“Hey! Learn our syntax here.”
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- jpg (124 KB)
- cred: P.P.
600
- ↓ 0.13
- ꩜ 0.29
- ↑ 2.36
{C} → Scratch : 10
{C}{C} → Nap Time
Remove all damage counters from Teddiursa. Teddiursa is now Asleep.
illus. Miki Tanaka
External: Bulba ↗ · Shop: TCGplayer ↗, cardmarket ↗, eBay ↗
If it finds honey, its crescent mark glows. It always licks its paws because they are soaked with honey.
Twylis
Miki Tanaka’s choice to feature in the TCG Illustration Exhibition, and it made me notice something interesting.
https://52f4e29a8321344e30ae-0f55c9129972ac85d6b1f4e703468e6b.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/products/pictures/1169031.jpg
This is one of a handful of artworks that *didn’t* get horribly distorted by Wizards in the Neo era, and if you notice the upper branch of the tree, it seems this artwork actually shows a little *more*. Given this, it seems likely Wizards actually had access to the original artwork files, and was actively *choosing* to ruin them whenever their default aspect ratio didn’t fit their personal layout whims.
Ambassador
You can actually rip the full image from the gallery! https://imgur.com/a/kNU7veh
I’ve been kind of waiting around to see if anyone else does it first – I’m not capable of writing a script to mass grab the gallery images, I’m having to go one by one and toggle javascript on and off and then jerry-rig this plugin actually meant for other things to grab the images for me, but with only a few days left, and nobody else apparently working on this(???), I might have to do it myself after all.
Ambassador
It would, of course, help if I linked the right image: https://imgur.com/a/zDnEb0a
Twylks
I figured as much, but couldn’t find any immediately apparent way to do so. Looks like the Download All Images add-on on Firefox is a solid bet, though its default settings seem to miss the full artwork images. Will finagle a bit with it a bit later today until I figure out a way that works. Definitely doesn’t hurt to have multiple people doing it, though!
I also assumed somebody else was already doing this too, you’d think the biggest franchise in the world would have *someone* documenting a time-limited upload of illustrations that have never before been available, but I guess it comes down to us :v
Ambassador
I do think it’s a worthwhile endeavor. While I have the impression some of the full art images are little more than ‘zoomed in’ scans of card art – e.g. you can see Neo1 Steelix’s evolution circle in its nominal full art¹ – some others are almost necessarily the source art (just as one example, all the Pokémon
that appear in the gallery clearly show the background that extends beyond the card’s art border). The Teddiursa art *might* be sourced from an EN scan, but given the EN print of Teddiursa doesn’t show up in the gallery at all, and it has, like you noted, the part of the branch that got cut off, so I do think it’s the OG.
¹ I feel like after looking at and saving a few, whether it’s the source image or just a zoomed in scan depends on the artist. It doesn’t seem like anyone bothered to save many (if any?) of the Ken Sugimori artwork, not even the original art he made for Gym. Others do seem to have held on to their artwork, or else someone held on to high-resolution scans of it for them.
Twylis
Very curious about your specific process to save those two (and also why they’re two different file types and dimensions?). Download All Images at its most intensive extraction seems to eventually crash my browser, and based on what I’m finding in the element inspection, it seems the full illustrations are actually video files and that’s why Download All Images isn’t able to extract them.
For example:
https://stream.mux.com/ofaSaTdy6lvzzULsfR1pCDA9rPER53Sz.m3u8
But if you were able to save those two, there must be some static image equivalent buried in the servers *somewhere*, likely in case of javascript being disabled. But when I disable the mux.com script (which seems to correspond to the video files), the illustration just doesn’t load at all.
Ambassador
Honestly, I don’t terrifically understand why what I’m doing is working, so I can’t explain it, so I’ll just have to spell out what I’m doing.
1. Hover over the image I want. Then toggle the Firefox extension “Allow Right-Click”, which I assume is disabling JS that usually blocks that, to be able to right click.
2. Upon right click, I use an extension called “Search by Image”. This gives me a couple options, including some blank images (I assume these are deliberately overlaid to try and counteract what I’ve been doing?), weird renders of the background image that includes the card, and then, the card art itself. I then pick either Yandex or Bing, and save the copy of the image that has been uploaded to those sites.
I think what “Search by Image” is doing is taking a static snapshot of, like you said, what appears to actually be a video file – the video toggles back and forth between a render/scan of the entire card, and the card art, and if I right-click with the extension at the wrong time, it’ll take a snapshot of one of the middle frames. It’s clearly not actually grabbing an image, because no image exists. (This particularly doesn’t work at all for any images that don’t have a corresponding video file, like any of the booster pack art, where I was reduced to just manually taking a screenshot anyways.)
As far as why the images are different file types, and resolutions are varying, I don’t know. I wonder if the second step I’m doing, aside from concerns about transferring a lossy image from the site > Yandex > and *then* my hard drive, is actually any better than just grabbing screenshots or not. There also seems to be resolution differences across the JP and EN version of the site I’m only noticing now that you bring it up. https://imgur.com/a/54JAOAP
Twylis
So, here’s the result of Fomantis using your original method:
https://i.ibb.co/Nsrqcqr/ocr.jpg
And here’s my result for the screenshot-the-stream-method (pardon the uncropped bars):
https://i.ibb.co/NNKGGp7/Screenshot-from-2022-10-21-11-34-50.png
And, as an additional point of reference, here’s the result of using my video player’s built-in screenshot function:
https://i.ibb.co/z54gr3L/Screenshot-from-Tn97l-Ei3-RMBdy9-GPsk-Cg-G6-Ik1-YBj-ZIFi-m3u8.png
The image search snapshot definitely seems to produce the worst results, being lower-resolution, unnaturally saturated, and more artifact-heavy. The manual screenshot of the stream file produced the largest resolution (perhaps misleadingly, since it was full-screen), the least amount of artifacts, and also the closest color match to how the card actually looks in the stream. The third method, using the GNOME Videos application, is a midpoint of both — slightly more artifacting than the manual screenshot and a fair bit more saturation, but does have the advantage of potentially most closely matching the “true” resolution of the video.
None of these methods are especially quick or mass-produceable, which kinda kills my motivation to work on it. Just saving all the .m3u files feels like a hassle, since I’ve been copying them directly from the code (which I saved in a separate document). Perhaps this is why seemingly nobody has undertaken it already :v
Twylis
Further information: not only are these video files, they’re video *streaming* files. They don’t actually contain the video even if you save them; they only contain a URL that directs to a playlist — in other words, once they decide to close the Exhibition, even these files will likely become unuseable. TPC *really* doesn’t want people accessing these illustrations after the exhibition :v
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M3U
Ambassador
One more weird thing here, I think.
https://imgur.com/a/nWfzIut
The left two images – well, screenshots, as it turns out – were grabbed from visiting the English language version of the site. Both have the same 758×482 dimensions. The right two images were from the Japanese language version of the site.. and the dimensions don’t match up. They’ve really rigged these up interesting because it looks like they’re, like you said, streaming files and the dimensions are just changing dynamically based on whatever size image the stream is pointed to.
The most efficient way of going about this, my guess would be, is to see if there’s a rhyme or reason to the filenames of the .m3u files – or else just have to manually scrape them – and then load them up in a media player and take screenshots? (Screenshots from a media player loading the m3u instead of screenshots from a browser would, I think, eliminate my question as to whether anything is being cropped out by the way it’s being rendered in the browser.)
Twylis
After checking Venipede as well, the saturation issue of the built-in screenshot method is pretty significant, especially when there’s a lot of red tones. However, the manual screenshot method is likely bottlenecked by my laptop’s 1920×1080 display, and I suspect an even higher resolution display would yield even better results. I suppose it’s good enough, but it’d be nice to get the best possible image :U
There’s a total of 157 .m3u8 results in the code (so presumably 157 cards to preserve), which uh. kinda seems overwhelming anyway. but if this doesn’t get done at all it’ll be such a loss :(
Ambassador
I agree that the manual screenshot of the file being larger is probably a false positive.
My attention will be split this weekend – it’s really nice weather outside, if nothing else – but if you want to split any rote screenshotting feel free to dump some onto me via Discord. II’ll be keen for everything save maybe Gen 5 cards, which I can see myself struggling to care about as a collective set :s)
Twylis
Apparently there’s *539* stream files in the code, which sounds obscene — 157 was only the number of pages. I assumed there’s a different file for every single language hence the huge number, but after randomly looking through a bunch, they all seem to be for the English site only. 539 also tracks with the numbers I was getting for the general full-card asset extraction. There really are just 539 illustrations there :v
Personally, I’m inclined to throw in the towel. This is *such* an immense undertaking that I really don’t want to commit to it in its completion, and selectively preserving only favorites doesn’t work especially well when you don’t know what illustration a stream link actually contains until you’ve actually saved and opened it (and they don’t even get thumbnails after!). I would drop the code in a pastebin for others to tackle, but it’s too big for pastebin’s 512kb size limit :/
You win, TPC.