Month: April 2019

Noctis, flower field, sunset, 4k

final fantasy xv wallpaper 4k notcis ffxv

It’s hard to find ready-made wallpapers that work well the game cutouts, imo. Angle is always wrong, it’s too realistic vs. game graphics, lighting is wrong vs. the shadows on the character etc. I used some spotlights to try to make Noct’s face be more lit while his arm is darker (since sun is “behind” him) but yeah, not sure that came out very convincing, heh. Personally I actually like them just on the dark grey background I cut them out of, but most would find that boring I guess. Dark grey is a nice desktop color tho.

Btw, it’s hilarious how I can type these paragraphs and it doesn’t seem like all that much, but then I check the site on the cellphone and it’s this HUGE WALL OF TEXT. Perspective.

Wallpaper practice

Just, y’know, more cutout practice, nothing special. The Noctis one, the hair had dark blue bleeding so it’s probably the worst hair-wise. Prompto’s hair is actually the easiest to deal with overall, just that top fringe area can be irritating.
Gladio’s pic, yes there’s a piece of him missing, I didn’t notice the greenscreen depth was too close, overlapping/cutting something off. Just pretend he had an accident and is looking out the window of his new house after forced retirement.

 

I did not create any of the backgrounds – since my artistic skill is about zero – random net finds from wallpaper sites.  Photography editing (for me) = working with lighting, color, certain types of corrections, simple layering and selection editing sometimes and that’s it. While I can pen-doodle while talking on the phone, and use/manipulate standard image editor “filters” and such, I can’t paint, draw, 3d anything and my abilities with a digital “paintbrush” using a mouse consists of line drawings that look like they were drawn with crayons by a 4 year old during happy-art time.  After all this practice in terms of finding what “greenscreen” background colors work best for the black-ish and brown/blondish hair, I now need to turn on the game again and take a lot more pictures to work with. Maybe I’ll get some actual ideas in the process. Or I might drift into some other busy work time-waster instead. Like a 150 episode anime. I’m distractable  like that.

Btw, my working .psd files for only the cutouts themselves end up around 30-70+MB, because they’re usually about 3500-4000 pixels tall (screenshot size I use/take is 7680×4320).  I’m not uploading a bunch of those.  >.>   Even the .png versions end up around 5+MB. If I ever get a set of good ones I’ll probably resize them a bit smaller and make them a zip file download.

Fist bump, denied + Did Ignis just parry?

After a successful link, Ignis goes for that fist bump … and Noctis ignores him (can’t fist bump while in defend mode I guess). TeeHee.

So I didn’t think the bro’s parried on their own. It could just be a coincidence but the timing is odd – when Noctis gets the Parry bit, Ignis turns at the exact same time like he’s parrying as well. No resulting linkstrike after the parry, so I don’t know what’s going on there. But it looks cool, like teamwork. Video has full speed first then in slo-mo.

Btw, I was wrong, if you upscale a 1080 video to 1440, YT does use the vp9 codec version. Just takes a while sometimes for the 1440 option to show up after uploading. Upscaling isn’t ideal but still better than the non-vp9 codec. Also, I know the YT embed looks odd on a phone (on standard “tall” viewing). I’m not sure why. Probably a theme thing. It looks normal in the width view. I tried some video plugins but haven’t liked any yet. Finally – why are the two video thumbnails so different in visual quality? YT is so inconsistent sometimes.

As good as it gets I guess

This is not transparent/a cut out. But it’s showing the full size. See all those 1 to 2 pixel wide strands of hair? Yeah, it’s like that. I use 500% magnification most of the time.

I made my own grey and beige greenscreen colors for screenshots that work much better. Doesn’t color-bleed into the hair, like Nvidia’s uber bright blue, green, purple etc. does, making it easier. Still, took me 3 hours to get his hair clipped. Problem is, I’m super picky. Or just obstinate, or both. 😛  So three examples of this cut-out on random stuff. Still not perfect on black background but it’s tolerable/you can work with it.

The last pic is … well don’t ask. When their heads are smaller you don’t have to be as precise about the hair.

Prompto, Noctis, 4k

…mostly Prompto. The “older Noctis” is Avatara, with the thicker beard.

I have a bunch of cut-outs that I keep working on a bit here and there, but the hair, the hair is so difficult, one could spend hours each one going pixel by pixel to clean up/cut out the color bleed to even somewhat tolerable levels. I wonder if there’s an easier way, outside of erasing 1/3 of the character’s hair, or trying to clone over it (a little cloning works ok, too much starts to look funky). Probably not. It’s either hours spent or use the cut-outs only on backgrounds where it wouldn’t be noticeable.

I’ll keep trying/fiddling with them (because I like pain) but dunno how many I may post or if I’ll post. I doubt there’s a huge “market” or interest in such. It’d just be nice sometimes to be able to put a fave pose of a character onto whatever wallpaper background or scenic shot I might take, vs. always trying to capture a moment in-game (where something in the scene is in the way 3/4 of the time…). Basically, I want to do what Prompto does with some of his photos. 😛