Huge opportunity

[Undeadprotoss]

Okay guys, we have something truly amazing on our hands. Blizzard just released a contest for fan-made portraits to make it into the final game of SC:RM. You can read all about it here: https://starcraft.com/en-us/articles/20937024

The top 10 winners get a Starcraft remastered T-shirt and the top 5 get a signed copy of the remaster. Of course, the absolute best portraits are actually put into the game by the team. Slight note, the portrait must be static and not animated.

[Visions of Khas]

Eee! On it!

[Robear]

Yup. Each person gets to submit 3 portraits, so I figure I'll do one for each race. VoK, you gonna do 3 protoss with SC1-style skin and markings? :P

[Undeadprotoss]

What programs do you guys use for this? i've never done art before but I'll be damned if I don't try now.

[Robear]

You can use any digital painting program. Photoshop is the industry standard and what I use at work, but GIMP is free and has all the tools you could possible need for this kind of digital painting. I actually like it a lot. And other free programs like paint.net (ironically their url isn't paint.net lol). Photoshop is the norm though.

The only slight barrier to entry is that it's definitely easier to do digital painting with a tablet, for both the ease of drawing and also for pressure sensitivity, which you can map to things like opacity of your digital brushstroke or whatever. It's definitely possible to do art without one (like, Samwise Didier mentions he did that Brood War Dark Archon art back in the day completely with a mouse), just harder. I actually edited and colored a lot of the SC to scale drawings in GIMP on a laptop trackpad because I was out and about working on them... But I did start with scanned pencil drawings for those.

Some early versions of the remastered portraits got released at extremely high resolution back when they were announcing it, and so you can zoom in to see the digital brushstrokes in the picture. It's good to work at a super high resolution and then scale it down to their final dimensions after you're done, just in case you want to make little adjustments or want to scale up or zoom in on part of it, you'd be screwed if you started at low res.



Then for the final animated portraits in the game they're like 2.5D animated. For at least some of them it looks like they projected the digital art onto simplistic 3D models so then they can animate the head turning and stuff, but you could also do the mouths and backgrounds moving and lighting effects and stuff in 2D animation software these days.
(Here's the final wraith, it's decent enough)


For this contest they only want the still image version. So maybe they'll animate them themselves, or (much more probably) these portraits will just be static bnet profile pictures, the way the ones in SC2 are. Good luck!

[Gradius]

^---was wondering how that was done.

[Visions of Khas]

Ever look at the original StarCraft character portraits and think, “'Pft, I can do better?” Well, now’s your chance!

Lads, I think we've got a mole.

VoK, you gonna do 3 protoss with SC1-style skin and markings? :P

Hell yeah, and so should you!

Naw, I'm actually leaning in the same direction you are. I'd love to take a stab at a terran soldier with heavy cybernetics, or a new zerg phenotype.

[sandwich_bird]

like, Samwise Didier mentions he did that Brood War Dark Archon art back in the day completely with a mouse

wtf, that's very impressive. Say what you want about the guy, gotta admit he got skills.

[Zoar]

was gonna pop in and post that up too, whoever made the Aldaris potrait I saw floating around needs to submit that one it kicks ass

[Visions of Khas]

Ugh, I think I already know who won.

That's just not fair.