Guild Wars 2

First, I have to just say that all the fantastic art being posted here is really inspiring. Alas, I has no talent in the drawing/painting department. So, I thought I’d try taking screenshots to use as the foundation, then retouch and add some detailing to improve the quality and hopefully to elevate it from a simple screencap to something more reminiscent of a 3d render. It seems it will take some time, so I figured I’d start a thread to track my progress in case anyone is interested in trying something similar.

First up: my warrior, The Kraken Queen.
The left side of the image is the cropped, raw screenshot and the right is my current progress.

I’m really interested to hear any thoughts on the progress so far as well as any ideas you guys might have for how to improve other aspects of the image, i.e. what landscape/castle/cave in Tyria should be screencapped for use as the background, etc. =)

best,
-Face

MORE UPDATES BELOW =D

First of all, great job. This is a cool idea. I think for the rest of the screenshot, you’ll probably want to work on smoothing out the more obvious jagged shapes of the polygons, making them more round. Especially along the waist. Also, perhaps more life could be added to the rest of her face. Making her lips more full and less cartoony.

I’m looking forward to more updates. I might want to try this out myself with my own character.

Thanks Malafide! I agree about cleaning up the jaggies for sure, but I’m kind of dreading it, because it’s gonna be really tedious. As far as the face goes, I see what you’re saying and I may make some slight changes, but I really want her to look just like she does in game. It’s a good suggestion though, I will probably play around with some subtle changes after work today and see how it goes.

The really difficult thing to do, would be to replace the reflections on the armor with one that seems to be reflecting an actual environment. Maybe you can look for example pictures of actual armor, and see how you can retouch the look of the screenshot to resemble more realistic reflections. But that’s quite a challenging bit of Photoshop work.

Another interesting idea, thanks! It would be doable I think, I do have a fair amount of experience with photoshop/photomanipulation ( http://ondraedan.deviantart.com/ ) so I think I could handle it technically, the tricky part will be finding the balance in getting the reflections to look good, as the armor in this case doesn’t exactly have a polished mirror finish so detailed reflection would look out of place. I’ll make a note of it though and give it a shot.

Very cool, I like her name!

Maybe, just include colors from her environment (whichever that ends up being) as highlights on her armor, since as you pointed out it’s not something that will exactly reflect details?

As far as suggestions, hmm, I think the aquarium in DR would be an interesting backdrop.

It looks good so far and I’m interested in seeing how it progresses.

Thanks, Coco! Her name is a reference to Asha Greyjoy’s character in the Song of Ice and Fire books. She’s kinda meh in the HBO show, but in the books she’s a total badkitten. Good idea for the armor reflections, I’ll keep it in mind.

I’ve started touching up the armor/skin boundaries, I’ll post another update probably later tonight.

Updates:
- Lots of repainting around certain armor/skin boundaries to get rid of jaggies, still a bit of that left to do like the arm and the leg. The side of her tummy is most noticeably different and is much improved, I think.
- I spent some time reshading her face to make her features pop a bit more without changing them.
- General armor clean up, removed stray pixels and such.
- Cut her out from the background of the original screenshot, still haven’t decided what I’m doing for the final background.

Tentative final version! Thanks for the comments/suggestions!

That looks really good. Great work!

Hm, I may have to pick up that series eventually.

Looks great! I love the touch-ups on the armor.

Thank you for the comments and compliments, guys!