Layered Portraits

[Feldoth]

I know there is already confirmation of swapping in custom portraits, but I'm curious about something slightly different:

 

How hard/expensive would it be to create the built-in portraits in a layered format, with things like hair, skin, eyes, and cloths on separate layers? Furthermore, if that is doable, is it possible to have an in game color-swapper for these layers (and possibly a visibility toggle for things like facial hair).

 

If the portraits are provided in any layered format openable by a good image editor, then we could do the swapping/toggling ourselves quite easily (I'm the antithesis of an artist, and even I could do that), but an in-game interface during character creation would be a nice touch - provided that it doesn't take too much time/money. If this is doable, custom portraits should be allowed to be flat images or layered ones, so that people can just grab their favorites off the web if they want to, or use ones custom-made for P:E with full access to the color change/visibility features.

 

Is any of this a reasonable possibility? Does anyone besides me think it would be at all beneficial?

[chisled2bone]

it is def possible to do. as far as resources to make it happen i have no clue. the only thing i think it brings into question is messing with the artists work. idk, something about loking at all the portraits and just liking the art that was done by the artist.

[ddillon]

Sounds cool to me.

[Shades]

I've seen something like this done in quite simple games with small pixel-art portraits about the size of our forum avatars (for recolouring anyway), however I think it would be a lot more complicated and less feasible for the type of portraits that the IE games had.

 

Basically the art is going to suffer for it if you had something like this. Because to put multiple hair styles on a portrait it means you either have to have all the portraits in the same pose (which would start to get boring and more like choosing a 3D model head), or each portrait has to have multiple sets of hair to choose from (meaning a lot more work per portrait). Likewise being able to recolour them would mean the colour on your portraits suffers, because you wouldn't be able to have different lighting or light reflecting off other things and onto the hair colour etc very easily.

 

To get this to work you would probably need to simplify the portraits a lot. Probably ending up with something leaning towards a more comic or cartoonish style. That's my take on it anyway, and I have no idea how difficult it might be to try and put a layered image in where you can change different layers. I would certainly prefer the IE type portraits that we can swap for our own custom ones instead.

[Feldoth]

I've seen something like this done in quite simple games with small pixel-art portraits about the size of our forum avatars (for recolouring anyway), however I think it would be a lot more complicated and less feasible for the type of portraits that the IE games had.

 

Basically the art is going to suffer for it if you had something like this. Because to put multiple hair styles on a portrait it means you either have to have all the portraits in the same pose (which would start to get boring and more like choosing a 3D model head), or each portrait has to have multiple sets of hair to choose from (meaning a lot more work per portrait). Likewise being able to recolour them would mean the colour on your portraits suffers, because you wouldn't be able to have different lighting or light reflecting off other things and onto the hair colour etc very easily.

 

To get this to work you would probably need to simplify the portraits a lot. Probably ending up with something leaning towards a more comic or cartoonish style. That's my take on it anyway, and I have no idea how difficult it might be to try and put a layered image in where you can change different layers. I would certainly prefer the IE type portraits that we can swap for our own custom ones instead.

 

I'm not suggesting multiple hairstyles/cloths/whatever at all, just color swaps, and from experience I can say that even with my pathetic image editing skills you can retain things like lighting quite easily. For example, I just grabbed this guy off google images and changed his hair color:

 

 

(original on left)

 

I had to cut this into layers myself, as it was just a random picture and not already a layered document. And since I suck at image editing, it isn't very well done. However, despite all that you can see the lighting is still in place and all that's different is that the guy's hair color is now a rather odd shade of brown (again, due to me sucking and also due to putting no time into making it look better). I could do the same for his shirt, eyes, and skin color if I wanted to. The problem is, the more complex the picture the harder it is to do something like that (this is about the limits of what I can work with), but if each thing you want to color is in it's own layer it becomes trivial, no matter how complex the picture is.