it at all or possibly provide some examples of changes I've made to other logos as examples for issues that may present themselves.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm taking a short break I will finish this tutorial in a bit...again PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS POST YET.

 

[mrliioadin]

Fill in the rest of the information on the generic Tab. the database name, Full name, Standard Name. Short name should be just a few letters. For the national teams I use the FIFA trigramme assigned to them.

On the rosters tab you want to make sure that if you are selecting players already in the game that you be sure to select the "exclude young players" checkbox. if you have youth players on your rosters your careers will not function properly. crashing after season 2.

If you choose to Transfer players they will be removed from their origional team. If you choose to CALL players (as is the case for national teams). they will play for both teams.

Do not exceed 27 players for a national team, the team will crash.

ON THE FORMATION TAB. Always change the formation for your team at least once. If 4-4-2 is the default change it then change it back if that's the formation you want. This just helps CM07 read it properly so that you can edit it easily.

ON THE KITS TAB:

Highlighted in red are the checkboxes to determine which kits you are going to import. I cannot give you a quick and easy tutorial for kit making... to start with I would just import other users kits. IF YOU PLAN ON PUBLISHING YOUR TEAM (making it available for other users) you absolutely MUST get permission from the kitmaker to use his or her work.

if you want to import a home kit click the tab next to the home kit. then click load on the window i've circled in PURPLE.

Your kit must be in 07 format in either 1gk or 2gk format. if you get it from a user who made their kit for fifa 07 this shouldn't be much of an issue.

Most users make minikits with their kits. if yours did not you'll have to aquire them somehow. Making them is a possibility. If you have any of my teams you can export the generic minikit I used, then reimport it for your use. I'll go into more detail about how to do that soon.

the other portions i've circled in the kit window must be edited as well, these should be pretty straight forward.

under the assets tab I would stay with generic flags, stay with 1 for the adboards ID. 1 for the ball will all work fine. You can change balls and adboards if you like it should be fine.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

EDIT --- ADDITION ---

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Let's talk about kits for a sec. I'm not kitmaker... I tried my hand and it was quite fun. And if I must I can throw together a quick one just to serve my needs. But I think given the amount of interest in very basic kit making, people should have a tutorial that will show them how to get started from page 1 as if they knew nothing.

I'll show you where to find your textures and how to color the kit using paint shop pro. using the techniques mentioned above, you can resize your logos in a different image, trim the fat (all the crap out to either side), and then copy and PASTE AS A NEW LAYER your logos as you see fit.

Click HERE then SAVE PICTURE AS to obtain one of sundsvalls kit textures.

After you have saved, open that texture.

You should be here:

Now select the box i've circled all the way on the right to create a new raster layer... It will open with window circled on the left.... Make sure that you set the BLEND MODE to MULTIPLY....

Now the layer window circled in orange below should look like mine. now you can select the FILL tool (circled in blue with many blue arrows pointing to it).

Below you will see the MATERIALS window circled in black... and the color selection box is circled in green. Set the box i've circled to the color you want.

Now left click on the picture and it should look like this:

NOTICE that in my layer window (circled in light orange on the right) that the top layer is a solid green and the bottom layer remains the texture. when you save this image to bitmap or PNG format it will merge these layers down and changes will be impossible. to avoid your kits twice, once as a PSP image that you can revert to later for editing. and once as a bmp or PNG format.

I'll go into more details giving you information on how to draw your lines and some of the other features rules and tools at a later time, but you should have enough here to begin kit making.

DO NOT LET ANYONE (including yourself) TELL YOU THEY ARE NOT GOOD ENOUGH.

everyone starts somewhere and we need more kitmakers... ALWAYS!

Start by making small teams no one else has made, that will mean that when you or other users make these teams the only kit available is yours. it gets your kits out there, they will get critiqued and you will gain confidence knowing people are playing the game watching their players score crazy wicked bicycle kick goals from 25 yards out in your kit.

Curswine has made many advanced kit making tutorials in the kit makers resource thread check those out when you get a little better.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



I'm going to stop there for now. I understand this could be in much greater detail and I plan to expand on it as well, hopefully other users can add their two cents about how to create some portion of a team with better quality. For instance, Makispla might be willing to teach how to make flags. I'm hoping to get a basic basic kit making tutorial written up as well.

I guess I consider my forte to be logos so I spent the most time there.

Like I said I'm not done with this I consider it to be a wrok in progress. I hope this thread becomes a thread full of questions and mini tutorials, suggestions and helpful hints.

I will, as I promise, go back and add to this tutorial to make it clearer where it is a bit gray.

Good luck guys, PLEASE ASK A LOT OF QUESTIONS.

 

[mrliioadin]

You can respond now if you choose. Thank you a ton for your patience.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

EDIT -- HINT -- Logo making

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hey, I just wanted to tell you guys, any logo you are doing that has a crest or is circular or in some way enclosed... to avoid major delapitation of your circle or crest... select RESAMPLE USING: BICUBIC

try it with pixel resize once and you'll see the difference. I believe BICUBIC is the default setting in PSP but I could be mistaken.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Edit - Addition - Hint

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



I've run into a problem recently where I will go to resize a logo and the RESAMPLE USING button is greyed out... the only option is to use Pixel Resize. I only recently figured out why. What's happening is for some reason when I paste the image from Internet explorer it is pasting it in 8bit pixel depth format... to use Bicubic resize you have to have it in I believe RGB 16bits/Channel. To change the pixel depth just go to IMAGE -- INCREASE COLOR DEPTH -- SELECT 16 bits per channel.

Then you can resize as needed.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now one other pesky little problem. It has to do with WHITE on logos. Any White on your logo that is perfect white (Red=255, Blue=255, Green=255) will be transparent in game.

It appears that this doesn't always happen... It may have something to do with the bit depth for the image you import or some other detail I haven't thought of but it looks like this isn' the norm as I thought it was.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I wanted to add a bit here about what specifically each section of the CM does, in the teams tab. We'll start on the first tab: GENERAL.

GENERIC TAB

We've already discussed how to make logos so that should have ya covered as far as what you need for the GUI logo section.

LEAGUE - Whatever league your team is in, it's logo will appear here. If you see no logo, you either don't have a logo for the assigned league or the far more likely scenario, the team isn't assigned to a league. Click the leagues tab in the upper left of the CM screen. go to add... scroll until you see your team then click add.

Team ID - The team ID isn't editable in CM. It is attatched for various things in the Zdatas including logos. In theory (don't try this) If you make five new teams, import logos for each, you can delete them all... make them again and the logos will still be there in the order you assigned them. So team ID 1 will always have Arsenal Logos unless you reassign them.

DATABASE NAME - doesn't actually appear in the game anywhere to my knowledge

FULL and Standard name - appear in the game anytime you see the name as a whole but I'm not sure which does which. I would use the teams entire name here

Short Name - this fits in the score display in game and the fixtures page in tournament mode and manager mode. Nomally want to keep it to a few letters... USA for United States ... Mex for Mexico.

GUI BANNERS - only appear in Manager mode as far as I can tell. I think they are required for use with a team in manager mode. Without it the league crashes. (REQUIRES MORE RESEARCH). Gui Banners are 512x64 ... I'de make a 512x64 black image and import that as a generic for all teams. But you can put some work into making it look good if you like.

DOMESTIC PRESTIGE - is the prestige a team has within it's own country's league system.

INTERNATIONAL PRESTIGE - is the prestige teams have when competing in tournaments like the Champions League CONCACAF or UEFA w/e. Or the World Club Championship.

OVERALL - Stands for the overall ability a team has. I have not seen this effect anything in the game in anyway so far but I'm sure it does. I would set it equal to the CHEMISTRY.

CHEMISTRY - is our overall team chemistry, It affects how well our players play together.

STADIUM - is a teams home stadium. I often just use the generics.

TRAINING STADIUM - you should only have two choices unless you added more... Urban or Rural.

LANGUAGE - The primary language of the country the team is in. I have not seen this affect anything significant in game yet.

OPPONENT TEAM - Is your rival. You'll see increased ticket sales in manager mode for rival matches. I believe the momentum in Rival Matches swings more... Mexico vs USA would be a rivalry for example.

INITIAL BUDGET - is the amount of money your team starts with at the bigging of your first season. I believe this is in US Dollars.

HOME CROWD SIZE - will affect your ticket sales and attendance. You only have a few options.

COUNTRY - is the country your team is playing in or is from. If your roster is empty or all of the players on the team are from the same country, you will have the option of making it a national team.

IS THE NATIONAL TEAM - In theory you can only set one team as the national team for each country. Due to a common bug if you set several national teams at once you could get several teams listed as the same national team. 4 Vanuatu national teams for example. If you set a national team, save right away before you do anything else. There is very little value to setting a team as a national team however if you put them in the "International League" and there are several players from that country in the game, you can use the international selections window which is a nice feature.

SIGN YOUTH PLAYERS - Is where your team will look to recruit from for it's youth programs. You can do a Primary, Secondary, Tertiary.

TEAM COLORS - doesn't appear anywhere to my knowledge... but you can pick two primary colors from the kits.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ROSTERS TAB

This is where you transfer players to and from your roster. It is very self explanitory. You can easily change the jersey numbers, Contract expirations (for the player's first contract in manager mode), as well as the easy transfers from different players on and off your team.

It is good to, when searching for players to ADD to your team, hit the EXCLUDE YOUNG PLAYERS button. If you have any YOUTH players on your team (Player ID 400,000 or higher) your careers will CRASH after the first season.

If you want to TRANSFER a player off of your team and onto another, go to filter, select BY TEAM find the team you want to transfer to.

You can transfer players from that team to yours as well. If you TRANSFER a player he will be removed from the origional team.

LETTING A PLAYER FREE, removed them from the team they are on. If this is their only team they will become a free agent.

CALLING a player will add him to your team, he will remain on any other teams he is currently on. This is idea for national teams... They remain on their club team but participate with the Nats as well.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

FORMATIONS TAB:

This is where you play with your tactics. STARTING with formation itself.

FORMATION is listed with DEFENDERS then MIDFIELDERS then STRIKERS. The goalkeeper is assumed always. Thus a 4-4-2 is a goalkeeper 4 defenders, 4 midfielders, 2 strikers. Often you will see more than 3 lines. A 4-1-2-1-2 for example is a variation of a 4-4-2 but the midfield is set in a diamond, with an attacking and defensive midfielder pushing behind the attackers or sitting just infront of the back line respectively.

You can edit formations with CM07, we'll discuss how later. There is a limit of 16 total it seems.

MENTALITY - Offensive, Neutral, Defensive

There are also Offensive and Defensive tactics in this window that correspond with the D-pad instructions you can give in game. I believe it is bugged at the moment in CM07... it isn't properly assigning these tactics.

The rest of this tab is all drag and drop... select and drag the players to the positions you want them in. The actual positions are fixed so you have to replace one player with another in exactly that spot... can't put him in a slightly different area like you could in Creation Center older versions. The same goes for the bench and the Captain and Kicktakers.

We've already discussed the kits tab in depth above... if you have any further questions let me know.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ASSETS TAB:

This is pretty simple, You select the ball you want, or you can load one in. We discussed the logo above.

Flags/Banners are 128x64. I forget the size of adboards but you can RIGHT CLICK, EXPORT THEM, Load them into Paint Shop Pro and find out that way, I will check to see what the exact size is when I get a chance.

You can always select Generic Banners tab to get the game to make some up based on the kit colors you select.

That's it for now.

 

[Biebrich 02]

Wow, this goes deep. Great tutorial. I guess we won't hear the question "how do i create my own teams?" anymore. You only left some parts of the generic tab though they are quite self-explaining.

Since you showed the creation of a team with a national team, there might be some questions unanswered about club teams, like what steps do i have to do so i can play my team in career mode.

 

[mrliioadin]

Wow, this goes deep. Great tutorial. I guess we won't hear the question "how do i create my own teams?" anymore. You only left some parts of the generic tab though they are quite self-explaining.

Since you showed the creation of a team with a national team, there might be some questions unanswered about club teams, like what steps do i have to do so i can play my team in career mode.

This may be a question better answered by a club team patch maker because at the moment I'm having absolutely no luck with career mode. Though as I've stated else where this may be because i'm using national teams. I don't know.

I agree I've left some things out. but I just couldn't write anymore. I would have been there all day I think if i hadn't stopped when I did.

 

[Biebrich 02]

I agree I've left some things out. but I just couldn't write anymore. I would have been there all day I think if i hadn't stopped when I did.

Of course. I don't think there will be a lot of questions left unanswered.

 

[Luis_Figo]

good job man ... very good tutorial ... i was know how to make a team or something else, but i post here because i saw cos you use PSP ... all others use adobe ... PSP rullz )) ...

 

[Tizmo]

Very good tutorial!! We need more people like you here!

 

[mrliioadin]

I just added a small section on very very basic kit making with PSP. PLEASE link the hell out of it. these some down to the dirt level information there that people can use to get started.

August, Figo, kitmakers... add to it !!!

 

[bluloon]

How do you enable a team such as Holland as it is already present in the countries section of CM 07? Please advise as I would like to put Holland into my International Cup.

 

[Biebrich 02]

It's in the countries' section but there is no "hidden" national team in fifa 07. you have to make it yourself or download it, from Liios national team thread for example.

 

[mrliioadin]

Aye there are a ton of players from all over the world in the various leagues... Each one of them needs a country assigned to them so that's why you can find Saint Vincent and the Grenedines in the countries section but you will find no team for them.

Ezra Hendrickson plays in the MLS thus, St. V&G needed to be added to the countries section.

with todays release of Syria, there are now 96 total National Teams available through EA and my patches.

 

[Tizmo]

Holland is also in my CMP thread also here in the editing section.

http://www.soccergaming.tv/showthread.php?t=142273

 

[dule982k]

Great tutorial

 

[mrliioadin]

Holland is also in my CMP thread also here in the editing section.

http://www.soccergaming.tv/showthread.php?t=142273

Tizmo is evil! always DL liio's teams

 

[mrliioadin]

I added some sections to the FIFTH post about what each section does in each section under the TEAM tab.

 

[Platini10]

Nice Job. You really provided some nice in-depth instructions.

Thank you for sharing.

 

[philips99]

You helped me so much giving the first steps of fifa 07 modding, I made 2 teams today I know that this topic is very old, but it's still very useful. The actual version of CM 07 is a bit different, but it's basically the same.