I wonder if it coiuld help us create fully open-source H3 game, which doesn’t require original game data? There were some ideas like that in the past, and AI can finally make it more likely.
That’s kinda what I would like to see; at least as far as all the visual assets are concerned; and hopefully support for a higher resolution interface; I have high-res versions of many of these portraits I’ve made.
Just doing these portraits surprised me with how long it took, even using DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion to help. Almost every one of these took at least 20 minutes, some as much as 4 hours. For some, I went through and generated around 200 images, then took 4-5 images and then photoshopped them together in GIMP to get the desired results.
It would take a lot of manhours to replace everything and it would need to be somewhat coordinated too. I tried to stick to the original theme of the portraits for the most part, some are straight-up redesigns, others are just variants of the originals that have been touched up and everything else falls somewhere in between a complete redesign and a touch-up. If you want everything replaced in a way that looks coherent, there will need to be someone in charge who decides what fits and what doesn’t and it will be up to those in charge of such a project to maintain that vision. Too many individual artists like myself adding their own touches will make the game look a mess, but I have to say, I think I did a pretty damn good job with these. I’m pretty proud of it.
At the end of each day though, it was a lot of fun making these and playing scenarios in-between.
Great work! Mod will be added to launcher for vcmi-1.3!
I have a few more planned, I am doing the HotA, Neutral Heroes, and ToW character portraits.
That’s taking a little longer because I’m also making modifications as alternatives for the new towns starting with the dwarf faction I’m changing the upgrade for iron clad Gladiator upgrade from being the same but with pixelated fire to being bronze clad and I’m making the tier 7 units a blue dragon and white dragon. Making the creature def animation files takes forever.
Added new alternative portraits for the HotA, ToW, Neutral Heroes (+ WoG and HotA Neutral Heroes), and Campaign Heroes VCMI mods. These are all submods independent of the original, but grouped together under it.
You may notice the Sorceress neutral hero alternative looks a lot like Dawn from Heroes of Might and Magic 2’s wizard faction. That’s no coincidence, that’s part of what I’m working on next: Adding new portraits, hero bios, new English text names, and a few new creature animations for the Highlands Dwarf Town faction, alongside some English text and portrait changes for other mods. For example, Astra from Heroes 2 is already a part of the Cove faction, so for the Highlands mod, I’ve changed her to Troyan from Heroes 1 and 2.
P.S. Mods, is there a way I can append this post to the original one?
Also up on Nexus. Google drive can be dysfunctional.
Thank you, I look forward to VCMI 1.3.
Very nice mod, and while I read your message to reddit haters 
here my unsolicited feedback :).
I LOVE 80% of the portraits, and I think is something that modern heroes needs.
But I cannot help but hate 5% 
Some iconic heroes like Craig Hack, Tazar, or Solmyr, should stay as close as possible to original. Sir Mulich is made after an actual developer so that will be lost. People got too used to them for 20+ years!
Troglodyte heroes do not look like troglodytes anymore.
Some heroes became too plain, too human in your version (HotA heroes mainly)
Conflux heros differ too widely from original one.
I hope you will continue with the mod and maybe revisit 1 or 2.
If they are different, that was often my intention. Solmyr’s original portrait was just copied and pasted from the game’s promotional art. The artists didn’t create a unique portrait for him. The idea of a troglodyte hero is kinda silly in the first place. I wanted them to look different and I still think they pass as troglodytes. Crag Hack used to look like a jolly red-bearded Norse warrior or dwarf, and I’m far more partial to that depiction of him. As with Solmyr, I looked at fan art and other depictions of the character and then used my favorite parts to generate a character portrait I preferred to the original. I prefer Crag Hack to look like a red-bearded Norseman and I kept 4 horns on his helmet.
I’m aware Sir Mullich is based on David Mullich who was the lead design artist for Hereos 3 and his hero bio is a joke about how hard he would push the team to rush to get it done. Now, I used an actual photo of David Mullich himself and photoshopped it onto the armor, then at low strength, I had the AI generate around 50 images and tried to pick one that looked close to how he looks, but still something like a knight.
If you prefer the originals or the HotA portraits (or any of the originals), I can’t blame you. The HotA portraits are particularly well done. I tried to offer alternatives to each hero, though originally, I wasn’t going to replace all of them.
Also, the conflux heroes are cursed lazy designs that are just lifted from the creatures in the conflux themselves. Much of the portrait art for them is recycled from MM7 and MM8. I prefer the artistic idea of an Elemental as being something or someone that can change form. A more human-like or attractive appearance is what I was going for.
I used Openart to create the portraits and then modified them in GIMP to get them looking better since Openart’s creative AI model tends to do weird things like make 17 horns on a Demon when you only want 2.
If you don’t like one or two, you’re welcome to give it a go yourself. I’m moving on to making other things.
This is portrait, not photo!,!
There are also these creations, that could be included in hero’s Bio.
https://www.deviantart.com/basaktinli/art/Gem-the-druid-full-outfit-392654421
Would be nice if both could be combined in some way.
I’ve got it installed, but for some reason, a number of the portraits aren’t showing when I play… but which ones do and don’t seems to be random. Anyone else seen this issue? Also; these are really cool images; do you have higher resolution versions of them?
I guess, some mods got folders reorganisation and mod should be updated to work with changes.
All of the base games portraits are in the same folder though. Also, I just refreshed earlier today.
Strange, I need to update the mod. In the meantime, you might just have to assign the portraits manually. Last I checked, all the portraits for the regular Heroes 3 heroes were working as intended.
All the portraits have higher resolution versions, but most of them were shrunk down and then modified in GIMP to fix a lot of features such as horns, armor, eyes, etc.
It’s most of the regular ones that I’m noticing aren’t popping. About half of them. It’s really weird. I’m pretty new to using VCMI. How can I manually assign them? If I’ve got them in the folder with the right file names, I don’t know what else to do with them to make them work.
I did delete and reinstall, and the results are better. I haven’t tested yet if they’re all in or not, but I still see some that aren’t. I notice in particular that Beatrice and Giselle are the original art. I’ll have a look around more today and see who else didn’t work. Conflux heroes in particular seem to not want to load. All but two of them (and the new Tides of War heroes) are the original artwork rather than this portrait pack.
Y’know, I admit that when I first saw this collection, I was skeptical of the direction you went with the Conflux heroes. The ones that weren’t humans or elves, that is. The more I look at them, the more I’m coming around to your way of thinking, though. If you think of it in D&D terms, rather than having them be actual elementals and stuff, having them be “genasi” makes more sense. The heroes are always humanoids. They may be monstrous humanoids, like lizardmen, gnolls, orcs or whatever, but they’re humanoids.