Red Dead Redemption 2 - Arthur's Journal

[AliKarimi]

Hello everyone
I was a silent reader for quite a long time on here and finally wanted to do a replica on my own. I gathered, that one of the starting projects a lot of people do is the grail diary and since I recently bought a printer, I thought about doing that myself.
But it so happened, that at that same time I played through Red Dead Redemption 2 and really enjoyed, that Arthur keeps updating his journal along the way. So I decided to make a replica of that instead.
What intrigued me about that game is, that although it is digital and fictional, the journal and a lot of the paper props in the game could be "translated" to the real world quite easily.
I started with taking screenshots and trying to retouch them in photoshop, but soon realized that there are modding tools that make it possible to data mine the source textures.
After doing that it was quite straight forward. Having the source textures also made it easier to layout the pages a bit better than it happens in the game. There are a lot of empty or almost empty pages in there.
If anyone is interested in it, I can make the PDF file I created available here, although I worry a bit about the copyright of the texture files.

 

[AliKarimi]

a few more images

 

[breen2057]

while I've not played the game, I am impressed by the work you put into bringing this into the real world. The diary has the look of a old notebook that has been well used and the inserts look excellent. Any fan of the game would love to have one for sure.

There should not be a problem sharing a pdf of the diary as you are not asking for money but it is up to you if you feel comfortable doing so.

Whatever you decide, thanks for sharing pics of you work. Its is always great to see a well made replica.

 

[TuckerMan]

Holy moly, that is great!

I'd love to see whatever other information you're willing to share, how you produced it, how you got the files from the game, anything. I want to know more!

 

[AliKarimi]

Thanks for the replies
I am glad to share more about the process!

The whole process can be divided into a digital and an analog part.

Digital:

• Firstly, I captured a video from the game, where I went through the whole journal to have a reference of the order and layout. (OBS is a great free capture program)
  
  
• After learning of the possibility to data mine, I found the program "OpenIV" that lets you get into the game files and extract them.
  
  
• Journal textures are here: "....\textures_1.rpf\textures\ui\ui_journal_textures.rpf\"
  Most insert textures are here: "....\textures_1.rpf\textures\ui\ui_itemviewer.rpf\"
  Cigarette cards are in here: "....\textures_1.rpf\textures\ui\ui_pausemenu.rpf\"
  
  There are also textures for the newspapers and shop catalogs, maybe for the future
  
  
• After I got all the necessary material, I started to put everything together in Adobe InDesign. I went with A5 as journal size, maybe it is not 100% accurate, but the easiest to work with. Since I could just print out A4 pages and fold them without the need to cut to a different size.
  
  I took the liberty to change the layout on some pages to use the space a bit better. I will upload an example.
  
  
• After finishing the journal layout, I wanted to print it. But I was baffled to find out that it is somehow not easy to reorder the pages for printing. I had a hard time finding a good solution to that problem. At the end, I was really happy to find the program "PDFBooklet", that lets you reorder the pages depending on how many you want to put into each signature before binding.
  
  I uploaded the PDF I created in two variants. Before and after reordering.
  Here is the link to the files:

  Google Drive: Sign-in

  Access Google Drive with a Google account (for personal use) or Google Workspace account (for business use).

  drive.google.com
  
  I will give access individually, because I so often heard about Etsy resellers and all that.

Analog:
Now into the real world:

• Over in the grail diary threat, I found a great link to the following how-to: Make Your Own Moleskine-Like-Notebook
  That is all I needed for the binding of the book, and I followed the instructions almost exclusively.
  
  
• For the paper, I went with 120g in cream color. It was way too thick and did not feel good after getting wet and dry again from weathering.
  But it gave me the chance to do the whole bookbinding process once, and have more faith in myself the second time around.
  
  
• After binding everything together, I started weathering it with black tea and coffee. I soon realized that this was my second mistake, as it took forever to dry (because it was bound together) and created big waves in the paper.
  
  
• Now that I had my lessons learned, I went with 80g creme paper and did the weathering on each page individually before binding.
  Weathering in my case meant distressing the edges with a razor blade and then using black tea and coffee to make it look old.
  I also retouched a few pages with a coal marker to emulate the "original" drawings and writings.
  
  
• Note on printing: I went with ink, because I have an ink printer at home. The quality is amazing, but it meant that I had to be careful with the weathering, because the ink will run when getting wet.
  
  
• Another note on printing: It can be worth trying to reduce the opacity of everything a bit to have the effect of coal/graphite. I had it at 100% at first, and it looked like ink. For my final prints, I put the opacity to 85%, but I still feel like it could be less in some cases.
  
  
• So after having all this figured out the hard way, I weathered each page individually like I said, dried them out and then begun the process of binding. After that, I cut a piece of leather to size and just glued it on. I used shoe polish on the leather and then scraped it with various tools, different types of old cloth, threw it around my house a bit and put it in my backpack for a while to make it look used.
  

I think that is all there was to it, but please let me know if there are any more questions.

 

[DudePerfect]

As a huge fan of RDR 2, this is amazing. Well done!

 

[TomCallhagan]

Amazing!
I've sent you a request to access the PDF. I'm especially interested in the cigarette cards. I don't know why, but I have a thing for trading cards these days, and I loved collecting those in the game.

 

[TuckerMan]

Awesome work, I use InDesign for my day job, and this sort of thing is exactly what I like to do in my hobby time. I've never created an actual book before, so this will be a great project to test my skills. I appreciate the time it took for lay out the steps, it will give me a great jumping off point.

 

[Brigandia36]

How many pages in your pdf diary please ?

 

[optimus51]

Never played the game, but I am just impressed by the way you managed to put together the diary. I think it's also quite amazing the quality of images from the game, that you can make use of them and print them out with such fidelity!

 

[kevin926]

My daughter is a huge fan of the game and this would be a great one to take on for her.. Great job

 

[SickleClaw]

This is some amazing work!

 

[Obie71]

Great work

 

[AliKarimi]

Thanks for all the replies!

To anyone wondering: I will continue with doing more inserts, and also I am planning to complete the collection of cigarette cards. But I have to do other stuff right now.


@Brigandia36 the PDF has 288 individual pages. That means 72 DinA4 pages printed on both sides and folded in half.

@optimus51 I was also amazed by the quality. It never translates in the game how high resolution the textures actually are.

@kevin926 Really looking forward to your version

 

[Obie71]

Many thanks AliKarimi

 

[kevin926]

thanks again. this is stellar work.

 

[TuckerMan]

I've figured out how to look at the game files with OpenIV and wow, I can see now how much work was involved in laying out all these pages. Huge amount of effort, kudos!

 

[optimus51]

Thanks for all the replies!

To anyone wondering: I will continue with doing more inserts, and also I am planning to complete the collection of cigarette cards. But I have to do other stuff right now.


@Brigandia36 the PDF has 288 individual pages. That means 72 DinA4 pages printed on both sides and folded in half.

@optimus51 I was also amazed by the quality. It never translates in the game how high resolution the textures actually are.

@kevin926 Really looking forward to your version

Thanks for giving me access to your pdfs. Having never played the game, I found the cigarette cards quite cool as well!

Would love to see what else you'll be doing with this project, esp with more cards and inserts!

 

[DoctorWhen]

I’ll take your entire stock! Please!

 

[Brigandia36]

Thanks for all the replies!

To anyone wondering: I will continue with doing more inserts, and also I am planning to complete the collection of cigarette cards. But I have to do other stuff right now.


@Brigandia36 the PDF has 288 individual pages. That means 72 DinA4 pages printed on both sides and folded in half.

@optimus51 I was also amazed by the quality. It never translates in the game how high resolution the textures actually are.

@kevin926 Really looking forward to your version

It is around 457 pages. I think you miss many entries.