Eve Online - Character Creator: Round II

A while back I wrote an article about Eve Online's new character creator, and how it would be a nice way to put together portraits for NPCs in RPGs. Of course it has the big problem of requiring the Eve Online client and an active account to actually use it. Fortunately, there's a Better Way (TM).

Eve Online has a rather active forum community. The forums show character portraits for anyone that posts. We can use this fact to get access to a decent-sized JPG image file of anyone that posts on the forums. With thousands of players, that's a ton of portraits. Here's how to do it:

Head for the Eve forums and browse around until you see a portrait you like. You don't need to log in to browse. Once you find one you like, do one of the following:
Click on the portrait, which takes you to a 256x256 version of the portrait. Next find the URL of the image itself. In Firefox right-click on this image and select Copy Image Location. In Internet Exploder you'll have to right-click and get image properties and copy the Address field. What you want to get is a URL that looks something like this:

• http://image.eveonline.com/Character/XXXXXXXX_256.jpg - Where XXXXXXXXX is a random number.

Paste this URL into your browser address bar and change the trailing 256.jpg to 512.jpg:

• Before: http://image.eveonline.com/Character/XXXXXXXX_256.jpg
• After: http://image.eveonline.com/Character/XXXXXXXX_512.jpg

Voila! 512x512 jpg image!

The alternative method involves a visit to another web site. Instead of clicking on the image in the forum, copy the character name, which is right below the portrait, then visit this site and plug the name into the web page. It'll show both old and new portraits.

In either case you can right-click the portrait and save the image locally. There are literally thousands of posts on the forums, and people change characters all the time, so the supply is effectively endless. Good stuff!