I've converted some in-engine screenshots into decent-looking paintings. What other subjects should I do? (The long-term goal is to replace all of the current assets which use real-world paintings.)
So far I've done:
- Baar Dau at Sunrise
- King Hlaalu Helseth
- Queen Barenziah (new)
And people on Discord have also requested:
- Duke Vedam Dren
Queen Barenziah (at a younger age than her appearance in Tribunal)
Ideas people have suggested, but which don't work as well with this method of generating paintings:
- Vivec, Almalexia, and Sotha Sil — non-imperialized Dunmer don't seem interested in IRL-Western-style realistic paintings. And the Tribunes probably wouldn't sit for some outlander who wanted to paint their portrait. So any paintings of the Tribunal would have to be done without a reference, which means the images I can make with this screenshot-based approach are too "realistic." One way to work around that would be to do paintings of prominent statues of the Tribunes.
2016-08-28 05:22
10 hours 34 min ago
Other subjects:
Some more important western-oriented people that aren't in Mainland yet but will probably have NPCs implemented Soon™ in the sectionfiles:
2016-08-28 05:22
10 hours 34 min ago
I'd also be interested to know what program/process you used on these. They look nice.
2018-08-13 09:52
3 hours 41 min ago
Correction, Edayn will certainly not be in TV, he's over in Kragenmoor. Sadrathim is a cadet branch of the family
"Forum sigantures suck" - a great man
Thanks! The TL;DR is that I'm (1) carefully staging and pre-editing the original screenshots so that neighboring shapes are lit very differently, (2) uploading them to the free AI Gahaku image transformer to make a base painting, and then (3) recombining that with the original screenshot in Photoshop through a complex mixture of blending layers, filters, clonestamping, and occasional straight up digital painting, in order to recover enough of the original colors and detail to make the subject recognizeable again. Also, in Barenziah's case, I "de-aged" her by editing her head texture before staging the screenshot.
Step 3 is the part with the most variability — the Baar Dau PSD has 9 layers, Barenziah has around 20, and Helseth has over 30. It depends on how much detail you need to recover, how hard it is to isolate that detail from parts you want to exclude, and how close the AI's output is to what you have in mind.
Here are the original screenshots and AI Gahaku outputs for the three paintings I've done so far, so you can see the intermediate steps. Note that these aren't fresh-out-of-the-engine screenshots; I moved Baar Dau higher in the sky, played with the exposure levels, and added a slight glow around Barenziah's hair to help the AI give me starter paintings with the right basic shapes.
2016-08-28 05:22
10 hours 34 min ago
Nice. I like that tool.
I made Duchess Jandacia:
Here's a portrait of Atran Oran (on a parapet of his manor, with his fields and Almas Thirr behind him) that I did a while ago and never posted here.
Also, I was able to compress a couple of the PSD files enough to share them on Discord earlier. They might be useful as references for other Photoshop users, since you can learn a lot about someone's workflow just by looking at how their layers are set up.