Amazing quality renders of Sacred characters

[Schot 407]

I've been dieing to figure out how to capture renders of a character in game for what seems like months but everytime I think about it something else comes up, lol. Long ago I remember being able to take screenshots of a character class that would have only a black background. I remember the images looking very very nice and thought it would be nice to be able to show case them at darkmatters... Well no more thinking about it I say!

 

After chatting about all kinds of stuff with bhj we got to talking about images related to Sacred and it was then that it occured to me to ask bhj. He always knows this kinda stuff, haha. Sure enough he had the answer for me so big thank you to bhj! You made mah day.

 

The answer is that in order to get a great screenshot of one of your characters you go to the character selection screen, click once to select a character and then push Ctrl-B. This will output a character0.tga and a character1.tga to your Capture folder of your Sacred installation. The first will be a render with a white background and the second will be against black. Note: Full Screen must be on! As an example here's what I got:

 

Now for those as picky as I am the renders need a little bit of help and here's what photoshop was able to do for my BM:

 

 

And just for kicks a photoshoped black version:

I think this could be an excellent way to show off the various sets so I'm going to try out a few ideas and see what I can do with them.

 

Give it a try!

[EvilMale 7]

Wow Nice work there Schot very Nice

[gogoblender 3,070]

Wicked!

Can you do this for all the classes?

I know it's a lot of work...but dang this looks good!

 

+++

 

 

gogo

[Schot 407]

Thanx Evilmale.

 

I think I could gogo. This ones needs a tiny bit more work I think... Too washed out?

 

[bhj 24]

hehe they looks nice (note to self take SC of all your chars)

[gogoblender 3,070]

FAAAAAAAAANTASTIC!

I love them!

 

And....we can scrap those little baby doll images in the Character Class page and stick in this snazzy original content.

Very nice work!

 

 

gogo

[Schot 407]

2 new ones. Whew! Were they ever putting up a fight in Photoshop. My pc kinda crashed in the middle of my work which I hadn't saved in... Well, too long. lol. "Noooooooooooo!" Haha. Seeking therapy.

 

Ack! Looks like the Seraphim needs some more work...

 

 

[EvilMale 7]

Wow Schot really nice work there they look AWESOME!!

[~Night.Wolfe~ 16]

Awesome! Thanks for the tip on how to do it!! I was wondering how to get a good render for a VERY long time!

[Schot 407]

Hehe. Thanx! Though in all truth after I posted those last two renders I decided... I hate them! lol. I don't know... Just isn't right to me somehow... Must push more pixels!

[gial 2]

Gotta luv that Octanion set on the WE.

 

I only have the somewhat crippled Photoshop Elements. Can it do what you did with the real thing? I'm no graphics guru -- software is my game -- what kind of things did you do?

[Silearth 6]

Very cool!

 

I was able to do a--less than stellar--version by taking a regular screen shot and then cutting......

 

Going to have to give this a try.

[~Night.Wolfe~ 16]

Darn I tried it and it didn't work for me.... I set it to full screen like you said and went to Ancarian Campaign to choose the character (since I want renders of the default armor/look of the characters) and clicked on each character in turn and did Ctrl+B... but the screenies had the background you see in game and showed all the characters with just the one I clicked highlighted

[Silearth 6]

I clicked on a character and took a screenie. I got something in 4 colors with heavy dithering.

[fRACTAL 0]

Those look amazing Schot! I managed make one, and two things, first, how did you make the sort of border/glow around them (what exact settings) and second wouldn't these be good for showing the equipped images of full sets?

I made one of full Talia Mel's.. (aren't those downloadable characters with full sets useful

~Doom

 

P.S. Here it is

Edited November 9, 2007 by TimOfDoom

[Schot 407]

Whoa boy. Looks like I missed some posts here, haha.

 

@gial:

Reeeally not sure about whether elements could do it or not but what I did with the renders was somwhat basic I think. The major steps in creating them were cutting apart two or three versions of the same render and combining all the nice parts into a single layer, duplicating said layer and applying the gaussion blur filter to it, setting that layer's blend mode to lighten and adding the layer style Drop Shadow to the bottom most layer. For the most part.

 

@~Night.Wolfe~:

Ah it's a funny thing taking those pics. It's a bit of a wonky process. Sometimes you only get black background renders and so on. Some things that are constant are the filename the renders get. Every time you take a single capture two renders are dropped into your captures folder called characters00.tga and characters01.tga. And they don't accumulate in your capture folder like the regular screnshots do unfortunately. Every time you capture a render it overwrites the previous renders automatically.

 

 

 

@Sil: Oh you'd really have a much easier time doing it this way seeing as there will only be a solid white or black background.

The dithering you're seeing could be a result of the fact that you're not playing with the config.exe setup for Fullscreen mode. I had this problem for a long time and as soon as I set config.exe to fullscreen everything was fine.

 

 

lol Tim. Glad you found them of use, haha! They sure are. Very nice work on the render. Let's see. About those numbers you want... *goes to check* Here you go.

 

Oh and yes they would be brilliant for the set item pages. TherionX has been working on the Daemon renders which you can see he has completed all of the Daemon set renders. Very nice work at that. I'm not sure if he is working on others already so you might want to ask him what he is working on so that neither of you end up with wasted time. For myself I'll be taking care of the Battle Mage renders.

 

Cheers and I'll catch you as soon as I can.

[fRACTAL 0]

Thanks, I started work on the seraphim set items, so far astralas and talia mels have renders...

~Doom

[Schot 407]

Something you might enjoy trying is to play around with "exposure" and "hue/saturation". I find the renders are a bit dull when they come out of the game and use those two options to bring a little life into the renders. You can find those too options under the Image menu dropdown-->Adjustments. For the Hue/Saturation option I only touch the Saturation slider, increasing it a bit to give more colour. For brightening renders I would suggest using exposure only. If there are spots that you need to brighten up then I find the "Dodge Tool" perfect for this. You can find the dodge tool in your box of tools. It's icon is a black sphere on a stick. If it isn't already visible then you'll need to right click on the 7th icon down from the top right of the tool box.

 

Looking forward to more renders!

 

P.s.

Here's a latest attempt that I've since put on the wiki for the Amarri set. Before and after. Things I did was combining the good qualities of the two output renders into a single layer with a white background, used the magic wand to Layer copy the BM only, increased the BM exposure and saturation, brightened dark spots with dodge tool, duplicated the BM as a new layer on top of it, applied a gaussion blur with lite settings and set that layers blend mode to lighten, selected the BM layer below the blured BM layer and added a small drop shadow to soften the edges.