Portraits

There are several issues with portraits I've been trying to improve for a while, but my skills are basic, to say the least, and these modifications never work. Maybe you can take advantadge of some of these ideas and my drawings. There are five:

1. Blinding. Taking someone's eyes doesn't leave black craters of death in your face. They leave either skull-like holes, dark but not black, or else the eyelids are left and they appear closed but sullen, sunk into the face. I made a graphic for it to substitute the craters, but it doesn't work.

2. Chaperons. Something as flashy and cool as a chaperon has never appeared ingame. Too bad! It seems now that the Republic outfits are made to look like XIV-XVth Century northern European outfits. Which brings me to...

3. Two sets of gear and clothing. One for the period up to 1300, and one for 1300-1453. Chaperons and fur galore post-1300, as well as more accurate armour pieces. Transitional plate armour, pigface helmets, long English moustaches, fancy shouldersleeves... Being in 1340 and having allmighty generals wearing cervellieres and Frist Crusade-type helms doesn't helm immersion at all. You already have the Republican gear. If there's a way to set this distinction between timeframes, I think you should take it. Although I reckon that portrait modding can be very heavy machine-wise...

This extends to hairdo too. Blackadder hairdo was common later on, but almost unseen before, say, 1250-1300. In 1400 you'd start seeing Leonardo-like long hair, imitating a supposed hellenistic hairdress. Then you have the King of France hairdo, incredibly common at the time. The game has something similar, but not quite. They got it wrong. I also tried to improve it, with little luck.

4. More clean shaving in Western Europe. Although beard was commonplace in Western Europe before the IXth Century, there were some fashion movements that pointed into the clean shaved faces the Greeks would mock in the First Crusade. The Normans shaved clean, and were one of the sources of this trend. Frankish kings also started to shave clean, although I'm not sure of the origin of this. But at some point, no king of France ever grew a beard (or at least, the ideal image of a king of France was beard-less, even when old). From the year 1000 on, beard in Western Europe was a sign of either poverty, wisdom or age. Germanic influence made beard more common in Central Europe, and old rulers used to grow a grey beard because it made them look venerable and wise, and also because it hides the fatty double chin. In England, beards came and went. Moustache got its peak at the XIVth Century. Then it was all clean shaved until old age allowed for a wisdom beard.

Allegedly, this is all quite blurry. The study of beard and its significance is hard because graves and portraits always have a taint of ideology and idealisation. Take the graves of the kings of France at Saint-Denis, for example: they all look the same. The tombstones of John Lackland, Richard the Lionheart and their parents and children, they also follow a trend: middle-aged bearded monarchs. But some of their contemporary "portraits" have them clean shaved. We're sure, however, that they were redheads.

So I'd say, when a character becomes king, make them likely to grow a majestic beard, unless they're Frankish. If not, make it for Western Europeans common to be clean-shaved. Make them Greeks laugh hard at their baby faces.

5. That pencil moustache. Please, fix it! I'm not asking to take it out, as I had before. I'm merely asking to make it less "I have a worm on my upper lip".

***

As I said, I tried to readress some of these things. I have the graphical files, which I'll update as soon as possible. But I lack implementation skills.

Well, it seems someone has already done it much better than I ever hoped for. Except for the "changing fashion" part, that's still on the table.

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?688227-MOD-Scarred-micro-mod