Virtual/Dream Card Templates and Resources [Warning: Image Heavy]

[TelTura]

Alright, buckle in!  I PM'd Kralik about the forum's long-standing policy about not doing anything dream-card-y with images, and he and I are apparently on the same page: it's [current year] and no one cares anymore.  So without further ado, I would like to share the same materials here that I have recently been sharing on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/LOTRTCG), the Facebook group, and our humble Discord server (https://discord.gg/mmyYfJ7). 

To begin with, let me show off the sort of thing that one can do using these resources:



"Now wait a minute teltura", I hear you say.  "That's...that's big.  That's bigger than the images we have hosted here on the website.  Did you....?"

No, I did not.  I have not received any original art resources from anyone who used to work at Decipher, tho I have been in contact with one such artist who regrets having too much integrity to help me out, so there's that. 

Oh, and you think that's big? This is one of three resolutions that my templates have, which are referred to as Original, Double, and Huge.  This one is Double.

Huge is twice as big. And, as is implied by the detail in the above image, is not muddy or smeared or anything (tho some details are a bit hit or miss).

How did I do this?  Well, one day I was cleaning up my #$&*@! original templates which were just painstaking photoshop jobs using images sourced from the wiki, when I had the idea to throw it through one of those neural network AI-scaling services on a whim to see if it was any good.  It promised 4X scaling with AI-backed detail inference, and well, uh, it worked.  I blew them all up to 4X the original size, realized that was Huge and unwieldy, made a version scaled down to merely double the original resolution, and the rest was history.

Here's an example of what it did to the strength icon:



That's neat, isn't it?  But it's on the card templates themselves where it really shines.



Click on that image to view the full version.  Zoom in.  Keep going.  LOOK AT THAT GRIT.  LOOK AT THAT SANDSTONE.  The painterly effect on the culture icon!  There's a snake, and it's apparently a snake skeleton (which admittedly didn't come through all the way, but hey, it worked with what it got).

It's wild.  Absolutely wild.

(If you don't have AI on your radar as Something You Should Pay Attention To, I hope this post nudges you in that direction at least a little bit.)


Anyway, enough patting myself on the back!  I'm here to throw out links, and links you shall have:

There are two ways you can download these templates: Imgur albums, and my Google Drive links.  Imgur is really just for browsing convenience, but if sometime in the future it is still up and I have gone missing, they should do as a means of last resort.  To download the entire album, scroll allll the way down to the bottom, click the three dots, and select 'download post', where you will get a zip folder of all the images.

But!  This is inferior to using Drive, because all of the filenames will have been scrambled!  I did put some effort into making the naming schema usable, so if you want an out-of-the-box solution that is ready to be played with, use the Drive links instead.

Also, a last word of warning:  Huge is big.  Really really big.  It's like, more than 500 DPI big.  I'm pretty sure it's higher res than the original templates used by Decipher.  You think you want Huge, but unless you're using them for further image processing or to print out to hang on your wall, I really really do think that Double is all you need.  But hey, it's [current year] and hard drive space is cheap, right?

Original Resolution (357 x 497)

Imgur album: https://imgur.com/a/thxDPmG

Google Drive download (5 MB): https://drive.google.com/open?id=1RHZ3BjQarriZmDpyHUW-HQTE2kawR7C3


Double Resolution (714 x 994)

Imgur album: https://imgur.com/a/EdaytYw

Google Drive download (43 MB): https://drive.google.com/open?id=1imO9YYUOCwg1hcpvoLli6g_fH4-cnZj7

Huge Resolution (1428 x 1988)

Imgur album: https://imgur.com/a/yz0xSWR

Google Drive download (118 MB): https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Mp05djEq01sEtq9x6OEyzpc7BRuFH9J5



And fonts! We can't forget fonts.  Years ago I discovered that the fonts used by the cards are actually embedded in both the Comprehensive Rules and also the various spoiler PDFs that Decipher released, so I just had to work some magic to get them back out again.  And then recently in the last few weeks, someone on the Facebook group dumped all the relevant resources extracted from the Lord of the Rings Online client made by World's Apart, and from there I was able to fill in holes in that coverage, including for the title/subtitle and others. 

These fonts include the various culture, block, and twilight symbols, replacing various unneeded characters in the font.  Look at the included instructions for details.

Card Fonts

Google Drive download (0.2 MB): https://drive.google.com/open?id=1PJYPWQ4WkN8S-YGWnIUCi7IxTM-z_-Kw

[TelTura]

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE

(more?! what could this guy possibly have more of...)

I am in the middle of writing up a tutorial for a complete card generator written using the excellent nanDECK , which uses these templates, fonts, and a long-ish nanDECK script to turn a regular ol' CSV spreadsheet and a folder of portrait images into a card, automatically, with no scripting or photoshop required.  It recreates existing cards nearly perfectly, and includes a slew of features for creating cards in design spaces that Decipher themselves never did.  The tool is done, but it's fairly involved to use so I need to make sure the instructions are comprehensive.

Here are some examples of cards generated from this tool to whet your appetite (all at Double res).  With any luck I'll have the tutorial ready later this week, and I will release it and the tool itself in a separate thread.  Stay tuned!


First, some 1:1 comparisons to existing cards.

Compare to Gimli's Battle Axe (1R14):



Compare to Smeagol, Bearer of Great Secrets (9R+30):



Compare to The One Ring, The Binding Ring (9R+1).  This one (unlike other 1:1 images in this thread) had its image AI-enhanced since it was filling the entire card and the original (sourced from the LOTRO dump) was supremely #$&*@! resolution. 




But copying existing cards isn't the only thing this can do!  Put any old data in the csv and dream cards are just a click away, like Gimli at the top of the page, or these examples:






But we're not just about doing what Decipher did!  This tool has the ability to push things further.  For instance, custom borders:



And since it had to be able to support full-art One Ring cards, why, it's just a hop, skip, and a jump to support full art cards of any type!










So yeah!  Stay tuned for that, and until that's out, fly my pretties!

[Cw0rk]

You did such amazing work. What a time to be alive! I look forward to try the NanDeck tool in the future!

[ket_the_jet]

Huckle buckle beanstalk. This is absolutely incredible stuff, mate. I might have to bring back the system just for this.
-wtk

[menace64]

Only thing I spotted off with your examples is a lack of capitalization in titles/subtitles.

The last month has been crazy-productive on the Player's Council side of things. We have close to 200 cards written/pending-playtest and ~500 cards stored in an ever-growing back catalog.

What a time to be alive, indeed.

[TelTura]

Only thing I spotted off with your examples is a lack of capitalization in titles/subtitles.

Rather, the small-caps option in nanDECK has only the one setting, and it puts the lowercase letters only somewhat smaller than the capitals.  I left it as it's just about close enough compared to the effort of altering the font itself, but maybe I'll reach out to the nanDECK dev again and see if they won't add a configurable size option for that...

[menace64]

For online-play clients I don't see any reason not to just run with whatever works - but for "official" PC releases we would definitely want the capitals.

[Durin's Heir]

Those template-less cards looks like Enola's Smaug cards. And that Hollin Snarler looks uncomfortably familiar...

Great work. My hat's off to you!

[TelTura]

Yeah, seeing those Smaugs was what pushed me over the edge from "eh, maybe I'll bother" to "wow, that's a must-have" for full-art card support.

[SGollum]

Tengwar and a full image card like Legolas would look killer.

[TelTura]

All of the links in the OP (imgur + Drive) have just been updated with a new version of the templates + fonts.

Changes include:

• Artifact overlays now exist (for ALL cultures, not just the ones that Decipher published cards for), as well as regular culture/twilight overlays (for making full-art cards)
• Moria Balrog template is now included
• Rohan and Gondor had their culture icons cleaned up
• Sites had some issues cleaned up
• Fonts have been tweaked and are now about as accurate as I can make them within just a font file

If you downloaded these in the ~4 days since I posted them here, I would encourage you to redownload for these improvements.

I'm also about to go and make a separate thread for the card generator, which is now released.

(EDIT: thread here: http://lotrtcgwiki.com/forums/index.php?topic=11718.new#new)


Some samples using these materials:

[TelTura]

The Drive downloads in the OP have been updated with a couple new icons for all resolutions, namely the Weta icon and the King Countdown icons, as shown here:




For reference, here are the original icons:

[JamesCB]

How did you get the image for the ring?

[TelTura]

It was taken from the LOTRO data dump (which includes low-resolution text less versions of all card images) and enhanced somewhat from the image on the wiki, and then put through the same AI upscaling process that the templates themselves used.

If you're looking to make your own, you can probably get away with just a vertical image, but a full reproduction would require some photoshop work.

[JamesCB]

Where is this LOTRO data dump?