The South Guard: Story pics and Portraits

[lostnumber]

It seems to me that mal-mbrins left arm is posed a bit un-naturally. It looks like he is squeezing his elbow to his body tightly (as if for example his hands werent free and he was trying to keep something from falling). While it is possible to hold your arm in such a fashion its not a very comfortable pose. This posture also makes it seem like his left humerous is curved instead of straight. After examining it in detail I can see how the robes would fall in such a way, but my first thought was "why arent his bones straight?"

This problem might be exacerbated by the way the whole character is leaning to the left (his left, our right)

Nice art btw and welcome

[zookeeper]

@zookeeper: Thank you for the info (and the compliments! ). Good to know about those two bandit portraits that don't need redoing too. Portraits for TSG are definitely priority for me. But as I love doing story pics, I'm definitely considering doing some extra story pics for TSG (if time allows). I kind of liked the way the game cycled through the seasons during the first couple of text screens (fitted nicely with the music too) -but yeah, some additional pics would make it even better, I guess. Especially for the ending of the campaign. Is there a possibility to extract those story texts from the game (are they in a specific folder?) to read and to base such story pics on?

All the content (campaigns, scenarios, units, etc) is written in WML (Wesnoth Markup Language), in .cfg files which are just plain text you can open up with any text editor and read (or edit). TSG's scenario files are in <wesnoth>/data/campaigns/The_South_Guard/scenarios/ if you want to look at those, and the story screens seem to be in <wesnoth>/data/campaigns/The_South_Guard/scenarios/sg_story.cfg.

As for the story image sizes, we'd like to get them in the biggest possible size (in lossless format, preferably .png): while we usually include story images in the actual game as .jpg's (for filesize reasons) and with a maximum size of about 1280x960 (kitty's core story images are in 1300x970), we do have a place in the repository for storing high-resolution versions of both images and sounds. Those are very useful to have in the case that something needs to be resized or otherwise edited later on for whatever reason, as it's better to do it on a higher-resolution lossless version.

[woodmouse]

Ug-ug... Epic.

(this post might be pointless, but still, it's worth posting. )

[azhag_pl]

@azhag_pl: Really? Deoran looks fine on all of the screens I tested it on... I do have a tendency to paint my art in a chiaroscuro style, though, so that's maybe what you perceive as "dark"?...

I mean: he looks like he's one of the bad guys to me, some servant of this lich, not a good and noble cavalry officer who's intended to destroy him.

As a portrait itself it's really good.

[bore]

Great to see some portrait work on my favourite campain! (Now if only someone would update the tutorial campain.*hint* *hint*)

The thing with Deoran looking a bit on the dark side has much to do with his dialog with Moreth who is a bit on the very bright side. It's not really that much of a problem a can probably be ignored.
If you do decide to brighten the armour I would suggest to try to add even more contrast to it to make it feel less plastic. Perhaps LordBob's Armour tutorial could be of use.
Another small detail that also could be ignored is Deorans gloves. They should probably be more open in the rear end. One inch think metal is a bit excessive.

[Darker_Dreams]

on the topic of Deoran still looking young-ish; if you want another way to add a little age you might look at removing the freckles on his cheeks. Freckles are one of those things that a lot of people cue into and associate with kids and being young. I understand if you like them because they make the character a little different and unique, but I saw that, if you were interested in adding a little more age to his appearance, that might be a route to get some without going all the way back to line art.

$.02 from the peanut gallery.

[Hulavuta]

Great to see some portrait work on my favourite campain! (Now if only someone would update the tutorial campain.*hint* *hint*)

The Tutorial doesn't need any new art. Except for Delfador.

[scavenger]

A few more updates...

On the "bent" arm of Mal-Mbrin:
Well, he is a crooked old skeleton...
But I can see why it can seem like his bones aren't straight. I might fix that later on, but not before I finished work on the other TSG portraits.

On Deoran's "dark armor":
Usually I'm not a fan of chrome-like shiny armor. Somehow it doesn't look very realistic to me (think of how shiny the Round Table knights were in that 1980's movie "Excalibur" ). But what I do see from the screenshots is that with his darker armor, Deoran doesn't seem to contrast enough to the background. So I fixed that. Made it a bit

On Deoran's freckles:
I intend to keep them, as they are a typical feature of this character.

@zookeeper:
Thank you for the image specs. I'll have the panoramas resized to the maximum size using the hi-res versions. You also spoke a "repository" where these can be stored, where is this? I paint all of my stuff at least three times larger than the intended size, so I have hi-res versions of everything, including the portraits.

@thespaceinvader:
Thank you for these pointers! I had not encountered them yet on my initial forum searches, so they were really informative.

[zookeeper]

Gerrick's portrait is looking good so far, but I assume the glaive blade is very much a work-in-progress still, right? The other issue which sort of jumps out is the big pauldron, which seems to be drawn from a very different perspective than the rest: we're looking at him from about the level of his chest (or even slightly from below his chest), whereas the pauldron is drawn as if we're looking at it from above. His face could perhaps also use a bit more texturing to make him look more like he's really been in a battle all week long. Kitty's core outlaw portraits have some really good face features like scars, wrinkles, dirt and such which make them look like they're really living in the woods and haven't washed up in a while; maybe you want to incorporate a few similar features.

The texture on the shield is really, really nice.

@zookeeper:
Thank you for the image specs. I'll have the panoramas resized to the maximum size using the hi-res versions. You also spoke a "repository" where these can be stored, where is this? I paint all of my stuff at least three times larger than the intended size, so I have hi-res versions of everything, including the portraits.

Well, it's in the resources branch of the main svn repository...if that sounds too technical, then you can browse its contents using the web interface (which is always annoyingly slow, at least for me).

[scavenger]

Gerrick's portrait is looking good so far, but I assume the glaive blade is very much a work-in-progress still, right? The other issue which sort of jumps out is the big pauldron, which seems to be drawn from a very different perspective than the rest: we're looking at him from about the level of his chest (or even slightly from below his chest), whereas the pauldron is drawn as if we're looking at it from above. His face could perhaps also use a bit more texturing to make him look more like he's really been in a battle all week long. Kitty's core outlaw portraits have some really good face features like scars, wrinkles, dirt and such which make them look like they're really living in the woods and haven't washed up in a while; maybe you want to incorporate a few similar features.

This is actually supposed to be the finished Gerrick picture. The issue with the glaive blade may be caused by the fact that the PNG has a transparent background, showing the background white of the forum, making it difficult to see the true outline of the blade. I attached a version with a neutral gray background to show this.

Now I must make something clear. I am very much open to constructive critique, but I can only invest so much of my spare time into this work. I can't dwell on each single one of these portrait pics forever. I'm just doing this to help out on this game that I love.
By starting to redo the existing story pics for TSG, I have initiated something that I shall finish. I will re-create all of the remaining portraits needed for the campaign, but since I am releasing them under the GPL, I claim no personal privileges or rights to them whatsoever. The Wesnoth development team is free to use them, or to ignore them or to change them to their liking. I won't mind at all.

[Sapient]

These are high quality and we're glad to see your contribution. I agree it is better to have the complete set than to dwell too long on minor details. This is an open forum so we get all kinds of comments from artists and non-artists alike, so bear that in mind.

[JustinOperable]

Holy wow! These are pretty amazing. If you were less skilled, I might say these fall a bit on the cartooned side of the spectrum from Wesnoths typical art style, but I think I'm not stepping over my bounds in saying these are too good to pass up! I am tempted to ask for a tutorial on your painting process.

With Gerrick, and feel free to discount this because it's a beautiful piece so far, I feel like the repetition of the elliptical shapes, especially in the breastplate sort of heighten the cartooned feeling for me. I wouldn't want to ask you to change your style at all, it's brilliant, but you might consider rethinking the shape design to err a bit away from the overly circular (maybe repeat some more of the rectangular shapes of the shield?)

I must say, when I saw the portraits, I thought Wow, another very skilled artist on the team, but when I saw those landscapes, my jaw dropped a bit. Really good work.

But really this is up to Kitty to talk about.

[zookeeper]

Now I must make something clear. I am very much open to constructive critique, but I can only invest so much of my spare time into this work. I can't dwell on each single one of these portrait pics forever. I'm just doing this to help out on this game that I love.

Sure, no problem. You're the artist and so it's your call how much time you want to sink into a single portrait. It's still an excellent portrait as it is and I'll certainly gladly put that to use in TSG when the set is more complete.

[Kenpachi]

Those landscapes are awesome, I want to frame and hang them on my wall.

Deoran's portrait still looks more boyish than Gerrick's portrait, and I think this is due to the head/body size ratio. when you have your growth spurt you get taller, but your head stays the same size.

Currently Deoran's body is about 2 heads in hight, while Gerrick's is about 2.5.

Other than that, very very nice.

[bore]

If you want to test your images ingame you could just replace the images currently in use.
On a windows system that would probably be in C:\Program Files\Battle for Wesnoth 1.8.1\data\campaigns\The_South_Guard\images or wherever you installed BfW

You can also edit the files in scenarios/ and utils/sg_story.cfg if you want to test different images for different situations. (Just search for the filename of the image you want to replace and see if the text in the file matches the story. In that case change the filename to your new image.)