H3SW: Character Portraits

Small improvements to the Gallavant. Only one pixel shorter forehead

We in fact already took all we could from Xeen.

Hmm, I disagree a bit. To me the World of Xeen is like a gift that just keeps on giving


I mean this purple guy with the horns, brilliant!

With a palette swap he could be an Ogre hero?

Or maybe use him for the Heretic faction at some point?


Then there's the girl from the Temple.


And finally this freaky looking lady with some serious brainpower.

Necromancer faction?

AkuAkuIslands wrote:

Hmm, I disagree a bit. To me the World of Xeen is like a gift that just keeps on giving

I completely approve this idea, thank you for this. I'm more for the Ogre hero, because we currently have problems with the Barbarian roster. I even started fixing him personally so he could fit more He also looks good as a draft for a Heretic hero, but Heretic is not a matter of the next coming versions while we still have a lot of problems with the existing factions. Also, the concept of the Heretic is not developed, but I anyway think in the direction of avoiding pure red gamma for it, Heroes 2 faction gamma is usually diverse.

Concerning the Necromancer girl, I'm also for including her after appropriate adjustments.

Concerning the girl in the middle - she must become someone from the Dervish roster, for we have the biggest trouble with this faction.



Could you also look for such large-scaled characters in Might&Magic 3? I don't have it anywhere and its resources cannot be extracted without pain.

Yay! Glad to hear. They still need a bit of work, since I did the palette swaps mainly to throw around some ideas. I also wanted to add a few details to the ogre (mainly the helmet), but if you want to work on him further, that's fine with me. I should probably also scale down the necromancer lady or mainly her hair, so that you can see some background. Or what do you think? She could also do with a bit of detail work. I actually prefer her as the blue-skinned version, because the bulging brain is just so over the top and classic Xeen style.

On the topic of Might and Magic 3 graphics, I found these walkthroughs. They seem to have pretty good shots of the game, though I don't know if you could find better quality images somewhere. However for reference, I think they work fine.
https://lparchive.org/Might-Magic-III-Isles-of-Terra/

There was also one for World of Xeen: https://lparchive.org/Might-Magic-World-of-Xeen/
Do you think Kalindra (Necromancer), Ellinger (Warlock, Wizard?) or the Sphinx could be used for portraits? The Sphinx is looking quite upright, but at least the headdress could be used for reference for a hero from the dervish faction.




One more thing. What would you guys think about making changing the hero classes to genders? I've always had a problem with a female wizard sporting a beard when she's in combat mode. Warlocks seem to be all men and there are no males (sorcerers) in the sorceress faction, but barbarians have the same problem too. In HOMM3 they had classes per faction right? So Knights and Clerics for Castle etc. Would it be possible to have a male class for male heroes and vice versa for female heroes? And no, I don't mean to limit the women to spellcasters and the men to fighters, that's just stupid. But is there some way in the game mechanic to accomodate for this? Or mod it, so you could choose a gender? Of course, this could be just food for thought after the beta, since I know there's already more than enough to finish before it.

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Yay! Glad to hear. They still need a bit of work, since I did the palette swaps mainly to throw around some ideas. I also wanted to add a few details to the ogre (mainly the helmet), but if you want to work on him further, that's fine with me. I should probably also scale down the necromancer lady or mainly her hair, so that you can see some background. Or what do you think? She could also do with a bit of detail work. I actually prefer her as the blue-skinned version, because the bulging brain is just so over the top and classic Xeen style.

I already started the work, but still the downscaling and the forthcoming work require a lot of efforts.
Yes, I'm also for the blue variant actually, but purple hair may be also coming in handy.

WORK IN PROGRESS, A LOT MORE TO DO

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Do you think Kalindra (Necromancer), Ellinger (Warlock, Wizard?) or the Sphinx could be used for portraits? The Sphinx is looking quite upright, but at least the headdress could be used for reference for a hero from the dervish faction.

"Kalindra" could work, but we require an in-game screenshot in original quality.

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One more thing. What would you guys think about making changing the hero classes to genders?

It is already possible to make individual hero sprites for each hero, both on the battlefield and on the adventure map. In future I planned to make unique sprites for Roland and Archibald, but the best option is to have unique hero sprites for each hero eventually. This will take a lot of time, though.

For now, no changes in specific, and genders don't work currently.

[quote="Orzie"]

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It is already possible to make individual hero sprites for each hero, both on the battlefield and on the adventure map.

Really? That's awesome. Solves the whole problem! But yeah, like I said not the most pressing issue at hand. I was just curious.

I will see what I can do with this new portraits. Very good idea indeed

Uhm wrote:

I will see what I can do with this new portraits. Very good idea indeed

Feel free to work with the blue-skinned lady, we can surely make her a part of a faction roster. Concerning the images above from MM3 - we need to find a better quality first, preferably from people who have this game installed and have savegames. There is no resource extractor from MM3 which is pity.

[quote="Orzie"]

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"Kalindra" could work, but we require an in-game screenshot in original quality.

Yeah. I would just use her for reference and draw her up myself. That picture is way too blurry.

For the blue lady you can use this one I tried to do a while ago:


She still needs many adjustments, she looks too blurry in the game, but maybe it's a good starting point. I don't think project Ironfist is gonna use it.

Orothin wrote:

For the blue lady you can use this one I tried to do a while ago:


She still needs many adjustments, she looks too blurry in the game, but maybe it's a good starting point. I don't think project Ironfist is gonna use it.

Why so? Looks more or less acceptable for the style of their graphic developments. Did they reject this concept?

I'm not working for the project Ironfist for a good while now, and they went in a completely different direction since then. Also this portrait I created for myself and just showed them.

I've added actual portraits in a first post.

What about this guy formerly proposed for Dervish?

Low-qual or just forgotten?

...and once I was working on Martina's portrait, I said that it needs a background like a Rogues' camp or a Temple. Just couldn't find it myself.

I think he has good chances to fit after some input. I just cannot find time to deal with the portraits finally. It's bad that we sometimes don't coordinate efforts (hence Uhm's updates made separately from mine), but the international development and lack of free time (with my technical inability to track Dropbox updates quickly enough) takes its toll.

What if?..


addition:
What is his hat/helm fur colour?

I like the face pretty much, it lacks "classic" PoL purple shadow tones which are absolutely different from classic H2 portrait shadows. However, I have some doubts about the hair.

The fur color is undefined. Such rainbow-like texture is likely a result of Color Depth operation. I think we can use dark yellow or whatever.

*different eyes, I know. Don't want to reinterpret the original ones.
Looks like some parts are too dark. Again.

Very nice result indeed. Yes, the face is changed slightly, but now it fits much more near our already existing PoL portraits.

Gentlemen, we are in a dire need of a few operative fixes.

Sir Albe and I have made first steps towards updating the in-game appearance of the heroes, i.e. correlate the names and portraits in a proper way. Of course, things may (and most probably will) change during December, but for now the approximate faction character sets are decided.

Currently, we have a few characters which don't have alternative variants for the beta, and at the same time are not qualified to be put in the game yet. These guys need some help badly, and the mod will benefit greatly if some of us put their skills there.

Characters in need of a background:
Moham the Barbarian
Alice the Witch

Characters in need of some more treatment:
Garik the Warlock
Wenin the Witch
new Dervish to replace the ugliest Dervish (see below)


The current questionable Dervishes (if one is finished, the other is scrapped or left optional/campaign)
Ethania
Tumur (might as well be exchanged with a Barbarian hero because he feels like one)


Of course, only a very few of new H3SW portraits can be considered 100% fitting to the game, but we don't have much time for perfectionism and will probably make further steps towards making them fit later in future.

I'll take them to my workshop the day after tomorrow

Orzie wrote:

new Dervish to replace the ugliest Dervish (see below)

"Erdem", if it's possible.
a) means "knowledge" both in Buryat and Turkish.
b) play on words, German "Erde"="Earth"

What's the current situation with improperly shrinked original portraits? (warlocks, barbarians...)

Same as before: Warlocks need some love, Wizards (except Wilfrey) can have it too, and the rest of the Barbarians which were not touched by you yet. See top post, second spoiler.

Fixed 4 of the portraits, will try to fix as many of them as possible