Custom character portrait art?

[Orifushi Mafuyu]

My apologies if this topic already exists but a search only turned up one result and isn't actually what I was looking for. Has any additional art been done for the games? Currently I've got Avernum 3 running, my first reinstall of the game after a hiatus of about 5 years (I know, I know... my bad). The only link I got out of Google was a Finnish site with a sample pic but the links are dead.

 

I threw something together in a hurry ( http://i923.photobucket.com/albums/ad72/mafuyuu/party01.jpg ) with some random images, it's pretty easy actually if you don't care about cleaning up the images as you can see with the glitches in some white areas. The game art is organized quite well, all I need to edit is only a handful of files. Very convenient.

 

Are there any fanmade image packs already done out there? Or is this sort of tinkering frowned upon? (if so, I'm sorry)

[Ishad Nha]

There is nothing to stop you replacing the official PC art in the Data folder. Just rename the graphics 1800 through 1823. I am not aware of any recent fanpacks.

[Dintiradan]

Dahak made some great replacement graphic for the humans, available here. You can see the discussion thread, as well as some earlier versions of the graphics, here.

 

So long as you don't redistribute the entire game with your new graphics, I don't think there's a problem (I Am Not A Lawyer).

[Orifushi Mafuyu]

Nah, I know to just upload the pics, that's all we need. Nice 3D look there, thanks for the link. I don't quite like that style though, it just looks like they were fished right out of a renderer.

 

I'm planning to go with the simple 2D look and I'll be tweaking the sprites as well. The lack of hairstyle choices always bugged me more than anything else Between work and stuff it'll take a week or so, hopefully.

 

Edit: Ok I overestimated my skill with GIMP ("how hard can it be to use, it's just like a bigger, more featureful MS Paint?" lol), forget about the sprites for the moment. I'll leave that to the long term.

[Arc the Lad]

I always wanted to change the sprites and portraits to other video game characters, I'm just....too lazy, even for MS paint.

[bTomfoolery]

I'm actually working on a short tutorial for photoshop on how to easily make a custom portrait (with an emphasis on making the portrait looks like it belongs in the game) for Avernum with little effort and no artistic skills, if anyone's interested

[Ishad Nha]

Go ahead, it might be useful. Photoshop, that is not freeware, how much does it cost anyway? Many people here might not have it or be able to afford it.

[Earth]

cs 4 costs 1.4k usd when not upgrading.

 

elements costs 150 usd.

 

when bought from adobe.

 

older versions are cheaper.

[bTomfoolery]

The techniques used in the tutorial are fairly standard, they should apply to other image editing software like GIMP. Just, the specifics will be decidedly Photoshop. I plan on posting it some time today.

[bTomfoolery]

(Pardon the double post, I was expecting someone else to have posted by now)

 

The tutorial isn't quite complete yet, by which I mean, all of the information is there, and the tutorial is, by all means, usable, but it's not quite up to my standards, and there were some unforeseen image errors caused by my use of blogger. Otherwise, feel free to use it as it is.

 

http://btomfoolery.blogspot.com/2009/08/custom-avernum-portraits.html

 

I'll be fixing a lot of the problems that I have with it tomorrow, I procrastinated on making it today which is the true cause of most of the problems with it, so hopefully spending more time on it will clean it up nicely.

 

I'd appreciate comments and criticisms on it, I'd like it to be as easy to follow and useful as possible to everyone.

[Orifushi Mafuyu]

Nice! I suppose the layer manipulation steps take care of the game turning parts of the character transparent which you don't want it to?

 

What I did for my images was to simply resize them to what the game required and saving as .bmp, that was it. As you can see in the image in my first post, Kodama's white hair is transparent in parts. I was kinda lucky the art I grabbed mostly had all the characters on plain white backgrounds. Your tutorial should help me fix the rest of those who don't, though. Thanks!

 

Edit: I forgot to add that all the character portraits (for A3 at least) are stuffed in one file, 904.BMP. Each character is allocated a 44 x 47 space, no transparencies to bother with. I normally just take a faceshot from the paperdoll image and paste it at the corresponding character location.

 

A3 horseback sprites are also in one file, 1680.BMP, with a tiny version 1681.BMP. I generally don't bother with this one because I've yet to actually edit the individual sprite tilesets (1650.BMP to 1665.BMP, for A3 humans).