How to get a photo into Animal Crossing: City Folk

By Joe Fourhman | February 6, 2009

I can’t take the credit for this idea; I first saw it from some guy on the IGN Animal Crossing boards back on the first Animal Crossing circa 2003. It’s a clever way to recreate a photograph using the Able Sisters’ tailoring tools. I did it in Wild World and I wanted to give it a go in City Folk. Naturally, so City Folk continues its pattern of being disappointing, there are some substantial differences between it and the older Animal Crossings, so pay attention!

And at the end of the day, you get some pretty cool imagery for your town… even if it took two hours to do it and other systems out there come with cameras for this sort of thing.

Fire up your Photoshop!

Pattern designs in Animal Crossing: City Folk are a stifling 32 by 32 pixels. I made a Photoshop doc in those dimensions and then pasted in a picture of my son. Of course, I had to shrink the photo down hardcore. Then I turned the file to grayscale. I zoomed in so I could see the pixels… looks crappy up close, but the eye naturally smooths out everything when the image is back to its normal size. I zoomed in so I could place some guides. I dragged in enough guides to cut the image into 8×8 squares. This would help keep me focused when I actually got to Animal Crossing.

Here’s a key step. Still zoomed in on the image, I snapped a screenshot. Effectively, I now had a giant pixel image at 100%, so it can be easily printed. Then I opened that screenshot in Photoshop and tackled the color palette issue.

Animal Crossing has multiple color palettes, but they all suck ass. Only one of them has enough shades to create something even close to a photographic image, and it’s the grayscale one. And even then, the palette only has 15 shades. My zoomed-in screen needed to drop about a thousand shades of gray.

So I went to Save For Web, set it to gif, and turned the colors down to 16. You’ll note that this is one more color than we can actually use, so you have to fake it. Cranking down the colors like this also removes the blue guidelines, leaving behind empty white lines.

Now that the image was reduced to the Animal Crossing grayscale palette, I saved that and printed it. On to City Folk.

If you have never made a custom pattern in Animal Crossing, you have to pay 350 bells or whatever for the privilege. Chump change. You can make that much bank selling a handful of the worst seashells you can find on the beach. New to City Folk is the “Pro” pattern that lets you design sleeves and backs as well as fronts… but for this case I only cared about the front of the design, so I went for a flat, old-style pattern slot.

Problem: Unlike Wild World, City Folk has no true grayscale pattern. Peep this crap:

Like, who got browns in my grayscale? I swear, it’s as if Nintendo had a giant checklist of everything they could screw up with Animal Crossing and set a full team of programmers to make it all happen. I’m just glad Yamauchi didn’t wander in one day and suggest they turn it into Animal Crossing: Dinosaur Planet.

Anyway, I tried to judge the comparative luminance of the 15 colors and assigned a numerical value from 1 to 15 to each, with 15 being the darkest. This is REALLY faking it.

Then, with my sample printout happily demarcated into those 8×8 blocks, I zoomed all the way in with the design tool, selected the smallest paint brush, and got to clicking. It was usually a matter of starting with #15 and working down the list, guesstimating how the colors related to each other.

I’m kinda annoyed that City Folk does not have an option to download the pattern maker to the DS for more precise work. We all know how floaty the Wii Remote gets. The original GameCube Animal Crossing let you send the pattern maker to the Game Boy Advance, for crying out loud.

Since the grayscale is boogered, the final image is not as nice as in previous Animal Crossings, but it is still a damn sight better than the clumsy hand-drawn Windows Paint style patterns that seem to be most common.

I think it looks better inside a house than outside. For some reason the inside shots seem to smooth out the image.

As with anything Photoshop, I’m sure there’s a hundred other ways to accomplish this. Good luck!