For posting text-only dream cards (no graphical cards or links to sites hosting such cards) and for speculation on future sets.
 
By bardez
 - Alpha Quadrant
 -  
#432616
I am interested in creating some blank templates for high quality/resolution dream cards. I am also very, very detail focused.

As I think about this, there are basically two approaches:

Raster
I could break up the current high-res (744x1039 or thereabout) into components like card border, picture borders, game text boxes, lore boxes, and so on. This is what I have seen most Dream Card creator projects do.

In order to properly get an affiliation template (for new affiliations), things like the constant, shared affiliation background noise pattern would need to be isolated independent of the overlayed affiliation color. It could be at least partially reconstructed from a lot of variants of personnel, facilities, and ships, but it would be incomplete.

I could break these elements out into a lot of components and that could be fun and a cool project, but at best I would only ever have a 745 x 1040 image. Isolating effects like drop-shadow would be tedious to recreate with an alpha channel, but corners could be cut because the raster resolution and positioning would be constant. The big draw-back is that if "special case" cards were designed, it would be somewhat tedious to create new template elements (such as adding a two-line restriction box or what have you).

I have seen an old photoshop PSD in the Yahoo! Dream Card groups that had a noise pattern, a couple of effects, and then an overlay to get a "close enough" approximation of things, but it lacks resolution as well as accuracy. It is a very good idea starter, however, for the below.

Vector
For quality, this is always the way to go. The problem is that every single element on the cards would have to be re-created from scratch.

I would actually love to do this, but I don't have the knowledge/eye for seeing what effects and filters are applied currently. Once I know what it is, I can re-create an effect visually really well, but I just don't have the know-how to identify existing effects.



I would really like to try re-creating card templates in Illustrator, but I just don't know certain things. I do not know what the affiliation background noise pattern is, but I do recognize that it is constant between affiliations. I don't know how to recreate the metallic and lighting reflection/shine present on the borders. The game text and title background is probably fairly easy gradient to recreate. Vectors of most non-set icons would be mostly re-creatable.

Does anyone know of existing Illustrator resources or even discussion on the art that could point me in the right direction for pursuing a vector template?
 
By bardez
 - Alpha Quadrant
 -  
#432751
After doing some comparison trying to coalesce the noise and background gradient, using different cards that have different gaps exposing the background in different places (multi-affiliation, restriction boxes, and so on), I've noticed that some cards have one noise pattern and others hold another. This is really apparent if you place the cards over one another in layers and toggle the images. For example, Arik Soong (Alt) and Larg, and Mr. Sisko's Interceptor all have the same pattern up top. On the other hand, Kira and Data and Picard share a different noise pattern up top. I originally thought that this might be due to some new card/reconstructed old card dichotomy, but I am seeing the first pattern on the reconstructed Mirror Terok Nor as well as the newer Mr. Sisko; some older reconstructed cards and newer cards share the same noise pattern.

Additionally, if you look at the bottom of the cards, Mr. Sisko's Interceptor and Data and Picard share the same bottom card background. It additionally appears that the bottom of the cards' background is mostly the same, anchored at the bottom of the area. Comparing ships/personnel to facilities, it appears as if the bottom half of the noise gradient is maybe resized to fit the bottom half of the area that the background inhabits.

This is observed across sets. If you look really closely at the middle of the cards, you can see what appears to be a blur, perhaps indicating an intersection of two different noise gradient layers. It leads me to think that the background noise is composed of at least 2 layers, one on top and another on the bottom, and that there might be a couple of different templates out there, a couple for the top, and at least one for the bottom, and that they intersect mid-card. I kind of wonder if one art guy has one template, and another guy a different template, both achieving similar results using different saved templates that they each have for their own use.

The TL/DR of this is that the art guys, while getting things really close to consistent, don't appear to care all that much for a canonical template that all personnel, ships, and facilities conform to, even within the card types themselves. Minor differences occur (example, Arik Soong (Alt) and Larg use the same top pattern, but inside the borders they are offset by a pixel), which are really hard to notice and thus overlooked.

It leads me to the conclusion that "close enough" is good enough, so maybe I shouldn't care all that much about recreating the noise pattern or the specific gradients exactly.
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By admiral-mogh (Jorn Engstrom)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
1E World Quarter-Finalist 2023
#432758
If you can’t see it with your bare eyes on a printed card, then it is superfluous. Also, since you can create virtually (no pun intended) any card you want using copy and paste with pieces from existing virtual cards, is it really worth the effort to recreate the templates?
 
By bardez
 - Alpha Quadrant
 -  
#432929
admiral-mogh wrote:Is it really worth the effort to recreate the templates?
There are reasons that it would be, mostly A) in ease of ability to create high-quality and B) ability to create new based on existing designs a bit easier with a bit more freedom. Plus there is C) wanting to do it because it is there.

IMO, documenting and understanding which affects/gradients/etc. are used is not a waste, but an overall learning exercise.
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By admiral-mogh (Jorn Engstrom)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
1E World Quarter-Finalist 2023
#432964
If you are skilled in Photoshop and Illustrator, you should be able to recreate a template for all affiliations background color. All other elements such as frames, icons, logos etc you can extract from the pdf’s (default res is 350 dpi)

I myself have modified the color of Borg and Starfleet compared to trekcc template. I wanted a better color match with Decipher cards. For Borg I added 5% ”warm” filter and 5% brightness to the grey, achieving colormatch with First Contact and EFC rather than the Borg expansion.

Starfleet was more tricky, as Decipher only released foil version. In my experience, printing trekcc Starfleet cards as is gives them more of a Hirogen color. After many trials I made a 50% transparent Cardassian overlay ontop of the trekcc Starfleet and got a close color match to Enterprise Collection.

Good luck! :thumbsup:
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By SudenKapala (Suden Käpälä)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#435033
Since I'm not an expert in graphic design, I did this the old-fashioned way... Layer style... Each extracted (well, screenshot) from the high-res PDFs at 400%.
So I have hundreds of graphics in a single gargantuan file (icons, affiliation border backgrounds, different heights of empty text boxes). It's a mess. Finding the right layers to turn on (or off) is a lot of work; it's operational, but certainly not ideal. And initially, a lot of work went into emptying the text boxes and perfecting the text size and placement. But the results certainly look OK to my standards.

Still, I'm very interested to see if a much easier / better / smaller product or package will be fielded by anybody!
bardez wrote:It leads me to the conclusion that "close enough" is good enough, so maybe I shouldn't care all that much about recreating the noise pattern or the specific gradients exactly.
Actually, I think along those lines, myself. Especially with the text boxes, which I cleared out (i.e., filled up with the white-ish gradients) manually. I copy-pasted small parts, many times, to cover all text.
I took the positions and styles of the text very seriously (still, there are pixel-wide differrnces with Virtual cards, I can't replicate them exactly), but didn't care about the metallic-white backgrounds so much. So my gigaquads files won't be of much help to you.

Great to see other people taking this to the next level (and a half)! :D

How did you tackle the text box backgrouds, how did either of you 'empty' those?
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By SudenKapala (Suden Käpälä)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#435084
admiral-mogh wrote:With Acrobat Pro you can extraxt all images from the pdf's without the text, as they are in different "layers".
:o :?
I did all that... work... for weeks... and I could've just bought a program to extract it!?

I feel very... old, now, suddenly. :P But I saved me some hard :twocents: . :shifty:

But if you can do this already, what do you need additional methods for? (I know it's probably been explained, but I seem to have missed the point.)
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By SudenKapala (Suden Käpälä)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#435085
bardez wrote:There are reasons that it would be, mostly A) in ease of ability to create high-quality and B) ability to create new based on existing designs a bit easier with a bit more freedom. Plus there is C) wanting to do it because it is there.

IMO, documenting and understanding which affects/gradients/etc. are used is not a waste, but an overall learning exercise.
Ah, wait, after re-reading this, I get it. Thanks! ;)
Question for noob

Awesome. Thanks everyone for all the help!

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