So, uh, interesting tie-in with world events: the art reference for one of the Mayorate faction portraits was killed recently. A few years ago, I wasn't the greatest artist ever (disclaimer: I am still a terrible artist), and I really struggled with making faction portraits that weren't absolutely atrocious to look at (scroll back to the early days of this mod thread if you don't believe me). After some initial failures, I came up with a new method of tracing reference photos and repainting the face and clothes with new light sources, colors, etc. that delivered more acceptable results. I used references from a lot of different sources: stock photos of pharmacists, weddings, and as it so happens, the late IRGC general Qasem Soleimani:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/06/world/middleeast/iran-soleimani.html. The main two qualifications were a near-ideal expression for a videogame portrait and that the reference was not immediately recognizable.
Mod portrait:
Reference image:
I'll likely be removing this portrait in the next patch: 1) It's probably my worst portrait art-wise (despite having traced things, I managed to utterly suck the life out of Qasem's expression) and 2) in light of recent events, I can't stop seeing the person behind the photo and get constantly reminded of the lovely state our world is in. Anyhow, I'd like to keep things relatively non-political in this mod thread, but figured this little bit of mod history would be interesting to others given current world events. Hopefully there are no wars in the upcoming year aside from the strictly fictional ongoing conflict between the Hegemony and the Mayorate.
(To my knowledge, no one else has been killed on the basis of being an art reference for this mod.
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