[MathUser2929]

I watched the youtube video. It's good that you made it, but you left out two characters. You should redo it with all of them, even if you have to play a little further. It might actually be more than two cause I remember they drew a Alucard too.

[ShadowOne333]

Huh I was about to reply to the joke post from some days ago but it seems to have been remved.
Thank you, mods!

[JohannGralog]

Finally had some time to finish Eric Lecarde / Wind.

And Brauner:

[Granville]

Eric looks mostly fantastic, especially the face and hat. The jacket outlines are a bit rough though, can anything be done to soften and lighten up the lines? The belt slung around the shoulder and chest looks very good too.

The Brauner drawing needs some work though IMO, no offense. The head proportions are very odd, the forehead in particular is way too small. The shape of the other facial features (nose, jaw, ears and overall expression) could also stand some work.

[JohannGralog]

Eric looks mostly fantastic, especially the face and hat. The jacket outlines are a bit rough though, can anything be done to soften and lighten up the lines? The belt slung around the shoulder and chest looks very good too.

I didn't bother much with the jacket since only a small bit of it will likely get used in the final sprite.

The Brauner drawing needs some work though IMO, no offense. The head proportions are very odd, the forehead in particular is way too small. The shape of the other facial features (nose, jaw, ears and overall expression) could also stand some work.

I'm not quite happy with it either.

Kojima sadly didn't have good bald faces to work with, so I worked from an illustration that had hair.



I tried modeling it a bit after the sprite. There's a pixel portrait of him too, but I understood that to be before his vampirism since it lacks, for example, the prominent ears of his sprite.



He's obviously modeled after Count Orlok from Nosferatu, though more of a dandy. I suppose I could try imitating Orlok’s face, but I'm not sure how I could make it resemble something Kojima-esque.

[richterwilker]

Brilliant work.
I'm playing Dawn of Sorrow right now, while i wait for PoR to be done.
I was going to offer my help with drawing and photoshopping, but the portraits done by JohannGralog are actually pretty good.

[ShadowOne333]

Awesome work with Wind there Johann!
As for Brauner, he does look odd.
He looks more like an Eeyore type of character instead of a distinct bald vampire.
I'll try looking around for drawing which might match him.

[-pepodmc]

can you make this patches for the Europe releases? please   

[JohannGralog]

It's been a while… 

Vincent


Another attempt at Brauner


Followed Count Orlok from Nosferatu for this design. Rather happy with how the coat turned out. Face obviously still isn't right, but Kojima doesn't seem to be fond of drawing ugly old men. Might at the very least try to make the ears look slightly more real, I suppose.

[ShadowOne333]

That Vincent looks really good!
And taking Orlok as inspiration for Brauner is quite interesting,  I'd love to see how that one evolves

[JohannGralog]

Loretta

[ShadowOne333]

That Loretta looks damn sexy af
These portraits are coming along really nice!
I might start importing some of these into the game once I am done with Zelda 2 Redux

[JohannGralog]

Stella

[ShadowOne333]

Damn, these are looking really good!
I'm already storing them in the folder with all the portraits dumped.
How are you doing these btw?

[JohannGralog]

Damn, these are looking really good!
I'm already storing them in the folder with all the portraits dumped.
How are you doing these btw?

I try to find Kojima artwork that looks the most like the character.



I load it up in GIMP and I cut them up in sensible layers. Hair, head and body for example. I remove what shouldn't be there and then work on new elements in separate layers. I cut stuff from other Kojima drawings, I trace elements from the anime artwork and use textiles from Kojima's drawings to add texture, …

So for Loretta I elongated the hair and modified the clothes.
Then I traced the bonnet from the anime artwork, used the textile from the clothe to color it in and used one of the filters to generate a texture that I then modified into something lace-like. Finally I pasted buttons and a rose from other Kojima artwork.

For Stella, I used the general outline of the anime corset thing to sculpt her body. I traced the ruf and integrated it with the clothing around her shoulders, I recolored and darkened the hair and tried adding the harsher highlights to compensate for it, integrating a rough trace of the anime's buns in the hair.

It's a lot of fiddling and trial & error. :p

(That's also why Brauner is still so rough, I have no good base Kojima drawing to work from)

[ShadowOne333]

The first character you posted actually looks a lot like Charlotte
Stella also looks a damn lot like Anette Renard from Rondo of Blood, or even Lisa (Dracula's wife).

But damn do I have to say what you've done so far is great!
They're coming along quite nicely

[Orochi Kusanagi]

Johann, I PMed you a rough version of a Brauner I came up with.

[JohannGralog]

The first character you posted actually looks a lot like Charlotte
Stella also looks a damn lot like Anette Renard from Rondo of Blood, or even Lisa (Dracula's wife).

But damn do I have to say what you've done so far is great!
They're coming along quite nicely

Official portraits for the main characters,



Which means we have everything covered now, once Brauner is finished. Might have to sharpen Charlotte's face, not sure how well it would look after conversion.

I might go over my earlier work after Brauner. Touch up Eric and Death a bit, and perhaps have another go at Vincent's scarf thing.

Johann, I PMed you a rough version of a Brauner I came up with.

Nice, that head shape is a lot better than mine. And yeah, I found some good GIMP filters for cloning, which is what sped up my workflow tremendously.

I'll probably redo the texture of the clothes though. I like what I did with the second Brauner better, and should be able to recreate it.

Edit:
Ah right, Richter/Maria mode also has tiny face icons.

We can work from:

[Orochi Kusanagi]

Cool, glad I could be of help!

[SCO]

It actually feels like there is a slight perspective error on this one:



The head gear seems to be at a more oblique perspective than the head itself so it looks like it's 'painted on' because of the conflicting perspectives.

The 'shadow' on the underside of the headgear clashes quite a bit with the shine of the top hair too. Since he light focus seems to be frontal on the original, the shadow probably needs to be severely minimized until it's a slightly darker shade of hair on the very top of the head OR the shine at the top of the head removed. Another alternative is to make the whole underside darker and remove the 'shine' of all the hair.

I understand the shadow was probably to distract from the 'paint on' look, but you probably need a better solution i'm not painter enough to notice, even if it's hard with such a rigid surface. The fabric on the sleeves has a much more natural organic shadow look... this is mostly due to the shadow play and organic creases changing the colors and grain. Consider making a slight 'shadow' on the visible part of the back of the hat in addition to the suggestions on the previous paragraph. The underside of the hat color looks fine for a 'frontal light' thing but it also makes the decorative fringe look artificial because of lack of relief. Dunno how to make it better cause not a painter.

All this criticism might be pointless when the images are downsampled to the NDS resolution ofc. No one might notice.