Re-rendering Character Portraits

Recently, I decided to have a bit of a tinker with my character portrait. I didn’t want a complete change-around that some people seem to go for; my character wasn’t about to go changing hairstyles, getting tattoos and magically gaining scars. I just wanted something subtle. A change of angle, pose, lighting, maybe some makeup fixes – just to spice things up a bit. And since its free to do so these days (unlike before we had the new chargen), why the hell not?

Brutor female character

This is how my character looked when I was editing her, and after I had finalised the portrait. The capture is from in-game shortly after I was done.

What ultimately made me decide on this portrait was the hair draping. Notice the curve of the hair on her right side as it drapes around her head in a natural fashion. Sure, there are going to be some minor clipping issues, but its nothing we can’t live with for the time-being.

However, after a downtime or two, I noticed something different when I logged in:

Gravity defying dreadlocks

I like (for the most part) when the server makes a pass and properly renders the new or updated character portraits – it means that newbies can have faces to look at, and it means everyone else has lovely antialiasing on their portraits.

But what I dislike very much is gravity-defying hair! I’ve yet to try this with some other hairstyles, so I’d be interested to hear if anyone else has noticed this one. I Imagine if its consistent, you could end up with some completely wacky character renders.

I got her to scour around her quarters just in case I had somehow missed it, but all I could find were empty bottles of Quafe, cans of some other drink, and holoreels; there was no industrial grade hairspray to be found!

Comments for this Post

0 thoughts on “Re-rendering Character Portraits”

  1. 19th May '12 at 11:04 am

    Interesting. I guess they were making some minor tweaks to skin and skin color rendering. I like the first picture a little bit more than the second one. But anyway – you look gorgeous! 🙂 You can always change the pose and the expression if there is something that you don’t like. Changes are good. 

    • 19th May '12 at 12:10 pm

       I think on the batch-run pass of rendering it removes all the ‘jaggies’, and I guess part of that includes removing some of the (admittedly silly) clipping you can get with some of the options in the chargen. A natural problem with having so much freedom with your character creation, I guess.

      Thank you for the compliment. 🙂

      Honestly, this is not a complaint about the flexibility we have with the character creation in EVE, more a small issue that may have been overlooked or something. I love the fact that we can change stuff about for free when other game companies would charge you for the privilege.

  2. Luci
    19th May '12 at 12:18 pm

    Hmm…Maybe dreads wouldn’t need industrial grade hairspray to stay in place? They’re kind of heavy anyway :p

    • 19th May '12 at 12:33 pm

       They still adhere to gravity though!

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