I was looking for our last MOTM for 2010, and a relic showed up on the radar...

Yeebaagooon: Greetings relicradar, and welcome to the interview. How did you come up with your name?
relicradar: Hello Yeeb, Happy New Year to you, and thanks for picking me despite my humble contributions to SD. I can't remember how the name emerged, but it took me approx. three weeks and then it suddenly popped up in my head. Actually the only reason for me to register at AOMH was to be able to vote at the CSC. At that time I hadn't known that you could produce artworks in the editor, and the stuff people submitted to the CSC knocked me out of my socks.

Yeebaagooon: Unless you haxed my forum, I see no topics made by you in SD :O.
relicradar: Haha that's right, see my contributions are few... Hail said I should write a guide to screenshot making, but I would rather think that he is the right man for that job. I'm also pretty orthodox in my worship of the search function, so there was no need for me to start any question topics.

Yeebaagooon: You are most widely known for you skills with screenshots, what is your favourite shot and how did you make it?
relicradar: I like most of the shots that look a little bit mystic... of course those three that got me the CSC hat-trick, (Mountains, Stargate and Ice World) but also the Forgotten Ruins one... that small Lampade glow in the background is kick-ass and probably won me that round :P

I also still like the Minimalism one, which only consists of the units and the enlarged relic in the background... that restriction was a real eye opener for me and got me into animations and zoomy close-up stuff.

Also the ones I made for Elrich's Screenshot Story are ok most of the time, without the pressure of having to appeal to the voters you can be a lot more free in what you do and try out different things. Although admittedly my experiments with the height changer have not yielded any good-looking results yet, same goes for undermap shots... I'm fairly clumsy at that.

Well I take ages to make a shot, sometimes like a week or so. Until everything is in its place, the animations are spot-on, the effects are timed right and especially the lightning is as effective as possible. Then it takes me another day to pick the best shot from more than a hundred... I pause the editor at the perfect moment and then run through dozens of lightings and modify them. I don't use triggers or cinematic mode, fussing around with that would kill me. All is done in-editor, as I'm not the greatest technician; most of the shots are made WYSIWYG so to speak...

[Protocol '"http' for image URL not supported.]Yeebaagooon: Is there any screenshot trick you are particularly proud of?
relicradar: Hehe sure. There are two things I used pretty often and people didn't seem to notice them...

First of all filtering the scene through a water hill. That's the tissue-like texture in some of the shots. When I told Hail about that trick he went completely bonkers and started to exploit it.... He made some really amazing shots with it and also won many contests, I think he took it to the another level. We've had a very long and fruitful conversation about the WH trick and discovered quite a few possibilities. I use water hills as a filter in the foreground, but also as a backdrop, when none of the available skies seem to suit the shot, like in the Stargate one for instance. The thing is that the water surface is highly manipulable by the lighting, you can achieve amazing results.

The second trick is related to that. Hail taught me how to make waterbodies. So I started to experiment with solid surfaces and interestingly some of them are semi-transparent, i.e. you can create a lake with a transparent solid surface, then arrange your shot underneath that surface and zoom in. I did that for the Ice World shot, the terrain through which the shot was taken is one of the Olympus ones I think, but the ice terrains, and some others, work as well to some extent.

Yeebaagooon: What advice would you give to budding screenshot makers?
relicradar: Well there are plenty of don'ts and as many dos... if you keep them in mind your shot will be on the best way to looking awesome

You have a whole map for your shot, there is no need to squeeze it into a corner. Don't show the edge of the map unless you use a sky; in this case sky and lighting should match... don't use the grey stormy sky with a pink or blue lighting, it makes no sense. If no sky matches it doesn't matter, either put something (sensible) in the background or zoom in.

Don't use granite in any circumstances. It is so *ugly* it makes me writhe in pain. Don't use the awful Greek standard mountains unmixed. Don't use Trojan or Atlantean walls by just chucking them onto the map, unmodified they look extremely coarse. Mix your forests, use Reyk's forests and waterbodies pack for that. Reyk has released some great stuff for eyecandyists.

There seems to exist the common misconception not to use Grass A. I think Grass A is perfectly alright, if you mix it well. It can also look entirely different if you change the lighting. Don't rely on the Terrain Mod to collect cheap votes for you.

Don't compulsively tile the meadows and forests, in particular not with these sterile city tiles or Atty bathroom tiles. Also there have no Atty bathroom tiles been found inside Egyptian pyramids yet (just saying).

Don't use any of the standard lightings that came with the game, they are horrible. Instead, create your own ones. Just start clicking around in the colour boxes and play with the sun rotation and inclination. Humans are visual animals, a strong lighting beautifies the shot more than any eyecandy, while a bad lighting can completely kill a good shot.

For the same reason you should also mix the player colours of your different units and objects or pick suitable ones, unless, of course, you live in a world where everybody and everything, *including the buildings*, is default blue or red. There are so many colours available, download Nottud's editor and dare make use of brown and white etc for your buildings... use natural looking colours.

Don't hesitate to enlarge, downscale, rotate, tilt or animate objects, or make them unrecognisable; vary the sizes of repeatedly occurring objects like trees, rocks etc. It's a good trick! Use cinematic animations for your units. If you take the shot in-editor you can just press pause to stop the animation at the right time, and then keep moving the unit around, which is very comfortable.

Don't flatten the map, use elevation. Nothing is more implausible than a steamrolled landscape.

Look at the screenshots of the grandmasters, like Hail, SoV, Elrich, Nightfever, Lupus, to get an impression of what is possible, and try things which you have seen in their shots. Learning by copying is a good way to start, like every Chinese Calligrapher will tell you Once you know the basics, use them to realise your ideas and go mad!

Hmm... now that looks like the first chapter of a screenshot guide...

Yeebaagooon: A CSC hat trick is an honour we both share. I especially love your mountains shot, I can't even begin to imagine how you did those skylight effects .
relicradar: Congratulations on yours as well, must have missed that somehow, it's a great milestone! Haha yeah the old trick (water hill) has worked on plenty of occasions. It looks a bit like crinkled paper or so. The pain was actually to get the terrain mixing right. Some of the "shadows" had to be simulated with patches of dark terrain.

Yeebaagooon: What do you think of as the greatest limitation of the editor when you are making screenshots?
relicradar: Well to be honest with nottud's tools you can do almost anything you want, plus a lot of things you had not even thought of wanting. I would, however, like to be able to just type my own colour values in, instead of having to go in steps of 50. But surely this can be done with the console, of which I have no clue of course. I'd also like to save a lighting properly in the editor, incl. naming the file etc. Some objects can't be turned upside down, but that is just a minor annoyance. Oh yes and png screenshots would be awesome. Well see, these are just small wishes ^^.

Yeebaagooon: Have you ever dabbled in scenarios/cinematics?
relicradar: Actually I have made quite a lot of scenarios, but only specific ones for a friend... they are of a sort nobody at AOMH would play, let's call them "walk in the park" scenarios, not very challenging. Cinematics are difficult but I've made an intro for a map once, a simple one though. I am totally inexperienced at that. My big dream used to be to make a Heroes Of Might And Magic map, this game obsesses me, I wrote a whole notepad full of triggers and mechanisms for that, which were supposed to simulate HOMM-like levelling and the skill and magic system, but I never started to realise it.

Yeebaagooon: In Real Life ^TM, do you have art skills to equal your screenshot skills?
relicradar: Well in real life I'm fairly talent-free in terms of arts. The editor seemed the perfect tool for me to create a painting without having to use my hands.
For that same reason I have also started to look into HTML/CSS, to be able to style my blogs etc. I'm still a bloody beginner, though, but can modify a code to suit it to my requirements. Nothing major, but I am gathering as much knowledge as possible along the path.

Yeebaagooon: What is your average day like?
relicradar: I'm actually a tourism professional but currently doing text work, so that gives me way too many opportunities to check the cricket scores all the time. Cricket is a disease, curse ye Poms for having made it popular... and for retaining the Ashes. In the evening I usually meet up with other cricket nuts and we rant away. Apart from that I'm a vegetarian, I like music, mainly Heavy Metal, some techy stuff, and some music from the Subcontinent. I don't like movies but used to love Star Trek (the three middle series) and Stargate SG 1, as well as a lot of nerdy lame-arse German crime shows, the latter being an important element of my daily dinner ritual. Furthermore I like hiking, historical exhibitions, Nutella, green tea, ice cream, chilli, Italian herbs and trifle, i.e. food. Also I am not afraid to dissect and re-assemble my computer, my own one that is; seems a rather minor skill but pretty cool for a woman, as I know plenty of males who would stare into their PC cases like a pig into the clockwork, as we say over here ^^ My life goal is to become the complete όbernerd. I also like silly shit of all sorts for example lolcats or stuff like this and this. Oh yeah I talk too much, too (obviously).

Yeebaagooon: Any final words?
relicradar: Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to talk to you, I've probably blathered more in this interview than in all the years at SD combined. A Happy New Year to everyone who bothered reading this. Also, drink coffee: do stupid things faster with more energy!