The X2AC album art remake thread

IMPORTANT: If you do make banners, PLEASE do not make them perfect squares! Do something like 256x258 or 512x514 (+2 to the vertical height) because stepmania will warp your perfectly square banner!
sm-ssc post-1.0final will not warp squares anymore. stay tuned?


I've seen people commonly referring to X2 AC banners as "the backgrounds", but there are a lot of modifications needed to achieve accurate images. For pre-SuperNOVA era album art, the backgrounds are often extended vertically or simply remade with more vertical space, requiring recreations of the entire backgrounds (ex, MAX 300, exotic ethnic,...). Others are the same backgrounds with no new vertical or horizontal space, but have the text inside resized and moved (ex, The legend of MAX, TwinBee,...). So, it's not a simple matter of taking your old -bg.png and cropping it. It's quite complicated (unless Konami lost the source art, as seems possible with DROP THE BOMB, which has letterboxing).

(See http://zenius-i-vanisher.com/v5.2/ddrx2bannerphotos.php for references)

With at least one square-banner sm-ssc theme making fast progress / nearing completion, I thought I would create a new thread to share some of my work!

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DDR X2:
She is my wife (missing bright purple lines at bottom right)
smooooch (from Miltank System)

DDR X:
TimeHollow (cut from video, thus image fades to black too close to bottom)

DDR SuperNOVA2:
Freeway Shuffle (image cut from video, so missing some lines/effects)
Music In The Rhythm (lol - cut from video, used some opacity and gaussian blur to get that blue light)
Pluto Relinquish (from Miltank System)
Raspberry Heart (rough cut from video, rough TV's skewed into the towers)
Trust -DanceDanceRevolution mix-

DDR SuperNOVA:
AA
Fascination ~eternal love mix~ (from Miltank System)
iFUTURELIST
Mind Parasite

DDR EXTREME:
bag
BE LOVIN
Daikenkai (from DDR Addict)
Heaven is a '57 metallic gray (kinda rough)
Pink Rose
TEARS (mspaint job)
The legend of MAX (mspaint job)
TwinBee ~Generation X~
xenon (by KKiONI - needs font change)

DDRMAX2:
AFRONOVA(FROM NONSTOP MEGAMIX) (according to Nicolas, crop needs a 2-pixel shift)
BREAK DOWN!
KAKUMEI (from Miltank System)
STILL IN MY HEART (MOMO MIX)
TSUGARU (kinda lazy with the clouds at top)
TSUGARU (APPLE MIX) (kinda lazy with the clouds at top)

DDRMAX:
Healing Vision (Angelic mix) (from Miltank System)
ORION.78~civilization mix~ (from Miltank System)

DDR 3rdMIX:
AFRONOVA
TRIP MACHINE ~luv mix~ (from Miltank System)

DDR 2ndMIX:
PARANOIA KCET (clean mix) (from Miltank System)

Cut songs:
DYNAMITE RAVE (super euro version)

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Feel free to contribute... my amateur editing skills and lack of art creation skills make it impossible to cover everything.

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what needs editing is Maxx Unlimited. . .

Those banners by the way looks so official, I hope you'll make more

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Well I currently whipped up two:
The legend of MAX
Xenon
Although according to the pictures of the album art versions, Xenon got a font change and the title in The legend of MAX is shifted a bit more to the right than in the original background.

Edit: Also forgot to mention that the squares in the background of Xenon have shifted a bit and there is not as many.

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Uh KKiONI... as I heavily implied in the opening post, the point is to not post (inaccurate) crops of backgrounds, but to actually remake/photoshop/shift/extend them to look like the official album art...

In any case, I actually did make The legend of MAX, but I wasn't very happy with it because I used content-aware fill and basically did a mspaint job over the vertical extensions.

edit: Actually, your xenon background looks just like the photo at http://zenius-i-vanisher.com/v5.2/ddrx2bannerphotos.php, so gj on that. I think my problem there was I was using the Universe 16:9 background.

edit 2: also don't do perfect squares because stepmania is dumb.

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My go at it with Wild Rush

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I tried a few, and I think I am getting the hang of it
(I should point out that I did them in 256x256 instead of 256x258. Oops...):

Your banners look superb! though I think this banner should have some effects on it's font:

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a lil bit of contentawarefill and text glow...
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/681348/X2AC/AFRONOVA.png
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/681348/X2AC/AFRONOVA%20(FROM%20NONSTOP%20MEGAMIX).png

(i messed up and didn't give afronova (3rd mix) enough of a glow, but i was dumb and didn't save a PSD. so you just get nonstop megamix)

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just a little nit-picky point-out, the Afronova and Afronova (Nonstop Megamix) is two pixels down from the original

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Nice thread~!
Because there are soooo many song banners that remake into square one.. Sticky this thread will be easy 2 find.

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Oh your Legend of Max album art looks much better than mine. It's true that was only a resizing. GimpSHOP is very limited in terms to detailing. I think I'll leave it to the Photoshop experts for this project then Well at least for the more complex ones.
Xenon was pretty easy to do as the solid colours made shifting things very easily. Oh and if you want a real shocker, it was was actually made in MS Paint believe it or not

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You know, I'm kinda disappointed that as soon as I begin to START making new banners and BGs for songs, Konami pulls THIS on me and now everything is different, huh? But oh well. I'll deal.

So I guess it doesn't make sense to remake older banners anymore now that we use album art, correct? Is there any StepMania theme in existence right now that utilizes it? I want to help if I can (with this thread, I mean).

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So can these help?

Oarfish
888
Aftershock
Sakura Storm
Delta Max
Dummy

I posted them up in the custom background page but they said they weren't backgrounds.

Not at this moment, but Lirodon is working on an X2 AC theme for SM 4.0.

Also...
Pink Rose
It turned out ok, but the background had to be shifted a little in order to fit the text properly. The album art in X2 for Pink rose seems to have a background that extends a little further than the one used in Extreme.
Thanks jch02140 for telling me the font used.

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There are at least two that I know of, but neither are publicly available (or not online). I don't know how Lirodon's song wheel looks right now (his old screenshot doesn't have the right number of banners onscreen, or proper rotation), but the other's looks a lot closer to X2's album art wheel.

I combined KKiONI's pink rose with mine.. I never got the artist text right.

These are some things I made from scratch, so they're not nearly as accurate as what I posted earlier.
DROP
She is my wife (missing those bright purple lines)

And this is the epitome of mspaint quality work:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/681348/X2AC/TOMORROW.png
If anyone wants to touch it up...


There definitely needs to be a place for posting crops of existing banners needing no editing, as well as good-quality album art for the new licenses (for example, I can't find a good image for Novaspace's Time After Time), but I was hoping this thread could be just "remake" work. Maybe when some of those albumart songwheel themes near completion...

btw, assuming all the U3 backgrounds are 1152x960 (I think a couple aren't), they can be batch processed in XnView to 512x514 (or resized smaller, if wanted).

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Just to confirm: are we sure that the actual dimensions for each "cover" is 256x256? I am aware that the rule of thumb is to add two more pixels to the height measurement (making it 256x258), however, how is it then that I've come across other covers that are twice the size? If I remember correctly, those were ripped from Universe 3. What dimensions do those iterations use? Is there any major difference between the two (other than image resoultion quality)? Does X2 use this higher image resolution as well?

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We know that covers are squares. I haven't been to a DDR X2 dedicab personally, so I don't know if Konami stores the images in a higher resolution, but we do know that the covers are at least 256x256.
(I think we've determined that Wii's covers are only 224x224).

To clarify, padding 2 pixels (they can even be transparent) to the height is only because stepmania is stoopid.

The Xbox team did things differently, they did HD backgrounds as well as "HD" album art. The size of those Universe 3 album art images is 512x512, so if you wanted to keep it that high (which will lag stepmania a little more), then pad 512x514. Otherwise resize the art down to 256x256 first, then pad to 256x258.

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Oh, perfect.

I like to call myself a big-time "graphics wh*re" (<-----for lack of a better word). That being said, I'll probably be making all of my covers HD. However, I'll also be sure to keep a scaled-down copy for those people here who aren't as picky as I am.

Thank you very much.

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That looks great
The font used in the artist appears to match the font used in the title.

I was also thinking the album art that looks pretty official should be grouped in the first post. I think it may be useful for future reference.

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Would anyone here happen to know where I could find high-res versions of dancemania album art? It just occurred to me that if this is going to be there new standard, maybe we should start looking for it? Just a thought. I know that for cases like DAM DARIRAM or IF YOU WERE HERE they just edited the BG images and put that in its place, but I would personally prefer having the actual Dancemania cover for more of an authentic feel.

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