Great Tree Contest :)

[Mefisto]

Only when I started to draw my own great trees I understood why the core ones are so bright. They need to distinguish themselves from the surrounding foliage. This need to differentiate causes also other problems. In best case the canopy of great tree should have the same level of detail as the small normal trees. But this would cause quite nice blending of it into the background which is something we want to avoid. So the possible resolution of this problem is to give more light to the top part of canopy and give much more shadow to the bottom of it. This mean greater overall contrast.

[zookeeper]

Only when I started to draw my own great trees I understood why the core ones are so bright. They need to distinguish themselves from the surrounding foliage.

Well, do they? I don't think they need to appear as special and magical as the current great tree does; an uncommonly large but otherwise quite normal tree which fits in with the other trees sounds much more in line with how they're used on maps most of the time... although a more "magical-looking" version would certainly be useful as well.

[Mefisto]

I don't think they need to appear as special and magical as the current great tree does;

This is what I want to accomplish. Just when the pattern and colour of the canopy i too similar to the surrounding trees, you can see only the trunk.

[gleedads]

Here is a screenshot of my dead great trees (and the standard live great trees as well). I've had comments on another thread http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=33689 that I need to use a softer edged brush and/or some lower opacity near branch tips. I agree, but haven't gotten around to it (also, I'm really not much of an artist, so graphics works takes me *forever*). Also, you can see my burnt forest graphic in this screenshot. It's a first attempt. I know it's not very good (for one thing there are no variants to the tile, so the repetition of the image is very obvious).

[Eleazar]

* The original "great trees" were intended to be a semi-magical Lothlorien type of tree that can be used to distinguish special elvish/magical areas of the forest from ordinary forest. That's why they stand out so much. I don't want to replace them with a totally mundane tree, but as mentioned earlier the art isn't the best, but i don't want to change the basic concept. Also these magic trees don't need to loose their leaves unless they are dead, so there's no need for a winter AND a dead variety.

* But there's room for non-magical giant trees-- though i'm not entirely sure that they should be added as terrain images rather than scenery, but that's not something we need to worry about now.

* There's not a single precise perspective used in terrain -- it depends on what allows that particular terrain to have the best illusion of "being right". 3:2 to 2:1 is more or less the range that might be right.
-- but a pure side view is never right.

* The old great trees are not exactly from a side perspective, but they are probably too close to a side view.

* Tree species vary, but to make a tree look giant, rather than simply a close up of a normal tree, you generally need to make the trunk proportionately thinner compared to the canopy. I know this is counter-intuitive, but trust me. We don't have enough resolution to make individual leaves to show the size, so it needs to be done via proportions.

* Mefisto: that's looking good, but while it make be necessary to have more contrast/saturation, you've taken it too far. Be careful with pure black-- it is a very powerful color. It's kinda tricky because a lot of the deciduous forest have IMHO a little too much contrast.

* gleedads: your dead trees look better in context than i thought from previous images-- but why are you still using 1.8x?? That will throw you off, since most of the terrain has changed since then.

* The terrain is not supposed to be razor sharp pixel art like units. There should be more softness, fuzzy edges, and semi-transparency which helps the units stand out and avoid getting lost.

[Mefisto]

Thanks for input Eleazar. Now I'm much more humble than when I began to play with high trees. Still this is quite good practice for somebody who wants to make completely new "faction" of flora from scratch. I agree that the contrast is too strong, I am still learning the subtlety of drawing something distinguishable from the background in such way that this isn't jarring. BTW, I didn't think of Lothlorien, though it should be the first associacion . I rather thought of Yggdrasil and other large mythological cosmic trees.

[Eleazar]

BTW, I didn't think of Lothlorien, though it should be the first associacion . I rather thought of Yggdrasil and other large mythological cosmic trees.

I didn't mean any replacement great tree had to be specifically Lothlorien-ish (which, since Tolkien was very much into Mythology, was probably inspired by Yggdrasil and others anyway), but just that i'm not going to replace the great tree with a totally non-magical tree, though i'm happy to add a good giant non-magical tree.

[homunculus]

I need to correct my previous post which had some misleading inaccuracies.
Most villages are more like ratio 1:1.55 when drawing rectangle in gimp, and that is viewing angle 50 degrees (60 degrees would give 1:2 ratio).
The 3:2 for terrain perspective would be ratio 1:1.50 when drawing rectangle in gimp, which is 48 degrees and is too much for villages (crazy, yes, but with this 2 degrees difference it is clearly visible that the perspectives don't match).
Actually things on terrain do not seem to be viewed from this angle, rather the hex seems to be longer in the depth direction (or the y direction on map).

[gleedads]

Thanks for the comments Eleazar. I'm running 1.8 because I run under Ubuntu, and as far as I can tell 1.9 isn't available for Ubuntu yet. Have I just not noticed it on the Linux download pages?

[melinath]

1.9 is available from the repositories for Ubuntu 11.04 - or you can build wesnoth from the source code. (Instructions are on the wiki and more or less coherent.)