How to Scrape Game Hero Skins with Python: Step‑by‑Step Guide

Overview

This article shows how to write a Python web‑scraper to download hero skin images from the official sites of three popular MOBA games: Honor of Kings (王者荣耀), League of Legends (英雄联盟), and Smite (神之浩劫). The goal is to obtain the large‑size skin pictures for personal use.

Honor of Kings (王者荣耀)

1. Open the All Heroes list page and use the browser developer tools to locate a JSON file that maps each hero to a numeric ID.

2. Parse the JSON to extract two parallel lists: hero_name (Chinese names) and hero_number (numeric IDs).

#爬取王者荣耀英雄图片
#导入所需模块
import requests
import re
import os
url='http://pvp.qq.com/web201605/js/herolist.json'
head={'User-Agent':'换成你自己的head'}
html=requests.get(url,headers=head)
html_json=html.json()
hero_name=list(map(lambda x:x['cname'],html_json))
hero_number=list(map(lambda x:x['ename'],html_json))

3. For each hero, construct the image URL pattern:

http://game.gtimg.cn/images/yxzj/img201606/skin/hero-info/'+str(v)+'/'+str(v)+'-bigskin-'+str(u)+'.jpg

where v is the hero ID and u is the skin index (1‑12).

4. Download the images and save them into a folder named after each hero.

def main():
    ii=0
    for v in hero_number:
        os.mkdir("/home/wajuejiprince/图片/WZRY/"+hero_name[ii])
        os.chdir("/home/wajuejiprince/图片/WZRY/"+hero_name[ii])
        ii+=1
        for u in range(12):
            onehero_links='http://game.gtimg.cn/images/yxzj/img201606/skin/hero-info/'+str(v)+'/'+str(v)+'-bigskin-'+str(u)+'.jpg'
            im=requests.get(onehero_links)
            if im.status_code==200:
                iv=re.split('-',onehero_links)
                open(iv[-1],'wb').write(im.content)

Run main() to start the download.

League of Legends (英雄联盟) – US Server

Two methods are provided.

Method 1 – Direct URL Extraction

Fetch the champion list JSON, then use a regular expression to extract image URLs from each champion’s page.

#导入模块
import requests
import re
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
url='http://ddragon.leagueoflegends.com/cdn/6.24.1/data/en_US/champion.json'

def get_hero_name(url):
    head={'User-Agent':'Mozilla/5.0 ...'}
    html=requests.get(url,headers=head)
    hero_name=html.json()['data'].keys()
    return [name.lower() for name in hero_name]

def get_onehero_img(name):
    url2='http://gameinfo.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/game-info/champions/'+name+'/'
    head={'User-Agent':'你自己的headers'}
    html=requests.get(url2,headers=head)
    soup=BeautifulSoup(html.text)
    hero_img=soup.findAll('img')
    reg=re.compile(r'"http://ddragon.leagueoflegends.com/cdn/img/.*?.jpg"',re.S)
    return re.findall(reg,str(hero_img))

Download each returned URL and save the files.

Method 2 – Simulated URL Pattern

Construct image URLs using the known pattern:

http://ddragon.leagueoflegends.com/cdn/img/champion/splash/{champion}_{index}.jpg

Iterate index from 0 to 19 (or higher) for each champion name obtained from the JSON.

for fn in list_of_nameMax:
    os.mkdir("/home/.../LOL2/"+fn)
    os.chdir("/home/.../LOL2/"+fn)
    for v in range(20):
        onehero_links='http://ddragon.leagueoflegends.com/cdn/img/champion/splash/'+fn+'_'+str(v)+'.jpg'
        im=requests.get(onehero_links)
        if im.status_code==200:
            iv=onehero_links.split('/')
            open(iv[-1],'wb').write(im.content)

Smite (神之浩劫)

Fetch the list of god pages, extract background‑image URLs with a regex, and download them.

import requests, re, os
url='https://www.smitegame.com/gods/'
head={'User-Agent':'你的head'}
html=requests.get(url,headers=head)
reg=re.compile(r'href="(.*?)"\s+<img')
hero_url=re.findall(reg,html.text)

def one_hero_picture(ul):
    html_hero=requests.get(ul,headers=head)
    if html_hero.status_code==200:
        reg2=re.compile(r'"background-image:url((.*?))"',re.S)
        items2=re.findall(reg2,html_hero.text)
        del items2[0]
        return items2

Iterate over each god URL, create a folder named after the god, and save all extracted images.

def main():
    ii=0
    for v in hero_url:
        os.mkdir("/home/.../Smite/"+hero_name[ii])
        os.chdir("/home/.../Smite/"+hero_name[ii])
        ii+=1
        one_hero=one_hero_picture(v)
        for u in one_hero:
            im=requests.get(u)
            if im.status_code==200:
                iv=u.split('/')
                open(iv[-1],'wb').write(im.content)

Run main() to download all Smite god skins.

Disclaimer

This crawler is intended solely for personal learning and entertainment; it must not be used for commercial purposes or any illegal activity.