Jump to content

Color German Portraits -- the saga continues


Recommended Posts

Work continues on Version 3 of the German Unit Portraits mod. It is now up to somewhere around version 2.90, and if it ever manages to get past 3.0 I'll publish it.

The first rough draft of the mod is now finished. All of the original BTS images have been completely replaced with new ones. Now I have to make sure that the sequence of images makes sense, and that I'm using the best images for each position that I have access to.

That last point is a big caveat, since I don't have a scanner (let alone a high resolution one), and I don't have any of the Osprey WWII books. The Osprey images that you see below were culled off the web, mostly as screenshots of Amazon.com. What is really frustrating is that there are clearly many, many pages of illustrations that would solve my image problems (I'd kill for a good Heer junior officer in a schirmmutze measuring 100+ pixels from crown to collar-bone -- I may have to demote a general).

So if anyone has any high resolution bmp's that they feel might be worth considering for inclusion, please get in touch with me.

00001screenshot7rb.jpg

A word on how to read this thing. It's actually an editing tool for the next stage of the project.

There are three periods of uniforms: all uniforms from one period are stacked vertically above each other.

The horizontal rows are Infantry, Mechanized Infantry, Mountain troops, Panzertruppen, SS Infantry (anyone know exactly what this represents, and how it differs from the next category?), SS Mechanized Infantry, SS Mountain, SS Panzertruppen, Luftwaffe Field Divisions (with Hermann Goering mech infantry as period 3 -- oddly enough it works), Luftwaffe Fallschirmjaegers, Luftwaffe Panzertruppen (anyone know what these guys should look like if they're not part of one of the HG units in period 2?), and finally, Volksturm (and yes, one of them really is wearing a Homburg).

Within each group the order is crew, infantry squad, platoon commander, company commander, battalion commander. For tankers the second image is the unit commander.

Just setting the images up like this made me reallize that there are a few things that will have to be changed. Hopefully I'll find the time and the resources to be able to do it.

So keep those cards and letters coming.

[And am I the only person bothered by the fact that the Italians in CMBB don't have faces?]

[ February 07, 2005, 01:14 PM: Message edited by: Philippe ]

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Philippe,

Your portraits for the LW/Hermann Goering guys look fine, except I would replace the one in the Panzer Beret/Helmet and get one with a side cap, M-43 or peaked cap.

David

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And the reason for this ?

__________________

Because I'm not sure I've seen any pictures of Panzer crews wearing them after 1940. Certainly not in the HG formations. In the early war in Russia the only LW armor that I know of was a Panzeraufklarlung Zug (PSW 231's) attached to the "General Goering Flak Regiment". And in all the 1941 photos they are wearing side caps.

Yeah, I think that's why. ;)

DavidI

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've done a little more work on the German faces, so now we're up to about version 2.91. I'm hoping that by the time the last of the feedback trickles in I'll have resolved the one or two issues that I still have with some of the image choices. The end is in sight, though. I'm running out of substitute images (partly because I stopped collecting them), and the ones I've used are resisting repositioning.

I know there are still a lot of good color images out there that could be used, but I don't have access to them. I'm sure there is at least one or two good images in each Osprey book that doesn't show up on the front and back covers, so that means about a dozen more images, at least. That part will have to wait until I can buy the books and a high resolution scanner.

In the meantime, so that we're all on the same page, here's what 2.91 looks like:

291screenshot0up.jpg

Link to comment
Share on other sites

One of the obstacles to finishing this mod is my nagging suspicion that I don't fully understand the way the game uses images of SS infantry as opposed to SS mechanized infantry.

The simplest approach, of course, would be to use the same images for both. But as you can probably tell by now, I hate that.

The mechanized infantry image gets used for cavalry. Fine. But the infantry image shows up in a lot of cases where I could have sworn the units were mechanized. At first I had thought that some of the strange foreign volunteer units would show up as SS infantry. They probably do, but I haven't noticed many scenarios that seem to use them. The big surprise was when SS infantry started showing up as the image for units that I could have sworn were mechanized. Though the problem may be that I've looked at too many late late war scenarios where everything was probably getting reduced to infantry ("We're the VI Panzer Armee because we have six panzers left").

So any help in clarifying my thinking would have a major impact on moving this process along.

The other main thing that has to happen is that I need to stumble on these images in game and see how I feel about them. One thing that I've noticed is that gamma in Paint is not the same as gamma in Photoshop (Photoshop is deceptively brighter), and the gamma and something else seems different (possibly the magnification of the 55x57 pixels) in game. So far I've been pleasantly surprised that things that I thought would have far too much magenta in them didn't when I stumbled on them in-game. Of course, how things look in-game on my computer is going to be different from how it looks on anybody else's, but I have to draw the line somewhere on what I'm willing to worry about.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Unfortunately, your content contains terms that we do not allow. Please edit your content to remove the highlighted words below.
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...