Wednesday, January 05, 2011

Incursions: New Character Avatar Creator

The second part of my SISI investigations is all about the new character creator.

First off, it looks amazing. I'm sure most of you have seen the images and they do not do justice to the detail you can get on these models. Secondly, still a lot of rough spots in the interface such as some colour selectors not complete and some choices not updating until you click something else. I'm sure they will all be fixed by Jan 18th.

My initial effort was with myself, i.e. Kirith Kodachi. He's Caldari Deteis and I wanted an avatar that looked angry while withdrawn. A little aspect of a recovering drug user/abuser too.

(Click to embiggen any image)

Basically you get a basic form based on race and bloodline, then you can make structural modifications and hair/eyes etc. There is a lot to like but I was a little put off by the colour selector (i.e. hard to use (buggy?) and lack of options) and the clothing selection was pretty limited as well. Also, no accessories like metal implants and tatoos? Sad puppy face!
All that being said I feel I was able to create something close to what I envision Kirith to be.

After you get your character structurally created, you go into portrait mode where you can position your character and alter their mouth for smile/sneering, eyes and head position, lighting, background, and take a set of four images and select one as your current avatar. I didn't realize all of this for Kirith so got a sucky portrait on sisi which I can't go back and change as far as I can tell.
Next I worked on Kirith's older and scarred brother Korannon. I wanted to make him look more business-man-like and less haunted than Kirith while still looking like he had a hard go of it at some point. I'm pleased with the result.
Actually that's not quite true: I did Korneilia before Korannon and still didn't know about the head/eye/mouth movement for portraits. Still, for a Minmatar she looks nothing like what I would have expected.


I decided to do another Minmatar character, Kla'strit, and armed with my knowledge of the bugs and tricks I created an avatar that I really liked.

Finally I played around with little used alt Sun Tomah who I used to use as a second BPC creator when I was seriously into inventing. I spent the most time on her trying to create a really attractive avatar for a Caldari Achura.
The close up results I was quite pleased with, and had fun in portrait mode trying to get the friendly smile down pat. Sorry, no pics of it here.
However, now that I'm looking at this view it strikes me that her bottom half is too wide in comparison to her top half.

Unfortunately, no editing for you! Sigh.

4 comments:

  1. Oh man I can't wait to get my hands on this! I'll have to create some useless alts to practice on first, so I'm ready for the big dance with Rixx.

    And don't worry Kirith, I find lots of women with that "bottom half is too wide compared to the top half" problem.

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  2. Anonymous9:57 am

    I've enjoyed playing around with the character editor as well and I was pretty pleased with my results. The thing I like about it most is that my character looks more a product of my imagination rather than a random conglomeration of other portraits I've seen.

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  3. I have mixed feelings about all this. I do think that the new characters look great from a design point of view.

    However.

    I also feel that the new toons don't look anything like what I imagine the races to actually look like. One example being the female Minmatar alt-toon you created above. I mean come on, she's meant to have some sort of tribal background, am I right? She looks like some kind of cheap hooker. (No offence).

    :)

    MB.

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  4. http://s1104.photobucket.com/albums/h333/Kalaratiri/ I've spent quite a lot of time on sisi testing this out. On the whole I am really pleased with it. The first images are newer, the ones at the end from my original attempts. Hopefully I have improved as I go :)

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