Help with baseball card design

[ctorg]

So I tried my hand at creating some baseball cards, just for fun. I wanted to make relatively original ones, but since I didn't quite know what I was doing yet, I used some of the XML from pre-existing ones others made and worked from there.

Anyway, I ran into one issue I just can't seem to fix. Below are some sample cards. Notice that at the bottom of each card, you can see some of the player image bleeding out. I can't seem to get rid of it. When I shorten the picture, it cuts off the top rather than the bottom. If I shrink the overall size, the sides of the player don't extend to the borders of the frame.

Is there a way to crop the picture so that it doesn't bleed out like that?

[klavier]

If you don't mind the top of the hat being closer to the white border part, you can move the player pic up (decrease the y value).

[ctorg]

I tried that, and it might be the best (or least undesirable) option. It's just that, due to the curved card corners, I have to move it up a bit more than I'd like.

So there is no way to crop it then?

[klavier]

Not without having gap between the player and the edge, plus you can't just change the height alone, you have to keep the 2/3 ratio or the facegen doesn't come out right. If you can edit the card image, you could try and change where the curving begins so it will cover the exposed part.

[ctorg]

Well, I might end up abandoning my curved edge idea. Maybe I'll put a sort of black space behind it and have the curved edges serve as the edges of the "printable area" of the card or something.

Thanks for the info.

[ThatSeventiesGuy]

Yeah, stick with it! That's too nice a design to throw away. A minor tweak is all you need.

[Bigrod]

I'd adjust the length of your border till it covers all of the pic. Then adjust the width so that's it's uniform. Another option is to adjust the length of the facegen itself. If it's set to let's say, 170x255, try 170x250. This will widen (fatten) the pic by about 2-3 pixels, but I doubt anyone would notice. Excellent card btw.

[TribeFanInNC]

Originally Posted by Bigrod

I'd adjust the length of your border till it covers all of the pic. Then adjust the width so that's it's uniform. Another option is to adjust the length of the facegen itself. If it's set to let's say, 170x255, try 170x250. This will widen (fatten) the pic by about 2-3 pixels, but I doubt anyone would notice. Excellent card btw.

Along the same lines, you could add like a 3px black border. Or a 3px team font color border.

[fhomess]

Originally Posted by Bigrod

I'd adjust the length of your border till it covers all of the pic. Then adjust the width so that's it's uniform. Another option is to adjust the length of the facegen itself. If it's set to let's say, 170x255, try 170x250. This will widen (fatten) the pic by about 2-3 pixels, but I doubt anyone would notice. Excellent card btw.

I'm not sure who close you have to be, but getting away from the 2:3 aspect ratio of default FaceGen has a tendency to cause weird FaceGen images on baseball cards. The best thing to do is to find a way to edge the card such that the portion of the player pic you want hidden is blocked by something in front of it.

In this case, it looks like two things would take care of it. First, make sure the image size matches the height of the card. It looks like there is one or two extra pixels in the image beyond the card border at the bottom. Secondly, you might just try shrinking the corner radius enough that it starts the curve beyond the edge of the player FaceGen pic.

Nice design.

[ctorg]

I did manage to tweak it so that the picture gets just behind the card. Here it is now. Making cards is fun. It's funny, I always get caught up in these little side things in OOTP, to the point that I end up spending more time on them than I do playing the game. I think I'll make some more and maybe put them together to upload in case anyone else wants them.

Thanks for the tips and votes of confidence, all.

[TribeFanInNC]

Nice!

I find making the front of the cards fun. I don't like making the backs of the cards very much. Too much "move this column 2px this way, move this column 2px that way". Wait, the stats aren't quite centered...

Ugh.

[ctorg]

Originally Posted by TribeFanInNC

Nice!

I find making the front of the cards fun. I don't like making the backs of the cards very much. Too much "move this column 2px this way, move this column 2px that way". Wait, the stats aren't quite centered...

Ugh.

I agree. The one part of the whole thing that just gets tedious is setting up the yearly stats. I enjoy the rest.

[fhomess]

Nicely done.

Originally Posted by ctorg

Making cards is fun. It's funny, I always get caught up in these little side things in OOTP, to the point that I end up spending more time on them than I do playing the game. I think I'll make some more and maybe put them together to upload in case anyone else wants them.

I tend to do the same thing. Fictional cards are always fun because they can be used for future seasons.

The front of cards are fun because they're easy, but the back is, IMO, where the real standouts shine. There's limited information for the front and you typically want a large picture. The back is where you can really play with graphic design. I was really disappointed we can't use stats tokens in image sizes as I was once hoping to create mini bar graphs of key stats for a visual representation of performance. It didn't work.

[ctorg]

Originally Posted by fhomess

The front of cards are fun because they're easy, but the back is, IMO, where the real standouts shine. There's limited information for the front and you typically want a large picture. The back is where you can really play with graphic design. I was really disappointed we can't use stats tokens in image sizes as I was once hoping to create mini bar graphs of key stats for a visual representation of performance. It didn't work.

That's a good point about the artistry showing on the back.

I've made a few more, and I'm kind of frustrated by how limited things are in general, especially the extremely small number of usable fonts. I was trying to make some older-style cards, but the fonts you can use are all generic and modern. I'd also like if there were more tokens for stats in general. None for CS? None for any advanced metrics?

And I'd really like to be able to change the capitalization of player names, team names, etc., but I don't see a way to do it.

Still, it's fun just doing the designs even with the limitations. For the old-style ones, I created a bunch of tongue-in-cheek 19th-century style ads. Attaching a couple here...

[ThatSeventiesGuy]

For card backs...

You can cheat a bit. If you can find another template that is about the same size as yours, so can copy the card back .xml from it onto your new one. No, or at least minimal, tweaking required.

Lord knows, it's saved me many hours of heartbreak and frustration, anyway.

[ctorg]

So I've really gotten into the baseball card making thing since I posted here. I'm running a solo fictional historical league, and I've been making unique cards for each year as I go. It's a lot of fun, and I think I'm getting much better at it as I do it more.

But I'm finding that I'm really frustrated by the limitations. The biggest one, to me, is the extremely small number of available fonts. Most of the fonts the game uses don't have lowercase letters available, and I don't know of a way to force token items to be uppercase (that would be great), so I'm stuck with essentially two fonts, one of which has a few variations (bold, italic, etc).

I also wish there was a greater variety of tokens for stats, and a more definitive list. BMW's guide is a huge help, but I've found tokens that aren't in it and things that can be modified that I didn't realize (like str_length).

I'm wondering how other people deal with the limitations like that and still keep some variety. I know you can change the x/y proportions of the fonts, which helps a bit with the fonts, but what else can be done?

[klavier]

You can make borders around the text for a little variety.

[ctorg]

Yeah, I've played around with that. I've also made letters that alternate colors and done a lot of fooling around with height and width to sort of make believe there are different fonts. I wish we could just add more fonts to the folder and have them work, or that the game could recognize installed fonts.

[fhomess]

Originally Posted by ctorg

I'm wondering how other people deal with the limitations like that and still keep some variety. I know you can change the x/y proportions of the fonts, which helps a bit with the fonts, but what else can be done?

I've tried to maintain this page with information about various tokens and options, so if you've found stuff not there, please let me know and I'll add it.

Having limited fonts is a pain. Particularly the fact that there is no longer a cursive font with which to simulate signatures.

[ctorg]

Originally Posted by fhomess

I've tried to maintain this page with information about various tokens and options, so if you've found stuff not there, please let me know and I'll add it.

Having limited fonts is a pain. Particularly the fact that there is no longer a cursive font with which to simulate signatures.

Oh, that's great. I hadn't seen that.

One text attribute that I can add is str_length. It allows you to specify the length of a text string. I used it to make a team name that had alternating letters of different colors by overlaying the team name at the same x/y coordinates 15 times but setting the string length of each to the one below +1, and then alternating colors. The default all star card uses it to display only the left 2 digits of the year (which is how I came across it).