Set of paper minis to use in any game. Well done, though I tend to prefer illustrations over the 3D computer art, but these are good.

As a self published rpg author I'm always looking for art, and that is the reason I picked this up (can't argue with free artwork!). I like the pictures, but the reason I can't give this a perfect rating is because as other reviewers noted the images without the background are poorly rendered to the point of being pretty much unusable. It's not too big of a deal, but sometimes I don't want a background for how I'm using a picture. Still, I do like the pics with the backgrounds and can find use for them. This product would have been a good value if priced for a few dollars, but the fact that it is free make it an even better deal!

Superb artwork and lovely examples of their work. A perfect free product to show off their quality and increase interest in their other purchases.

Lovely examples of their work. Their artwork is very good and this is a great product to suck you into their other fine products.

Great art work and a perfect tease to get you interested in more of their fine work

A beautiful character with a well-modeled face, presented in a variety of poses with a couple different weapon choices.

I'm not crazy about them putting her in a thong in most of the fully-clothed images, which strikes me as pandering considering she's otherwise armored; frankly, it just looks silly. This detracts from usability, which is the only thing keeping this from a five-star rating.

Some nice Skins and character conceptions.

That said, some of these characters seriously need to add some protection to the groin area. (That many super villains with their anatomical bits dangling free is just an invitation to a called shot.)

I was disappointed at the very low resolution of the images without the background. After all, it's always easier to lower resolution than to raise it again, and so if I want to use one of these images at full scale, I have to either use the background or suffer really bad resolution

Nice set of CG character images. Very handy for people using Virtual Table Top software such as Maptool as you can use Adobe Acrobat to copy a full sized image for each character out of the PDF instead of just printing them as little images.

Highly recommended for the price.

EXCELLENT! Well done! Great job! I wet my pants I was so happy!

The dam thing is broke. The .pdf is empty. Don't bother! Why is this still being offered for sale? Doh!

Very good set of counters. Graphic quality is good. Can't beat the price.

I’m not sure I really understand why I like character galleries. Maybe it’s because they’re just fun to look at; like an art book where you get to fill in the narrative blanks. Or maybe it’s utilitarian – you can use the pictures to showcase a character in your game. Either way, there’s a certain appeal to a collection of artwork about a character. Once you have a good set of images, all that’s left then is to properly compile and market them. Unfortunately, sometimes these little technical details are what makes a product go off the rails. Enter the Tigress, from Action RPG Counters.

A seventy-page PDF, Super Portraits – Tigress starts off quickly, waiting only for the title page and credits page before presenting the images. Each page presents one single picture, with no other text or images to distract from the artwork (notwithstanding the barely-visible watermark in the bottom left corner). We’re given about twenty-five images of Tigress in various poses and outfits; in the case of the latter, most of those are her super-heroine costume, a tiger-striped getup that has claws on her hands and feet. We also get to see her in a sports bra and tiny shorts, and in a women’s business suit.

It was at this point that I started to notice the major fault with this collection; it likes to double up on a lot of the images it includes. Many of the pictures in this section are immediately followed up with another page of the same picture, just in closer. Now, I can appreciate why this is being done – I like sexy women as much as anyone – but it seems rather needless here. Do we really need a magnified picture of Tigress doing that high kick? We can just zoom in on the first one about as much with little loss of resolution. It just really seems wasted.

Following this are a number of images that showcase Tigress, and several other characters in an old factory (or a similar location). The images are laid out in a fairly linear manner, meaning that we’re basically watching the story unfold as Tigress breaks into the factory, is surrounded by ninjas, and then leaps into battle. I quite enjoyed this section, but found my enjoyment somewhat broken up by how the images weren’t as large as the entire page, meaning that as I scrolled down I had to put up with some white space at the bottom of each image. I recognize that this probably couldn’t be helped given the restrictions of the portrait layout, but it still broke up the pictorial narrative. There was also at least one picture where she was in the same pose she was in on the title page, this time just set against a background.

All of that takes up almost another twenty-five pages. Oddly, after that, we’re suddenly thrown back out of the storytelling pictures, and find ourselves back to Tigress posing against a white background. This time, it’s a few shots of her in some rather sexy lingerie, though only for a few shots…one of which is again a close-up. Then, bizarrely, we’re taken back to the images of her fighting ninjas in the factory again. We’re literally being given the exact same images here; I did a page-by-page comparison, and it’s the same set of images over again, except the lighting and shadowing are slightly different. The only new pictures come at the end, showing her tied up.

All of that took us to the sixty-ninth page. I wish I could say that the seventieth page, the last one in the book, had some sort of great picture that made it all end on a high note, but I can’t. Every time I scroll down to that page, my PDF reader informs me that there’s an error on the page, and it may not display correctly – clear it’s not, because all I’m seeing is a blank page.

It’s a sad irony that this last page forms an allegory for this book as a whole; what’s there may very well be great, but the technical details are undermining it. The number of doubled-images, even if they zoom in or change the lighting, doesn’t change the fact that there are a significant number of pages where you’re seeing what you saw on a previous page. That’s a killer where a character gallery is concerned, because it makes it seem like the page count is being padded. Throw in that irking error on the last page, and a total lack of easy-navigation tools (a PDF with no bookmarks is, to me, inexcusable), and you’ve got a good book that isn’t playing to its strengths.

The quality of the art work is great, however i wish there were the options of some other samples.

I bought this because I'd succumbed the freebie villains booklet these guys put out and used some of that free art in a product of mine. (If you haven't picked up that free book yet do it now!) I figured I owed them some payback. But it isn't much at this cost.

Good points: Bright, colourful, usable and cheap. Very cheap for the quality of artwork you receive.

Areas for improvement: Being CGI there is a tendency to rely upon the software rather than artistic flair and some of the pictures appear a bit bland. We need more dramatic poses, more expressive expressions, costumes which are more than sprayed on lycra (try adding some detail - the old underpants outside the leggings works well). If they could do this and work out how to produce some full Hero vs. Villain slugfests then their products would be bargain at ten times the price they are currently charging.

Look, I KNOW with "Poser" and its clones there are loads of people turning out CGI artwork in their bedrooms now and a lot of it looks good. However, I still can't see how these guys can bring themselves to GIVE AWAY something as good as this. At the very least, they should have given the artwork free and then made us publishers pay them a bit to use them in our projects. But no - you can use them and you still don't have to pay.

I swore to myself I wouldn't use this because I'd feel guilty but then I needed a set of Nazi power armour for my WWII supplement and there it was in this pack. That was it.

At least I went out and bought their Heroes book as a kind of payback. I'd like to buy some more of their stuff but I can't have the wife find it on my computer. What's with the fixation with teenage girls?

Good points - Free, colourful and usable.

Areas for improvement - Need to work on the poses to make them more dramatic. If the artists can find a copy of "Draw Comics the Marvel Way" by Stan Lee there's a nice illustration by John Buscema in there on dramatic poses.