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Update Portraits for NPC's of the OC

VasculioVasculio Member Posts: 482
in General Discussions NWN:EE
I had issue with the forced change to some of NPC portraits. Mainly Tomi Undergallows

See... we get this cool wild rogue halfing thief in this portrait and he gets replaced by this boring loser, which is more of landscape photo then a portrait

I know... like him. Two other characters had there portraits replace because of some vague legal issue with likeness. Sharwyn is good update... Fenthick was good update too. Even though i prefer the original over it. So is possible to update Tomi Undergallows with a new Portrait like the original?

Comments

  • Dark_AnsemDark_Ansem Member Posts: 992
    Ninjamestari said:

    I'd like the Original Campaign to feature the original character portraits for Tomi, Sharwyn, Fenthick and Nasher alike. The newer "improved" portraits feel out of place and don't even look as good as the originals. I seriously can't figure out why on earth did they have to change them.

    Copyright issues
  • NinjamestariNinjamestari Member Posts: 18
    Dark_Ansem said:

    Ninjamestari said:

    I'd like the Original Campaign to feature the original character portraits for Tomi, Sharwyn, Fenthick and Nasher alike. The newer "improved" portraits feel out of place and don't even look as good as the originals. I seriously can't figure out why on earth did they have to change them.

    Copyright issues
    What? How? The original portraits were in the original game, and an expansion changed them. How did copyright issues get into that?
  • Dark_AnsemDark_Ansem Member Posts: 992
    Took the original owners ages to find legal BS to find something to threaten Bioware with.
  • BelleSorciereBelleSorciere Member Posts: 2,108
    Ninjamestari said:

    Dark_Ansem said:

    Ninjamestari said:

    I'd like the Original Campaign to feature the original character portraits for Tomi, Sharwyn, Fenthick and Nasher alike. The newer "improved" portraits feel out of place and don't even look as good as the originals. I seriously can't figure out why on earth did they have to change them.

    Copyright issues
    What? How? The original portraits were in the original game, and an expansion changed them. How did copyright issues get into that?
    The explanation is linked in this comment.
  • NinjamestariNinjamestari Member Posts: 18
    BelleSorciere said:

    Ninjamestari said:

    Dark_Ansem said:

    Ninjamestari said:

    I'd like the Original Campaign to feature the original character portraits for Tomi, Sharwyn, Fenthick and Nasher alike. The newer "improved" portraits feel out of place and don't even look as good as the originals. I seriously can't figure out why on earth did they have to change them.

    Copyright issues
    What? How? The original portraits were in the original game, and an expansion changed them. How did copyright issues get into that?
    The explanation is linked in this comment.
    Dear god, the stupidity of this world, Artists being lazy and stupid enough to use copyrighted material, and then the owners of those pics being petty enough to raise a legal issue about it xD
    Thanks for the link, now I finally know the story :)
  • Dark_AnsemDark_Ansem Member Posts: 992
    Ninjamestari said:

    BelleSorciere said:

    Ninjamestari said:

    Dark_Ansem said:

    Ninjamestari said:

    I'd like the Original Campaign to feature the original character portraits for Tomi, Sharwyn, Fenthick and Nasher alike. The newer "improved" portraits feel out of place and don't even look as good as the originals. I seriously can't figure out why on earth did they have to change them.

    Copyright issues
    What? How? The original portraits were in the original game, and an expansion changed them. How did copyright issues get into that?
    The explanation is linked in this comment.
    Dear god, the stupidity of this world, Artists being lazy and stupid enough to use copyrighted material, and then the owners of those pics being petty enough to raise a legal issue about it xD
    Thanks for the link, now I finally know the story :)
    They didn't really "use" copyrighted material. They were inspired by it. Except for Fenthick, he REALLY looked like Joseph Fiennes!
  • BelleSorciereBelleSorciere Member Posts: 2,108
    It's not petty for artists to defend their work. It's petty to expect artists to allow their work to be used for free and without credit.

    Also, those pictures weren't inspired by the photos, they were practically traced reproductions.
  • NinjamestariNinjamestari Member Posts: 18
    I agree that it isn't petty for an artist to defend their work. What I don't agree with is considering a photograph to be a piece of art, that is an insult to every real artist out there. If it can be produced with a press of a button, it isn't art.
  • BelleSorciereBelleSorciere Member Posts: 2,108
    Ninjamestari said:

    I agree that it isn't petty for an artist to defend their work. What I don't agree with is considering a photograph to be a piece of art, that is an insult to every real artist out there. If it can be produced with a press of a button, it isn't art.

    So photography is not simply produced with the press of a button. It's not like clicking a link on the internet. It's a matter of lighting, pose, presentation, and more. It's a lot of actual real work. It is definitely an art form and calling it such is not an insult to other artists. Also, whether or not one considers photography an art form, photographs are still a product of someone's work and belong to them. It's not petty for a photographer to defend their work, whether it's art or not. To put it more bluntly, if I take a photograph and it gets published, I expect to get paid for it. And so should you.
  • BelleSorciereBelleSorciere Member Posts: 2,108
    https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/oct/19/photography-is-it-art
    What some pioneering photographers recognised straight away was that photographs, like paintings, are artificially constructed portrayals: they too had to be carefully composed, lit and produced. Julia Margaret Cameron made this explicit in her re-envisagings of renaissance pictures. Her Light and Love of 1865, for example, shows a woman in a Marian headcovering bending over her infant who is sleeping on a bed of straw. It is part of a line of nativity scenes that is as long as Christian art, and was hailed by one critic as the photographic equivalent of "the method of drawing employed by the great Italian masters". I Wait, 1872, shows a child with angel's wings resting its chin on folded arms and wearing the bored expression that brings to mind the underwhelmed cherubs in Raphael's Sistine Madonna. Such photographs were not direct quotations from paintings, but they raised in the viewer's mind a string of associations that gave photography a historical hinterland.
  • BelleSorciereBelleSorciere Member Posts: 2,108
    It wasn't a vague issue with likeness. The original art was directly taken from photographs Bioware didn't have the right to use. To be fair, Bioware thought they had the right, and when they found out they didn't they replaced the art.
  • NinjamestariNinjamestari Member Posts: 18
    edited November 2017
    Anyone can conjure up a few paragraphs of bullshit to describe any mundane artifact as art, that doesn't make it so. Look at how many empty emotional fluff words that quote of yours has that don't actually mean anything. Take the story of Merda D'artista as an example of this point. People in general aren't very good at discerning what is and what isn't art, therefore the more agreeable feminine mind usually wants to be inclusive and let everything be art while the more disagreeable masculine mind tends to not consider anything art if it is avoidable. In the art world, just like everywhere else in the western society, we see how the shift in gender positions has reshaped a lot of things, and thus it is way easier for all sorts of pretenders to fool people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist's_Shit

    EDI: oh yeah, sorry about that, we really did go completely off rails. I'll leave it at this.
  • BelleSorciereBelleSorciere Member Posts: 2,108
    edited November 2017
    Edit: Not really worth it to come down to your level.

  • devSindevSin Member Posts: 32
    edited November 2017
    BelleSorciere said:

    It wasn't a vague issue with likeness. The original art was directly taken from photographs Bioware didn't have the right to use. To be fair, Bioware thought they had the right, and when they found out they didn't they replaced the art.

    To be fair, all the other portraits they were forced to change were basically modifications that preserved the original appearance.

    This was a soul-crushing overhaul, that turned Tomi from a spirited halfling rogue to a hobbit with a pompadour.
  • BelleSorciereBelleSorciere Member Posts: 2,108
    edited November 2017
    Are you saying the original portraits preserved the original appearance or that the replacements preserved the original appearance? Because if the latter, that is not exactly correct. They are certainly similar, though.
  • JuliusBorisovJuliusBorisov Member, Administrator, Moderator, Developer Posts: 22,758
    Ninjamestari said:

    Anyone can conjure up a few paragraphs of bullshit to describe any mundane artifact as art, that doesn't make it so. Look at how many empty emotional fluff words that quote of yours has that don't actually mean anything. Take the story of Merda D'artista as an example of this point. People in general aren't very good at discerning what is and what isn't art, therefore the more agreeable feminine mind usually wants to be inclusive and let everything be art while the more disagreeable masculine mind tends to not consider anything art if it is avoidable. In the art world, just like everywhere else in the western society, we see how the shift in gender positions has reshaped a lot of things, and thus it is way easier for all sorts of pretenders to fool people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist's_Shit

    EDI: oh yeah, sorry about that, we really did go completely off rails. I'll leave it at this.

    This thread is not for discussions, it's for suggestions. And if you want to have a discussion on this forum, create a separate thread, please, but read the Site rules first, which don't permit being rude to groups of people.
  • devSindevSin Member Posts: 32
    edited November 2017
    Going by the list here, one of those is clearly not like the rest ("appearance" in this case is more framing/pose than the fact that they had to reduce visual similarity to source material).
  • BelleSorciereBelleSorciere Member Posts: 2,108
    edited November 2017
    That is true. I agree the replacement Tomi is not that great, and I did much prefer the original.
  • NinjamestariNinjamestari Member Posts: 18
    JuliusBorisov said:

    Ninjamestari said:

    Anyone can conjure up a few paragraphs of bullshit to describe any mundane artifact as art, that doesn't make it so. Look at how many empty emotional fluff words that quote of yours has that don't actually mean anything. Take the story of Merda D'artista as an example of this point. People in general aren't very good at discerning what is and what isn't art, therefore the more agreeable feminine mind usually wants to be inclusive and let everything be art while the more disagreeable masculine mind tends to not consider anything art if it is avoidable. In the art world, just like everywhere else in the western society, we see how the shift in gender positions has reshaped a lot of things, and thus it is way easier for all sorts of pretenders to fool people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist's_Shit

    EDI: oh yeah, sorry about that, we really did go completely off rails. I'll leave it at this.

    This thread is not for discussions, it's for suggestions. And if you want to have a discussion on this forum, create a separate thread, please, but read the Site rules first, which don't permit being rude to groups of people.
    How about pointless and false accusations of being rude? I'd say that's being rude against an individual and I consider that comment to be an attack against my reputation and I would like an apology, especially considering that you've got this blue hue behind your post which is an indication that you're abusing an authoritative position.
  • JuliusBorisovJuliusBorisov Member, Administrator, Moderator, Developer Posts: 22,758
    "Anyone can conjure up a few paragraphs of bullshit" and "Look at how many empty emotional fluff words that quote of yours has that don't actually mean anything" are rude and disrespectful to other user(s).

    "more agreeable feminine mind" "we see how the shift in gender positions has reshaped a lot of things, and thus it is way easier for all sorts of pretenders to fool people." are rude to groups of people.

    This is what is prohibited by the Site rules.

    When you registered on this Site you agreeed to follow those rules.

    And moderators are here to make sure the Site rules work.

    Your comment is also off-topic and is meant to switch the constuctive tone of this thread.
  • semiticgoddesssemiticgoddess Member Posts: 14,903
    Ninjamestari said:


    How about pointless and false accusations of being rude? I'd say that's being rude against an individual and I consider that comment to be an attack against my reputation and I would like an apology, especially considering that you've got this blue hue behind your post which is an indication that you're abusing an authoritative position.

    @JuliusBorisov is a moderator and administrator here, @Ninjamestari, hence the blue background (grey backgrounds like mine indicate moderators who are not administrators). This is exactly his job: to enforce the Site Rules. We've been doing this for years and you're being held to the same standards as everyone else.

    I understand if you're offended, but you can ask literally anyone on this entire forum what they think of @JuliusBorisov's conduct as a moderator. You will get the same answer.

    That said, if you feel that someone, even a moderator, is breaking the Site Rules by attacking YOU, then you can report it via the "Flag" button at the bottom right of the post in question. The Site Rules explicitly say that this is the ONLY acceptable response to personal attacks; fighting it out in-thread is not tolerated here because it just encourages people to throw out an endless stream of insults rather than halting the behavior. Once you report a post, a new thread is created where all moderators pitch in and discuss privately what action, if any, is needed.

    I notice you're new here. You should bear in mind that the rules here and the local culture are probably very different from what you're used to on other forums. Whenever two or more users get in a heated argument and start throwing around personal attacks, the moderators put a stop to it.

    Any further off-topic comments along these lines will be deleted. I've seen this exact story play out a hundred times before, and the outcome is always the same.
  • VasculioVasculio Member Posts: 482
    HunterRayder93 said:

    I was thinking of a change that would not bring any conflict with the existing modules and updating portraits of NPC creatures, etc. ... BD could make a change of style at least, there are some comrades such as Tomi who have a different portrait now compared to vanilla, vanilla's Tomi's portrait was much better than that of HoTU and horrible in my opinion.

    OC:



    HoTU:



    But in itself many creatures and enemies have some disappointing icons unlike other creatures that year's most beautiful Art Concepts defined.
    How did i miss this post?! I agree 100% Tomi had the worst makeover ever!

  • SystemSystem Administrator Posts: 199
    edited December 2017
    Comments split from: Suggestions Thread: Art Assets (models, textures, images, sounds) have been transferred here.
  • scriverscriver Member Posts: 2,072
    One! Two! Tomi needs to (under-)go (another make over to better portray his spirit and personality and also make it a portraitier portrait)!
  • AstroBryGuyAstroBryGuy Member Posts: 3,437
    edited December 2017
    devSin said:

    Going by the list here, one of those is clearly not like the rest ("appearance" in this case is more framing/pose than the fact that they had to reduce visual similarity to source material).

    The HotU revision of Boddyknock Glinckle's portrait was pretty extensive as well (I guess the first revision wasn't different enough from Leonard Nimoy's appearance).

    Original:


    First revision:


    HotU revision:

  • FardragonFardragon Member Posts: 4,511
    I think the problem was made worse because the gnome sounded like Spock as well as looked like him.

    There really was a creativity bypass when it came to those NPCs.
  • DorcusDorcus Member Posts: 270
    lol @ the Gucci ad one tho
  • AstroBryGuyAstroBryGuy Member Posts: 3,437
    Fardragon said:

    I think the problem was made worse because the gnome sounded like Spock as well as looked like him.

    There really was a creativity bypass when it came to those NPCs.

    I always thought Boddyknock sounded like C-3PO... :smiley:
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