Today you get a double dose. Normally, the next character that you could select would be Sylvia the Knight, but the Horn of the Abyss mod replaces Sylvia on maps without any water, given that she's a Navigation character. Kind of a shame; her portrait is a classic. But, of course, Navigation is a stupid skill; I don't even think it's desirable on maps with water unless it's tons of water and sailing around is a major feature of the map. Which, to be fair, is not really a map that I enjoy very much either.
Since Sylvia is replaced by Beatrice in that situation, and Beatrice has few graphical options (many of the portrait replacement packs that I have only address the core characters from Heroes Complete, not the Horn of the Abyss characters. All of the HotA characters have only one or two options to choose from) I thought it prudent to just lump her in with Sylvia and do them both together.
Once again, you can ignore the Pack 01 and Pack 02 images altogether. There are a tiny handful of instances where they at least have a good image, although it's normally not an appropriate one for the character, because it looks nothing like him, and is just a generic fantasy image of a character, usually from a D&D illustration, or some other fantasy novel cover.
Also as usual, dtnmang and Vallex offer great choices, but the stylistic differences means that they're more academically great choices rather than ones that I'm likely to entertain. And StrikerX is a mixed bag; sometimes fitting in the same mold as dtnmang and Vallex, and sometimes in the mold of the two Packs. the so-called wildcard pack doesn't have a choice for either of these, and I'd suggest that they are also not usually an option anyway. ensrick and the two Stable Diffusion packs therefore become the normal leading options to replace the Original.
Although my goal was to replace all of the original character portraits, I'm making an exception for the HotA portraits. Some of them are new to me, because I just downloaded HotA recently, they're not old and familiar to me yet. However, if they look more like an original and less higher quality, I might entertain replacing them anyway.
For Sylvia, all three of the AI generated ones (including ensrick's GIMP edited AI; he really did put the most work into it, and he has a consistent vision, which is why he so often wins these decisions) all look very similar. The original Sylvia had a bit of a crazy eyes look. The Stable Diffusion AI portrait pack option has her with a strange expresion on her face. I do kind of like the look of Stable Diffusion 2, but ultimately ensrick is just a little better. Plus, it has the same slight smirk that the original does.
The Beatrice versions all look very similar, but again, I think ensrick's is the highest quality execution of the idea. His more realistic eyes and softer features, where the original often has exaggerated eyes and sharper shades and lines on the face. Sometimes that's not always what you want; the sharper features look fine on the men characters, whereas sometimes ensrick makes them look like they belong on the cover of a romance novel. But you usually want your women characters to be a little prettier.
WINNER: ensrick for both characters.
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