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Character Artist is the latest in a series of expansions for Profantasy's map making software Campaign Cartographer (see review). Its purpose is to provide quick and easy character portraits for the hard-of-drawing and the pressed-for-time GM.

Installation

It comes with a decent instructution manual and an expansion CD which is installed as normal. It found my installation of Campaign Cartographer (CC2 hereafter) without prompting and installed without problems. A new icon appears on the CC2 icon bar which toggles between the usual CC2 icons and a new set which select symbol catalogues for race, sex, heads, right and left arms (and things for them to hold, like weapons and shields), torsos, legs, "monsters" and other items which includes things like belts, pouches and jewellery.

The Basics

To start a new sketch, you choose a background from the supplied template list which includes stock fantasy settings like on a road, at sunrise, etc.. There are also templates for making counters with your character on, which is a neat touch.

You select your character's race by repeatedly clicking on the appropriate icon- for example, click on the head icon and you will get human heads and headgear, another click will get you dwarvish, then elvish and so on. The races supplied are human, dwarf, elf, gnome, half elf, halfing and half orc, with a goodly selection of monsterous bits and pieces thrown in as well. Click on the toggle sex icon takes you from male to female, obviously.

Now you click on your choice of head in the symbol catalogue at the side of the screen, click on the drawing and - ping!- the head appears, locked in the correct place. If you need to make slight adjustments to the position of things at the end you can do so, but I found this was only necessary for a few items like belts and necklaces. Now you are flying- click on a hairstyle, click on the drawing. Ping! instant hairdo. Click on the torso icon, click a body (say clad in a robe), click on the drawing - ping! You get the idea.

This all takes longer to describe than actually do. A neat touch is "varicolour" symbols, which are filled with the currently-selected colour, making it easy to assemble an outfit in whatever garish colour scheme you favour. As in CC2, the colour management is very crude compared with Illustrator/Draw/Freehand but that's an issue with CC2 rather than Character Artist.

So the process of drawing the character is pretty easy. What about the results? This all depends on the quality of the supplied symbol libraries. In general, this is pretty high. The sketches have a certain cartoonish quality and certainly aren't going to rival Larry Elmore, but considering you can get a pretty decent representation of your character in ten minutes straight out of the box I think it is pretty impressive. On the plus side, everything is vector-based so printouts will be neat and high quality.

How good is it?

There are niggles- a much wider variety of faces for the characters would have been very welcome. The hairstyles are all a bit 1980's and if you are playing anything other than vanilla AD&D you may find that you rapidly run out of style options- the clothing is quite limited and really only fit for a bog-standard fantasy game. We tried it for RuneQuest and drew a halfway decent troll, but ducks were out of the question!You can add your own symbols to the catalogue of course, which will certainly help add in the fabled +7 vorpal carrot of bunny slaying or whatever, but I suspect that if you have enough artistic ability to do a good job illustrating complete new races you might find Character Artist too limiting. It is, after all, based on CC2, which is a CAD program, not an illustration program.

This I think is the ultimate limitation on the quality of art you can produce easily with Character Artist. There are no graded fills or blends, no pressure-sensitive pen to make variable width lines. Just solid blocks of colour or pattern fills, maybe with a border. Still, it would be churlish to criticize Character Artist too heavily for this, it is after all clearly designed to let you produce recognisable pictures quickly, rather than being a package for producing pro-quality illustrations.

In my review of CC2 I criticised several aspects of the user interface for being radically non-standard. In Character Artist, the fact that everything snaps to the right place deals with 95% of these problems- you very rarely have to adjust anything more complicated than the fill colour and the stacking order of the body parts you have put down. Changing the stacking order is more difficult than it should be, because you select something by clicking on its outline and as far as I have seen there is no shift-click to cycle through a stack of objects on top of one another. So if you select an arm, you will likely select the armour on it too which can be awkward if you wanted to swap them around!

ProFantasy's web site has some example portraits; producing ones of similar complexity only took me about 15 minutes.

Conclusions

All in all, Character Artist is a cheap and cheerful add-on to CC2 which is well worth the extra money (though I wouldn't want to have to buy CC2 just to get Character Artist). Its symbol catalogues are great for standard hack'n'slash AD&D campaigns, reasonable for most Medieval stock fantasy and rather limited for anything beyond that. The quality of pictures is a bit cartoony, and may lack variety in the long run for a GM illustrating NPC's, but for the price one cannot really complain.

I hope that expansions from ProFantasy may come out in the future: I'm sure a Vampire/World Of Darkness one would go down well, and I could really use a superhero one, and an SF one wouldn't go amiss either, and an "identikit" set for faces would be great...

Style: 3 (Average)
Substance: 3 (Average)

Character Artist
Author: ProFantasy Software Category: Computer software/Gaming Aid Company/Publisher: ProFantasy Software Line: Campaign Cartographer Cost: £20/$30 Page count: n/a Capsule Review by Hywel Phillips on 08/20/00. Genre tags: Fantasy	Character Artist is the latest in a series of expansions for Profantasy's map making software Campaign Cartographer (see review). Its purpose is to provide quick and easy character portraits for the hard-of-drawing and the pressed-for-time GM. Installation It comes with a decent instructution manual and an expansion CD which is installed as normal. It found my installation of Campaign Cartographer (CC2 hereafter) without prompting and installed without problems. A new icon appears on the CC2 icon bar which toggles between the usual CC2 icons and a new set which select symbol catalogues for race, sex, heads, right and left arms (and things for them to hold, like weapons and shields), torsos, legs, "monsters" and other items which includes things like belts, pouches and jewellery. The Basics To start a new sketch, you choose a background from the supplied template list which includes stock fantasy settings like on a road, at sunrise, etc.. There are also templates for making counters with your character on, which is a neat touch. You select your character's race by repeatedly clicking on the appropriate icon- for example, click on the head icon and you will get human heads and headgear, another click will get you dwarvish, then elvish and so on. The races supplied are human, dwarf, elf, gnome, half elf, halfing and half orc, with a goodly selection of monsterous bits and pieces thrown in as well. Click on the toggle sex icon takes you from male to female, obviously. Now you click on your choice of head in the symbol catalogue at the side of the screen, click on the drawing and - ping!- the head appears, locked in the correct place. If you need to make slight adjustments to the position of things at the end you can do so, but I found this was only necessary for a few items like belts and necklaces. Now you are flying- click on a hairstyle, click on the drawing. Ping! instant hairdo. Click on the torso icon, click a body (say clad in a robe), click on the drawing - ping! You get the idea. This all takes longer to describe than actually do. A neat touch is "varicolour" symbols, which are filled with the currently-selected colour, making it easy to assemble an outfit in whatever garish colour scheme you favour. As in CC2, the colour management is very crude compared with Illustrator/Draw/Freehand but that's an issue with CC2 rather than Character Artist. So the process of drawing the character is pretty easy. What about the results? This all depends on the quality of the supplied symbol libraries. In general, this is pretty high. The sketches have a certain cartoonish quality and certainly aren't going to rival Larry Elmore, but considering you can get a pretty decent representation of your character in ten minutes straight out of the box I think it is pretty impressive. On the plus side, everything is vector-based so printouts will be neat and high quality. How good is it? There are niggles- a much wider variety of faces for the characters would have been very welcome. The hairstyles are all a bit 1980's and if you are playing anything other than vanilla AD&D you may find that you rapidly run out of style options- the clothing is quite limited and really only fit for a bog-standard fantasy game. We tried it for RuneQuest and drew a halfway decent troll, but ducks were out of the question!You can add your own symbols to the catalogue of course, which will certainly help add in the fabled +7 vorpal carrot of bunny slaying or whatever, but I suspect that if you have enough artistic ability to do a good job illustrating complete new races you might find Character Artist too limiting. It is, after all, based on CC2, which is a CAD program, not an illustration program. This I think is the ultimate limitation on the quality of art you can produce easily with Character Artist. There are no graded fills or blends, no pressure-sensitive pen to make variable width lines. Just solid blocks of colour or pattern fills, maybe with a border. Still, it would be churlish to criticize Character Artist too heavily for this, it is after all clearly designed to let you produce recognisable pictures quickly, rather than being a package for producing pro-quality illustrations. In my review of CC2 I criticised several aspects of the user interface for being radically non-standard. In Character Artist, the fact that everything snaps to the right place deals with 95% of these problems- you very rarely have to adjust anything more complicated than the fill colour and the stacking order of the body parts you have put down. Changing the stacking order is more difficult than it should be, because you select something by clicking on its outline and as far as I have seen there is no shift-click to cycle through a stack of objects on top of one another. So if you select an arm, you will likely select the armour on it too which can be awkward if you wanted to swap them around! ProFantasy's web site has some example portraits; producing ones of similar complexity only took me about 15 minutes. Conclusions All in all, Character Artist is a cheap and cheerful add-on to CC2 which is well worth the extra money (though I wouldn't want to have to buy CC2 just to get Character Artist). Its symbol catalogues are great for standard hack'n'slash AD&D campaigns, reasonable for most Medieval stock fantasy and rather limited for anything beyond that. The quality of pictures is a bit cartoony, and may lack variety in the long run for a GM illustrating NPC's, but for the price one cannot really complain. I hope that expansions from ProFantasy may come out in the future: I'm sure a Vampire/World Of Darkness one would go down well, and I could really use a superhero one, and an SF one wouldn't go amiss either, and an "identikit" set for faces would be great... Style: 3 (Average) Substance: 3 (Average)