Artistically Challenged

by Lucas Thompson, Art Team Lead

23rd July 2024

Today I'd like to talk about some of the challenges the Art Team faced when bringing the Vidiians to life. For most of the design process, we assumed that we'd at least have all of the Vidiians that appear in First Edition to work with. It seemed like a reasonable assumption. It wasn't the case though.

Take, for example, First Edition's Sinaren. He has a nice, clear shot, which was easy to find in the episode (Deadlock). But, when I found him, I noticed that Decipher had performed significant alterations. The whole graft across his ear-area is gone! Why?

Well, after you've been staring at Vidiians for weeks, you begin to notice that the Voyager make-up department had maybe nine different Vidiian prosthetics, tops. That prosthetic that Sinaren has in the original shot, that's Dereth's prosthetic. And Losarus's prosthetic. And the prosthetic used by an unnamed Vidiian in Seven's memory in Infinite Regress. And, it turns out, that's the prosthetic used by Telari... because Sinaren and Telari are the same personnel. Dereth's prosthetic is by far the most re-used, but it happens with other ones too.

I couldn't very well go ask the Decipher Art Team to share the image with their original edits, and the First Edition website jpeg is too small for use on a new, virtual card. And, unfortunately, my art skills are inadequate to convincingly generate Vidiian flesh grafts from scratch. I've started a few discussions with this community on the forums and on Discord about the use of AI art, since I know it's... controversial in other communities I'm a part of. The general consensus has been that, since we are a non-profit organization that can't afford to pay an actual artist, and we're using the art for non-profit, fair-use reasons anyways, AI art is fair game. (If you feel differently, please let me know in the forum thread below!)

Leonardo AI has a feature that allows me to upload images for alteration. I often use it to upscale blurry or jpeg-artifact-ridden screen shots, but for several cards in this set (including Sinaren, I needed to use it to smooth together (and enhance) elements that I stitched together, like something to replace that graft over Sinaren's ear. Vidiia itself was built by Leonardo AI using a draft image that I made and uploaded of a green and brown plague planet. And Today's Ovion (mentioned only in dialogue in the show) was completely AI-generated from a prompt alone. I still dream of the day that AI art is good enough to add Captain Boday to the game, but for now it's at least good enough to generate some planets for me.

Several other planets in this expansion are The One Planet Voyager Kept Visiting. You know, Obtain Advanced Technology and Norcadia Prime? That's the same planet image (in different colors as the Sakari Colony, which I cropped and shadowed to make it look like a full globe. Well, this time, rather than just crop the same part of another shot of the same planet, I did that, then let the AI get a bit "creative". The result: Ilari from a few days ago.

Other cards were more traditionally photoshopped. Today's Drapanas was originally "Enabran Vain (Not Chakotay)" in the playtest file - assuming we could just pretend he was the Vidiian that Chakotay replaced, and we could just use his face. But Chakotay didn't actually replace anyone - in fact, Sethis says he doesn't recognize Chakotay, and he has to lie (ish) and say his face had been freshly grafted. If Sethis doesn't recognize Chakotay, then there probably wasn't a Vidiian that looked like him walking around prior to his arrival.

I mentioned Seven's memory from Infinite Regress earlier: that's where I pulled Drapanas's face from. There are actually three Vidiians in that scene: one with Dereth's prosthetic, one with Bridon's prosthetic, and a third whose prosthetic I don't recognize from elsewhere. Well, now he's Drapanas, a famous Vidiian scientist from the past who was eventually assimilated. It took some doing - characters in Seven's memory are really only visible during strobe effects, so he was very washed-out, I could only really take his face, and the perspective of the shots were distorted. I did my best to restore some color, repair the perspective, and gave him some clothing that Sulan wasn't using anymore. Enjoy!

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