Particially animated Backgrounds with nude females behind and around the leader or whoever.

[Lordsyke]

It seems kinda tedious to make the main characters nude. Why not just have the option for a background where there's alot of them around and maybe just some movement and animation?

[Armchair]

I can't speak for everyone, but I don't know how to animate anything so IMO animating the background is more tedious than making static nude portraits.

[Screws]

2 hours ago, Armchair said:

I can't speak for everyone, but I don't know how to animate anything so IMO animating the background is more tedious than making static nude portraits.

From personal experience, cutting out a static nude portrait, just one.. takes about 10-20 min each depending on the difficulty of the background and details of the character model itself, plus if any restoration work needs to be done (I.E. part of the image is cut off and needs to be recreated [I actually enjoy doing restoration work weirdly enough lol]) Mugginato can apparently cut out pics in like 2-3 min each, idk what the wizard is doing, but doin' somethin' lol.

There is a guide on how to animate the models themselves, but for backgrounds.. that might be asking a bit much, not even sure if it is technically possible. I just know a lot more effort goes into animating the models than cutting out static images. 

[Armchair]

Mugginato must have some secret sauce workflow to get that down to 2-3 min.

 

I'm actually planning to release a portrait mod of my own soon.  I just spent the past week or so cleaning up portraits.  The backgrounds on mine were pretty easy, mostly were solid colors or simple gradients, and it still took me 5 to 10 minutes to clean things up nice so that you don't see glaring flaws around the edges.   I did find a plugin for GIMP that runs the image through an "AI" driven algorithm to cut out the background.  That worked great 20% of the time.  Otherwise I was stuck extracting things with the select tools or simply tracing with the eraser tool by hand.  Things could probably be sped up if I was less picky.  Flaws visible at full resolution can vanish once you shrink down to the resolutions that the DDS portrait files use.

 

 

[Screws]

18 hours ago, Armchair said:

Mugginato must have some secret sauce workflow to get that down to 2-3 min.

 

I'm actually planning to release a portrait mod of my own soon.  I just spent the past week or so cleaning up portraits.  The backgrounds on mine were pretty easy, mostly were solid colors or simple gradients, and it still took me 5 to 10 minutes to clean things up nice so that you don't see glaring flaws around the edges.   I did find a plugin for GIMP that runs the image through an "AI" driven algorithm to cut out the background.  That worked great 20% of the time.  Otherwise I was stuck extracting things with the select tools or simply tracing with the eraser tool by hand.  Things could probably be sped up if I was less picky.  Flaws visible at full resolution can vanish once you shrink down to the resolutions that the DDS portrait files use.

 

 

He do indeed. I asked em about it and he told me something to do with some tools in the program he's using, but I use a different software. Feathering tool/Fuzzy tool and such leaves behind residue in my pics so I decide to just erase around the outlines manually, then select the leftover background and delete it all in one go after basically cutting the character out. It's like cutting a cartoon character out of a newspaper article lol.

Yeah, those flaws often don't appear in the DDS portrait format, but still.. YOU know they are there. lol. Hell there are 1-2 pics in some of the sets I made that I still want to go back and fix because its like a small cluster of pixels that is super easy to miss, but I see em every time.

I've actually taken to the practice since then of adding a Light background and a black background that I can toggle the visibility of on any pic I work on. That way I can see if there are any residual pixels left behind. Nothing worse than having say... an off color outline of the character, or some pixels floating around in space that aren't meant to.

Btw, you can turn in pics to Mugginato to add in to his own mod and he'll credit you, BUT.. he won't necessarily use all of the pics you send em, which kinda sucks because I had spent a lot of time on some of em that he didn't use x.x

[Armchair]

6 hours ago, Screws said:

He do indeed. I asked em about it and he told me something to do with some tools in the program he's using, but I use a different software. Feathering tool/Fuzzy tool and such leaves behind residue in my pics so I decide to just erase around the outlines manually, then select the leftover background and delete it all in one go after basically cutting the character out. It's like cutting a cartoon character out of a newspaper article lol.

Yeah, those flaws often don't appear in the DDS portrait format, but still.. YOU know they are there. lol. Hell there are 1-2 pics in some of the sets I made that I still want to go back and fix because its like a small cluster of pixels that is super easy to miss, but I see em every time.

I've actually taken to the practice since then of adding a Light background and a black background that I can toggle the visibility of on any pic I work on. That way I can see if there are any residual pixels left behind. Nothing worse than having say... an off color outline of the character, or some pixels floating around in space that aren't meant to.

Btw, you can turn in pics to Mugginato to add in to his own mod and he'll credit you, BUT.. he won't necessarily use all of the pics you send em, which kinda sucks because I had spent a lot of time on some of em that he didn't use x.x

When cutting subjects out from the foreground, I usually follow the following steps.

1. Create a duplicate of the original layer so that I have a working copy and a master copy
2. add a layer between the two that is some high contrast color with the subject that I'm working on.  Usually for me this has been some flavor of dark green.
3. start cutting away at the working copy with assorted selection tools and erasers.  Be quick and dirty with the first pass.  I try different techniques here depending on the image.
4. inspect the working copy for flaws where I accidentally deleted more than I intended to.  Then select the flawed area and restore it with copy/pastes from the original master copy.
5. Finally select everything, feather the selection, invert the selection, and delete the selection to produce feathered edges on the whole subject.

 

For mugginatto not using all of your images, I understand that since it is a time consuming process and we all live busy lives.  I can't speak for muggin, but I suspect that muggin would be more likely to incorporate all of your images if you simplified the process further to make it more "cut and paste" for inclusion into his mod.

• Shrink your images down to the same dimensions and positioning as the other portraits in vanilla framework
• create the species class and portrait definitions so that they can be readily copy/pasted into the mod.

Even then, it's muggin's mod and perhaps muggin simply might dislike some of the images from an aesthetic standpoint.  But since muggin implemented a subset of your images into the mod, it would be very quick and easy for you to implement the remainder of the missing portraits within your local copy by just resizing the images and then adding the extra lines in the portraits.txt file to expand the pool of portraits for that species.  At least then you can personally enjoy the full set of images in your games.  I've done more exhaustive "surgery" on my local copy of vanilla framework and have redefined the male portrait definitions to point to their female counterparts just so that I'm only looking at women when I play.

 

 

 

Back to the OP's topic, I noticed on the planetary view that the backgrounds were moving last night if I select a pop that's working a job.  That opens up a details screen where a bigger version of the pop's portrait is visible alongside a city street background.  That might be part of the UI dynamic overhaul mod.  I might need to turn mods off and see if something similar is present in a default game.   The movement looks like it is simple panning back and forth along a larger image.  I don't know if more complex movement is possible.  I haven't personally explored the prospect of animating anything whatsoever, so I don't know how to go about making what the Op described.

Edited March 25, 2023 by Armchair

[Lordsyke]

Would it be possible to make it so there can be multiple characters in portraits? Like you can have a basic male or female and a bunch of girls behind them?

[Armchair]

A portrait is just a picture.  If you wish, that picture could depict a person with other people in the background.  At least that's the case with static portraits.   They're just image files in the .dds format.   I don't know what's involved with creating moving portraits.

[Lordsyke]

12 hours ago, Armchair said:

A portrait is just a picture.  If you wish, that picture could depict a person with other people in the background.  At least that's the case with static portraits.   They're just image files in the .dds format.   I don't know what's involved with creating moving portraits.

Yeah that's the point. Make one that's animated but includes multiple people in it.