Edited faces for BG

Tribun Dragon · Post by **Tribun Dragon** » Sun May 17, 2009 2:52 pm

No, wait, I send you all portraits in their original resolution, therefore no loss when re-sizing the pictures.

Lathlas · Post by **Lathlas** » Sun May 17, 2009 3:30 pm

Cool, thanks.

Do you have any for the non-U7 characters from UW2? Mors Gotha is the only character I know of exclusive to the game. I may be able to use some elements from some of them as well.

I really appreciate this, thanks again.

Tribun Dragon · Post by **Tribun Dragon** » Sun May 17, 2009 3:34 pm

Got the mail with all the faces?

Lathlas · Post by **Lathlas** » Sun May 17, 2009 6:50 pm

Yeah, I got all of the U7 faces, thanks,

Tribun Dragon · Post by **Tribun Dragon** » Sun May 17, 2009 8:09 pm

Well, I sent you another bunch of Underworl II pictures. That game really has good portraits. This time beside several guards and fighters, also a troll.

Enough pictures for your needs or should I try to gather even more of them?

Lathlas · Post by **Lathlas** » Mon May 18, 2009 12:01 am

Got your second mail, thanks. Anything you feel like sending, I'll use, but don't put yourself out. I have a TON of faces from various sources now.

Lathlas · Post by **Lathlas** » Thu May 21, 2009 7:33 pm

All of the gargoyles are done.

I tried to split them between Terfin and Vesper in such a way that none of the ones with the exact same faces are in the same area.

None of them are *exactly* alike, but there are some obvious similarities since I only had a few options for source material. I did check out the in-game description when you first meet them all to try and get certain characteristics right; smiling, displeased, etc...

The Serpent's Hold gargoyle is a heavily edited version of Michael Dorn, I'm planning on using modified pictures of the TNG cast for the portraits there.

I think I'm just going to start finishing up one town at a time, since it's hard to get motivated for the more boring NPCs in the game.

I keep trying to modify the gwani portraits into emp portraits but they are very stubborn. If anyone has sources for emps that might work let me know.

Tribun Dragon · Post by **Tribun Dragon** » Thu May 21, 2009 7:36 pm

I noticed that you followed my advice about Nelson and Brion, nice touch the blue cloak.

All other Ultima VII NPCs from UUW II should be easy, since only the wall has to be removed from the background. Btw., I think the guard portraits from UUW2 are better suited, since they are actual britannian guards.

Tribun Dragon · Post by **Tribun Dragon** » Thu May 21, 2009 7:52 pm

I forgot... the Gargoyles look all really nice. Everyone of them has an individual look. That must've been a lot of work!

Lathlas · Post by **Lathlas** » Thu May 21, 2009 9:53 pm

Thanks.

Yeah, I'm probably going to go over any faces I copied from SI and see if I have a better option. I like the SI faces, but I seem to be the only one.

I finished Serpent's Hold. Menion, Pendaron, and Pendaron's Wife (can't think of her name) didn't seem to be based on Trek characters, but I made them anyway.

For the record, those *are* Brent Spiners eyes under Denton's helmet.

Tribun Dragon · Post by **Tribun Dragon** » Fri May 22, 2009 7:56 am

I think you should nonetheless try to use SI pictures, if they fit (f.e. Batlin was after the edit, a perfect fit, and the black sword looks great).

I noticed that you used an actual photogaph for Lady Tory. Well, it works better with the TNG joke, so the loss isn't too big, although she still looks too white (after all, Lady Tory is a black woman). A little further edit is needed.

My other thoughts on SI pictures that could be replaced:

-Lord British, his SI picture looks too desinterested (UW2 picture looks better)
-Goeffrey (actual portrait sent)
-Gilberto. (The Artakan guard form UW2(uw2_016), after an edit for the injury, looks better.)
-All guards (the UW2 portrait looks better).

Lathlas · Post by **Lathlas** » Fri May 22, 2009 10:20 am

I'm not talking about the SI faces that are the same people, just the ones that aren't.

I used actual photo's for ALL of Serpent's Hold, not just Lady Tory. I don't think she was black in BG. Marina Sirtis is mediterranean and I think the olive skin just looked darker than all of the very white people in Britannia. Although her portrait came out more washed out than the others, I'll probably revisit it at some point.

99% of the UW2 portraits are awful. It's like they fired their art department betwen games. I will definitely revisit all the guards, both with UW sources and external sources.

I'm NOT using UW2's Geoffrey, it's just plain wrong. I'll find a better source somewhere.

Lord British always looks disinterested, he's a terrible ruler.

Lathlas · Post by **Lathlas** » Mon May 25, 2009 11:16 am

I just noticed that the shape number for Marzo's avatar faces is diffrent between the Keyring and TFL mods. Is there any particular reason for that, and are there any other differences I'm not noticing?

I'm trying to keep my files sorted for maximum compatibility and the different numbers gave me a headache until I figured out why I was getting different results.

Post by **marzo** » Mon May 25, 2009 2:14 pm

I just noticed that the shape number for Marzo's avatar faces is diffrent between the Keyring and TFL mods. Is there any particular reason for that, and are there any other differences I'm not noticing?

It was to steer clear from the TFL-only faces that Wizardry had already added by the time I made the Avatar Pack.

Post by **Dominus** » Mon May 25, 2009 4:04 pm

Hmm, should I clean this thread further? I mean de-linking the "old" images? Your call Lathlas!

Edit: so to not clutter the thread further, I just replay here and will leave it as it is, as I wrote, your call

Lathlas · Post by **Lathlas** » Mon May 25, 2009 4:28 pm

Hmm, should I clean this thread further? I mean de-linking the "old" images? Your call Lathlas!

Only if it bothers you. I don't really mind if people see the early attempts and have to scroll through discussion. As long as they can get to the current progress from the first post the rest doesn't really matter.

I do like having the various opinions here so that hopefully I won't have to hear the same complaints from different people.

Lathlas · Post by **Lathlas** » Wed Jun 03, 2009 12:09 pm

So, my hard drive appears to be totally dead.

I have a lot of my data backed up, but most of my recent progress on the faces is probably gone.

I'm going to try some more recovery options (I know what I'm doing here) but I fully expect to lose all of my recent changes that I hadn't posted yet.

Bummer.

Tribun Dragon · Post by **Tribun Dragon** » Wed Jun 03, 2009 4:43 pm

Yeah, that sucks.

Post by **Dominus** » Thu Jun 04, 2009 7:08 am

That is bad. I feel for you!

Lathlas · Post by **Lathlas** » Thu Jun 04, 2009 1:03 pm

I think I've managed to get at the data on my hard drive. I'm looking at it all right now, and I'm going to try and back it up before I repartition my drive and start over.

I'm just hoping that the data won't be corrupted when I copy it.

Lathlas · Post by **Lathlas** » Tue Sep 15, 2009 6:03 pm

So I got my new computer finally. Unfortunately my backup drive has also died in the interim so I lost a fair amount of my progress.

Anything I uploaded already I just pulled back down, so in the long run I haven't lost all that much.

I've started working on this again, although I can see that I have a lot farther to go than I'd previously thought. Oh well.

I made a new page for displaying progress as well, it's fairly graphically intensive. It displays all of the new faces (or a blank placeholder) next to the original BG style faces. I included keyring mod faces on the list as well in the hopes of maximizing compatability if I ever actually finish this.

http://home.comcast.net/~lathlas/exult/bg_faces.html

Post by **Dominus** » Tue Sep 15, 2009 6:57 pm

With Firefox, I couldn't load that page, with Safari I could... oh well

Welcome back and too bad about your loss...

That page is much nicer to look at and compare faces.

comments about the Trekkies:
#199 shouldn't that be somehow more "Data" like and I think, just judging from the original faces, didn't you confuse 193 with 202? Don't know who #193 is supposed to be, though

Lathlas · Post by **Lathlas** » Tue Sep 15, 2009 7:11 pm

Some of these are very rough drafts from before I lost everything, so some of them might be silly for now.

I was kind of torn on the Data picture, the in-game description states that you can't see his face at all, so if I use a picture of Brent Spiner in a helmet, it will be better for the joke but less accurate in game.

As for 202, despite appearances he's not actually on Serpent's Hold. He's the caretaker at the Fellowship retreat one island over so he has nothing to do with the Star Trek joke.

192 & 193 are on Serpent's Hold, but they don't appear to be part of the Trek joke either, so I just arbitrarily made them characters from the show.

I cleaned up the HTML a little, hopefully compatability will be better.

Lathlas · Post by **Lathlas** » Wed Sep 16, 2009 12:29 am

For some reason I can't get into my current faces directory via FTP. I made a whole new account just for hosting Exult files though, so I'll continue using this mirror. Please disregard any older versions floating around.

http://home.comcast.net/~exult/faces/bg_faces.html

Lathlas · Post by **Lathlas** » Wed Sep 16, 2009 1:32 am

There is apparently something badly wrong with my files or directory structure. Every time I upload a 'faces' directory it completely fails to ever let me in again. I can access every file and directory in four different upload spaces except for 'faces' and any file inside that directory.

Johann · Post by **Johann** » Wed Sep 16, 2009 9:23 pm

@Lathlas
I think you got your slashes backwards. You are using \ instead of / causing the images not to show. I think safari automatically compensates for this but Firefox just doesn't like it.

MeddlingMonk · Post by **MeddlingMonk** » Wed Sep 16, 2009 11:43 pm

Konqueror also doesn't like the images page but, like Safari, Opera copes.

And if you don't mind a suggestion, I think it'd be nice if for the Time Lord you used Jon Pertwee or maybe William Hartnell.

Lathlas · Post by **Lathlas** » Wed Sep 16, 2009 11:53 pm

I hate using real people if I can avoid, shifting the palette from real skin into something that will display in exult is a nightmare.

Whether Firefox likes my slashes or not, my FTP access is fubar.

Normally I get this when I try to log in or access a directory:

Command: LIST
Response: 150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for /bin/ls.
Response: 226 Transfer complete.
Status: Directory listing successful

When I try to access any directory into which I've uploaded my faces, I get this:

Command: LIST
Response: 150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for /bin/ls.
Response: 426 Data connection error: No child processes.
Error: Failed to retrieve directory listing
Error: Connection closed by server

So, I am making more progress, you just won't get to see it yet. When I have a decent portion finished I'll update them in the wiki, that still seems to work for me.

Lathlas · Post by **Lathlas** » Thu Sep 17, 2009 12:12 am

Ok, I'm mad. Apparently FileZilla doesn't like directories with a lot of files in them. I switched clients and BOOM, no problem.

I swapped the slashes, hope everybody can see it fine now.

I'm going to maintain this link, until something else breaks on me.

http://home.comcast.net/~exult/bg_faces.html

Tribun Dragon · Post by **Tribun Dragon** » Thu Sep 17, 2009 6:14 am

Wow, thought it had died.

In case you need them, we recently uploaded all Underworld II portraits. http://ultima.wikia.com/wiki/Category:N ... erworld_II Feel free to use them, only remember to scale them down carefully, on they can become blurry.

quentinak · Post by **quentinak** » Thu Sep 17, 2009 3:17 pm

Looks great!

How about using a young Richard Garriott's picture for Shamino's portrait? I've come across a good picture of his younger self on Google.

I just don't feel comfortable with Shamino being the Trapper with an evil grin.

Warder · Post by **Warder** » Fri Sep 18, 2009 8:51 am

Should you really be using pictures from Bioware games?

Lathlas · Post by **Lathlas** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 12:46 am

For the record, using a different picture for already finished portarits isn't a priority for me. I'll go back over some of them later for sure, definitely Shamino.

Anyone who has pictures or suggestions for any of the unfinished portraits is more than welcome to chime in.

Lathlas · Post by **Lathlas** » Sat Sep 26, 2009 8:41 pm

Updated, including Shamino since everyone but me hated him.

http://home.comcast.net/~exult/bg_faces.html

Post by **Dominus** » Sun Sep 27, 2009 10:17 am

I like that better.
I also edited the link on the first post to point to the new location of the overview.

Machiel · Post by **Machiel** » Sun Sep 27, 2009 7:15 pm

Not wanting to cause any offense with my first post here, but I hope new portraits won't ever be used in Exult but only as optional mods.

I am really fond of the old look of the game and, sorry to say this, but most of these portraits look awkward. Partly because I know the character behind the portrait and it is just plain weird to see the portraits from SI in BG.

I don't use Marzo's fixes either, since you can't use the old portraits anymore (for as far as I know). (Marzo, if you're reading this, is this fixable?

)

Lathlas · Post by **Lathlas** » Wed Sep 30, 2009 6:08 pm

So, I just attempted to make a new 'faces.vga' file with ipack and noticed that the palette on EVERY single file I've created is totally screwed up for some reason.

This basically means that I have to start over from scratch... AGAIN!

So, this time I'm just going to make all of the portraits in full RGB color and upload them that way so you can see what they're intended to look like and then down-palette them later. That way if anyone wants to fiddle with the palettes on their own, since I apparently suck at that, they can.

That actually shouldn't take as long for me, since making the portrait is easy, but making the colors come out right is the longest process.

Yay.

And to lump a bunch of replies together:

@Tribun, thanks for the UW2 links, although I doubt I'll use very many of them.

@Warder, I doubt Bioware cares as there is already a huge portrait community that uses their character pictures in other mods for games. As well as a ton of other copyrighted fantasy material both in and out of Bioware games.

And this is a really sad little mod, for a very niche community of a very old game. If anyone ever did care I'd fix it, but I'm pretty skeptical about that.

@Machiel, No this has nothing to do with the main Exult files, and I am in absolutely no way affiliated with the Exult team. I'm just some guy screwing around for my own benefit and posting the results here in case any one cares.

I am very much NOT fond of the old look of BG, and this mod is %100 not for people who are. I really wish people would stop telling me how much they don't want to use these, that's fine, just don't. Problem solved.

As for modifying the few faces in the Keyring mod back to the original, that's really incredibly easy with Exult Studio, I suggest you start a new thread or go to the feature request tracker if you aren't comfortable with that though since it's off-topic for this thread.

Post by **Malignant Manor** » Wed Sep 30, 2009 11:29 pm

You didn't save the u7 palette with them but colors seemed compatible. Use Exult Studio to create a palette. Open the picture in GIMP and copy it to the clipboard for pasting after changing the color map.

Select>All and Edit>Copy your image since it may need to be pasted after using the correct color map.

To get the color map, you select palettes.flx and make sure it is frame 0, then select export. Open the file in a text editor.
Delete the line

Palette from ExultStudio

Add these two lines to the top

GIMP Palette
Name: Ultima7

Save the file and exit the text editor.

Import the palette you exported from ES into GIMP by selecting Colors>Map>Set Colormap... Left click on the palette box. Right click on one of the palettes and select Import Palette... Select the Palette file dialog box. Choose the palette file you exported and modified. Choose a Palette name and select Import.

Then select the palette you just imported and then left click close. Now left click OK. Then paste in the portrait from the clipboard. Save the file.

Now for the rest of the pictures, you can skip the importing stuff.
Open the file.
Copy it into the clipboard.
Colors>Map>Set Colormap...
Select your palette and click ok.
Then paste in the portrait from the clipboard.
Save the file.

Post by **Malignant Manor** » Wed Sep 30, 2009 11:44 pm

When you make new portraits, you can start out with the U7 palette so you have easy access to all the colors (,index numbers, and html code) and cannot put in colors that don't exist in the palette.

To do that:

Image>Mode>Indexed...
Use custom palette
Select the U7 palette
Make sure remove unused colors from palette map is unchecked
(Dithering should be disabled but shouldn't matter since no colors are used.)
Convert

You should be good to go at that point.

Lathlas · Post by **Lathlas** » Thu Oct 01, 2009 12:18 am

Thanks, but I have the U7 palette and know how to use it, that isn't the problem. For some reason all of my files got saved with the wrong palette, even ones that were fine from several months ago and I haven't edited since. I need to go back over them one at a time, which is the part that sucks.

I actually use two seperate palette files in GIMP, one thats the full 255 colors, and one that has the animated colors stripped out to guarantee that there aren't any color rotating pixels.

The reason it's such a hassle is that simply converting to the correct palette sometimes has bizarre dithering issues. Sometimes it's perfect, usually it's not.

I think computers just hate me.

Lathlas · Post by **Lathlas** » Fri Oct 02, 2009 10:54 pm

I redid all the palettes one at a time to see if I can save any of them and I think only a handful of portraits are totally botched.

Now I have a slightly different palette issue. If I use Exult Studio to add in my new portraits one at a time they seem to work fine, but if I use ipack to create a new faces.vga file they get created with a botched palette.

Am I using ipack wrong? My scriptfile looks like this:

archive faces.vga
palette palettes.flx
0/2: 000_
1/1: 001_
2/2: 002_
etc...

Should I be using something instead of palettes.flx for the palette?

Post by **Malignant Manor** » Sat Oct 03, 2009 1:33 am

Your problem is ipack uses the palette indexes and ignores what colors are actually used in the picture. Exult Studio will try and match the colors in a file and select the closest palette index that matches it. Your portraits show up properly with ipack when I edited them with GIMP to use proper palette (only tested Spark).

Post by **Malignant Manor** » Sat Oct 03, 2009 3:32 am

I see what you mean after testing some other shapes, some minor although horrible looking differences appear. I think that Exult Studio outputs the wrong html code for a few indexes. I noticed a difference between what is displayed in Exult Studio and what it outputs for use in GIMP.

Lathlas · Post by **Lathlas** » Sat Oct 03, 2009 5:19 am

Minor although horrible is a pretty accurate description. I guess I'll just skip testing with ipack for now.

Post by **Malignant Manor** » Sat Oct 03, 2009 7:30 am

GIMP doesn't seem to be saving the color index properly when converting no matter what I try. It looks fine until I reload and select the proper color map. It then looks the same as using ipack.

Post by **Malignant Manor** » Sat Oct 03, 2009 7:53 am

Shp files seem to work properly but aren't handy for web viewing.

Post by **marzo** » Sat Oct 03, 2009 1:55 pm

When editing U7-palette PNGs with Gimp, a workaround that works for me is:
* Create a palette of 255 colors from the U7 palette by deleting the last color;
* Duplicate that palette and make it into a 256-color palette by duplicating the first entry of the palette (the first two entries should be black);
* When you edit a PNG, convert it to the 256-color palette before saving.

The above works because the last palette entry is used in U7/Exult for transparency; hence, its absence in the palette is a non-issue.

I have actually preferred to use shps instead as they work without problems (as Malignant Manor points out). You can hack-up a script that extracts all shps to PNGs using ipack and dump the PNGs to your website, while working on the shps directly. You can then use expack to build the vga file.