My CoH characters - group photos

[Super Firebug]

I've been trying to make my CoH-toons' group photos available here. I've stored them on Photobucket, but can't figure out how to get them to be visible in a post here. HElp, please?

[Aggelakis]

[ img]http://url.to/image.jpg[/img ]

(remove the spaces in the tags.)

[Super Firebug]

Yay! I finally have it! Thank you, Aggelakis!

Okay, I was asked to post these once I got them done, so here they are.


The first one is the whole-group photo, taken at the concrete bench northeast of AP's Wentworth's. (I decided against posing them on building steps, because I wanted something that would give each row height and visibility, but still have the back row relatively close to the camera, and steps have too much depth.) Not as much detail as I'd hoped for (plus, somehow, Sidekick Girl doesn't show up on the far-right front here), so I took photos of each half of the group.


Top row: Big Orange Guy (Battle-Axe/Invulnerability brute), Trapper Jack (Traps/Dual-Pistols defender), Super Weathergirl (Storm/Electricity defender), Six of One (Force-Fields/Electricity defender; a stranded Borg), Auntie Gravity (Gravity/Kinetics controller), Auntie Matter (Radiation/Energy blaster)

Middle row: WaveRider (Water/Storm corruptor), Jessie Valentine (Dual-Pistols/Devices blaster), Jade Katana (Ninja-Blade/Ninjitsu stalker), Frosty the Ice Man (Ice/Ice blaster), Super Firebug (Fire/Fire blaster; my namesake, and my first toon)

Bottom row: Max Security (Assault-Rifle/Traps corruptor), Hypno-Sis (Mind/Radiation controller), Fryerstorm (Fire/Fiery dominator), Doc Pruitt (Sonic/Empathy defender), Red Rockette (Martial-Arts/Regeneration scrapper, and my first 50)


Top row: Auntie Gravity again, Auntie Matter again, Auntie Freeze (Ice/Icy dominator), Gunny Sargent (Mercenaries/Poisons mastermind), Lt. Canada (War-Mace/Shield scrapper), The Mighty Flynn (Battle-Axe/Shield brute)

Middle row: Super Firebug again, Lady Goldblade (Dual-Blades/Willpower scrapper), FlashFire (Fire/Fire blaster; a concept toon, blending The Flash and The Human Torch), The Pink Panzer (Invulnerability/Super-Strength tank), Longbow Reactor (Radiation/Radiation corruptor)

Bottom row: Citizen Commando (Assault-Rifle/Devices blaster), No No Bad Kitty (Claws/Super-Reflexes scrapper), Spider Wasp (Claws/Regeneration stalker), Sister Spectre (Illusion/Kinetic controller), Sidekick Girl (Plants/Thorny dominator)

Less than an hour's work, and I'm really pleased with how well it turned out. Immeasurable thanks to Codewalker for making it possible.

[Thirty-Seven]

I kinda wanna make one of these for my characters too now...

How do you go about doing this?

[Super Firebug]

I kinda wanna make one of these for my characters too now...

How do you go about doing this?

After you've picked the location where you want to pose your characters, you spawn NPCs in the group arrangement that you want. (That bench is wide enough for a row of ten or eleven.) When you spawn one, it'll appear right where you're standing, facing the same direction. So, put yourself where and how you want the NPC to stand. In doing this first effort, I found that the characters on the left of the shot tend to look away from the camera when they stand in the "Left Foot Forward" pose, as I think of it (in the MOV popmenu, it's called "Stand Still and Turned to Side"), so you might turn them a little toward where you'll be taking the shot from. (As an example: in the second photo, Big Orange Guy is positioned to face in the same direction as Trapper Jack and Super Weathergirl, to his left. But, since he's standing Left Foot Forward, he looks like he's positioned straight ahead.) In spacing them, there's a natural "personal space" around them that keeps you from getting closer, so you don't have to worry about positioning them close enough to overlap. Two winged characters, standing side by side, might overlap; I didn't try that. (I did find that, if I placed the front row right up against the bench, their back legs clipped into the bench when they took the Left Foot Forward pose. Plus, capes can clip, too.)

Then, you outfit each NPC, in the saved costume of the character that you want standing there, by targeting the NPC and typing /load_costume [costume-file name] without the brackets. (If you're not targeting an NPC, you'll re-costume yourself.)

Once you're standing where you want to take the picture from, move the camera forward far enough to have a first-person view, in order to get the "photographer" out of the shot (in my case, it was done by rolling the mouse wheel forward). Frame the shot by holding down the "Page Up" key and moving the mouse; then, press "Prt Scrn" to take the photo. The tricky part of taking the shot is timing it so that none of them is changing pose. I had 29 of them there, so it took some doing! That was before I learned about the MOV menu, though. Experimenting with different Stances under the Standing category, I've found that at least five will hold an NPC stock-still - perfect for a photograph!

When you press "Prt Scrn", Icon will save the shot in CoH's Screenshots folder. Conveniently, it does so without the HUD (or UI, as it calls it) in the shot. But, there will also be a copy of the shot on the clipboard; if you paste it into Paint or another graphics program, the HUD/UI is there. So, use the one from the Screenshots folder.

(Edited to add re-costuming and MOV-menu information. Also, these instructions include keyboard commands for PCs only; apologies to you Mac users, but I don't know the Mac equivalents, where they differ.)

[Thirty-Seven]

I have no idea how to change spawned NPC's costumes.  Can you spawn any kind of NPC to do this?

[Super Firebug]

I have no idea how to change spawned NPC's costumes.  Can you spawn any kind of NPC to do this?

You type /load_costume [costume-file name] while targeting the character you want dressed in that costume.

And yes, as far as I know, any in-game NPC will accept a costume change. Before I started assigning costumes, I had 29 Fusionettes - a CoH player's nightmare! (At least they weren't 29 Flambeauxes!)

[Thirty-Seven]

Awesome!

Thanks much.  I'll have to make a pop menu to speed up the process of switching folks.  I think I have all of my costumes saved somewhere.

[OzonePrime]

Great alts!

[mrultimate]

Very cool. Gives me a reason to do something constructive in Icon.

[Super Firebug]

Man, with our being so close to hearing about a finalized deal, I keep looking at these again and again, and keep feeling the same thing: more than at any time in the last year and a half, I want to log into CoH, and run missions.

[Super Firebug]

Here's a shot of my Venture Bros. tributes.



I tried to make Brock, too, of course, but he came out pretty generic without the curly mullet. He's more distinctive vocally, anyway. Dr. Girlfriend certainly got attention in her Dr. Mrs. The Monarch costume. I couldn't give Triana both her striped stockings AND her red shoes, so I went with the more noticeable of the two. It still bugs me that I couldn't do both.

[Byakuya523]

I couldn't give Triana both her striped stockings AND her red shoes, so I went with the more noticeable of the two. It still bugs me that I couldn't do both.

Try using bodysuit gloss pants then put strips on it, you should be able to choose shoes to make red then, btw nice work

[Super Firebug]

A tip: before you go into the City and start positioning NPCs, go into the costume creator, and look at all of the costume files that you intend to use, to make sure that they're the way that you want them. I had spawned all of my NPCs, and was re-costuming them, when I found that I only had an early version of a particular costume. I didn't want to lose all of that work to that point, so I opened a second window, and it froze. So I closed it, and re-opened it. I made the costume change, saved the file, and exited the second window. Then, the FIRST window froze, and I lost all of the work anyway.

[Serpine]

I wanted to do this to: I don't have nearly as many alts as some, but this still took a while to build since I wanted to give each one an appropriate emote. Sorting through which "mov" options were which / which and the ones that would stick was definitely a bit of a pain. But I'm very happy with the final result.

Heroes on the left led by Robo-Santa, villains on the right led by Huntsman Rafferty:

[Thirty-Seven]

Was the snake in the background hungry?

(Or just photo bombing?)

[Serpine]

Was the snake in the background hungry? (Or just photo bombing?)

Look at my avatar: I'm just hanging with my crew.

[umber]

Row 1: Indivisible, Desert Owl, Umber, Inclement, Phlogiston
Row 2: Pentecost, American Aegis, Winterdrift, Lady Angela, Kate Techtonics, Living Lethargy
Row 3: Freon 14, Luck of the Draw, Heartstrings, Sand Wasp, Mistigris, Shimmermint, Antikythera
Row 4: Northbridge, Hot Wrench, Delta Drogue, Guardinal Elaan, Elfa, Jenny Flame
Row 5: Flux Armstrong, Heaven's Spear, Nilas, Tungsten Lad, Maridian, Intuit, Heaven's Lance, Kompost, i.Rad



Row 1: Baal Hammon, Ballyhoo, Shadow Vitalis, Absolom, M-Type
Row 2: Chronarch, Dr Decay, Alabaster Frigid, Sultana Surge, Tokarahabu, Cyberdaemon
Row 3: Living Lethargy, Dynamok, Swiftsilk, Kompost, Phantomime
Row 4: Bolt Spider, Kalderra, Soultorque, Sinneret, Hemogoblin, Confederacy
Row 5: Noxxe, Cesium Man, Xanthic, Click Beetle, Belle Hammon, Kraktoa, Tianamen

[Aggelakis]

Holy wow! You have some really striking costumes!!

[Paragon Avenger]

Group photos of your alts?
Firebug, see what you started!

(Truth is, now I want to do that too.)