How Wussel draws ships and wings!

[ForestDragon]

hi, well, good job, but i think i won't have time to keep up with your tutorial, so, how about you keep posting like you do now, and i will probably make a ship from the full tutorial step-by-step

[Wussel]

Take all the time you like. The hull is basically finished. For the sail, mast and ropes you will need the linetool, as it makes awesome straight and curved lines. Masts are straight, sails and ropes are curved. Sometimes people think ropes are straight. That is not true because they are curved. If anybody needs a hint of how to draw ropes, I will be happy to help out.

I did the 360p size for you, as this might be the one you guys are interested in. I did add really rough lines with 10 or 12 pixel wide in a separate layer. This should show you what I meant with managing the black content.

I did submerge the hull. Maybe a few words are needed. If you want to submerge something you could put transparent water on top of it OR make it transparent before you put in onto water. Obviously we go for the second version. The transparency needs some gradient following the shape of the hull. I do put the lowest plank at 30% the second at 40% and the third at 50% visuality. If you copy and paste the ship 3 times on top of each other you can NOT do this with transparant layers. Anyway for the 360 pixel size I am not doing this anyway.

s2-f3-360transp.png (86.8 KiB) Viewed 6160 times

If anybody is in serious need of ships for a UMC campaign you might voice your requests here. If you like to practise and want comments, you are wellcome to post here too.

[ForestDragon]

here is what i made:

ships can be MLG too :p

who_said_can't_be_MLG.png (105.6 KiB) Viewed 6143 times

[Wussel]

Hi there, had some time this morning:
I finished step1 for a human and an elvish fleet. Ships 1-3 are regular bigger, stronger, but slower. Ship 4 is a bit special. For the elves it gets faster again. For the humans it should get leadership or inspire. The biggest ship would be elf 3 but elves prefer 4. For the humans it is more ship 3 than 4, since 4 is a kind of flagship. Elvish ships should be faster than human ships. It would be cool to have something like swarm for movement! Maybe loosing half the movement according to hp loss!

I did pick color for the elves. Please notice the tree This is only 144. My mistake:

s2-e1c-360.png (18.28 KiB) Viewed 6092 times

I did change the color for the humans. Brown from red to orange, less hue and red instead of magic blue. I did try a less loaded version for the human ship.

s2-h1c-trans-360.png (82.83 KiB) Viewed 6092 times

So ForestDragon may do the lines and colors for the undead ships!

[Wussel]

I did some experiments on sails for the small human ship. The conclusion of this experiments is. The ropes do not add much value. Ropes could be just plain light color if used at all. The little front mast will blow the canvas size for bigger hulls.

The good news is that I decided that the 144 does NOT need to be copied 2 times on the ground layer to boost outline. This means: You could just scale the 360 down to 144.

So you just need a main mast and a main sail. The line tool will do the trick. I used 16 pixel line strength and applied shades as explained before.

I did look on more pictures of medival ships. They usually have only one mast and one sail anyway. So everything more is at least Renaissance (15th-16th century). Since wind magic might be kind of common, it should be enough anyway.

So ship mechanic should be like before Christopher Columbus. There was an innovation in hull building, which I would not asume for Wesnoth.

So basically the elvish ships should be the better ones due to that magic silver wood from the magic silver tree. Human ships use 3 different types of wood and are cheap copies of the elvish design. They use dark strong wood (mast and keel) light flexible wood (decks) and water resistant brown wood for planks.Since elvish ships are somehow still living, they get not sold to other races and they must be somehow maintained with druid magic.

So here are 3 files for game testing: 360 with sail up and down as well as 144 with crew. Please check if that 144 size could be used for ship units on maps.

s2-h1c-sail-sigil-360.png (119.05 KiB) Viewed 6039 times

s2-h1c-sail-up-360.png (111.26 KiB) Viewed 6039 times

s2-h1c-sail-sigil-crew-144.png (28.2 KiB) Viewed 6039 times

[Wussel]

Ok, here some more files for the elvish color line.

s2-e1c-sail-sigil-trans-360n.png (131.24 KiB) Viewed 5990 times

s2-e1-h1-bg-144.png (53.96 KiB) Viewed 5990 times

s2-e1c-sail-sigil-crew-144.png (30.27 KiB) Viewed 5990 times

[Wussel]

Any ideas on ships for different races?

Maybe trolls build like viking ships?
saurian built catamarans, which can go onto shallow waters?
Orcs get square ships with high towers?
What to do with dwarves?
Undead like to resurrect elvish vessels as they are somehow alive?
Maybe they get orcish vessels too?

How about levels?
The easiest way would be to put more and better troops onto the ship. More and bigger sails would be possible too. Could somebody share units for catapults and such? I have seen them before.

About the ship sizes:
Small-> Patrol duty, catching trespassers, couriers, uncomfortable for longer trips. (corvette)
Medium-> Long distance presence, fighting pirates, exploration. (frigate)
Big-> flag ship, war ship, command vessel, most comfortable (man'o'war)

So Christopher Columbus had a flottila of 2 medium and 1 big ships. Later a medium one (Pinta) became his vessel of choice.

[White_Drag0n]

Undead would look great with a ghost ship, a shipwreck, something of these lines. Dwarven ships might be more modern, and use cannons.

About the downscaled ships, I feel like they look well without a crew. It just looks weird when you have downscaled units on the same canvas, where units take a full hex by themselves. Considering that a single elf warrior represents a full squad of elves, we can try to put a 1:1 unit into the ship?

Giving ships extra sails sounds fine for a level up. Instead of the catapults, I believe that you could use something which fits the fantasy world more - for example elves can board a giant wose, which will be throwing stuff at nearby ships... The possibilities are endless!

[Heindal]

Your ships look really great. Maybe they will even make it into mainline campaigns.

[Wussel]

Dwarvish ships may be tricky. While I am fine with ironclad, I would advice caution for engines and cannons.
About undead ships: How would a ghostship look? Transparent???

Main line ships would be great. In the past real artist jumped the projects, before diletants made it into main line. That is fine with me too.

Heindal: If you need something, just be specific.

[Samonella]

I like the ship-wreck idea for the undead better than the ghost ship. After all, the ship is supposed to carry non-ghost personel. If it was alike the human ship, but had obvious holes in the side or something so it looks like it shouldn't be foating but somehow is anyways i think it would be awesome.

I have a hard time imagining trolls making their own kind of ship at all, and I'd see orcs with a fleet of small, barely functioning boats. But I guess that a giant, slave run oar ship could happen if some strong leader commissioned it. In fact, the giant slave-ships would be great for my campaign, in which one of the biggest plot holes is that The Great Horde has a giant fleet for no known reason.

There's two cents from a non-artist. Good work so far by the way!

[ForestDragon]

well, good ideas

[Wussel]

I would like to give ships to primitive cultures too. I am just not sure about nagas and mermen, asuming they like swimming. Maybe they have moveable underwater dwellings?

About trolls. Maybe we should go for giant rafts instead of viking style boats? That would leave viking style for dwarfs. Catamarans for saurians is kind of cool for me too. About orcs: I would go for very straight, crude structures with silly towers. So undead can have a mixture of zombie-elf-ships, human-wreck-ships and orcish-slave-ships. Just to lazy to built their own. Who else would have ships?

@Samonella
What are giant slave ships? Are you going for rowing like slave galley? I still have trouble downloading your campaign. I will check it out and see what I can do. I am not sure if "rowing" is good to draw. It would need a decent movement animation to be awesome. Please keep in mind that wind magic is widely availabe. Just enslave a few wind mages and you can fill your boat with fighters.

About small makeshift boats: Any race may have them. fisher boats, ferries and such. I am concerned with military grade, ocean going vessels which may be used for exploration and long distance trading of luxury goods.

[Samonella]

What are giant slave ships? Are you going for rowing like slave galley? I still have trouble downloading your campaign. I will check it out and see what I can do. I am not sure if "rowing" is good to draw. It would need a decent movement animation to be awesome. Please keep in mind that wind magic is widely availabe. Just enslave a few wind mages and you can fill your boat with fighters.

Yes, galleys are what I meant. And I guess the oarsmen wouldn't have to be slaves; for a large band of orcs, it would actually make sense to put the soldiers to work rowing. Also.. is wind magic actually that common? I don't think I've heard of any wind mages in Wesnoth before... i'd think that making winds strong enough to push a ship could only be done by relatively powerful mages. For orcs in particular, getting a wind mage would be tough, since orcish shamans of any kind are none too common, and kidnapping an accomplished magician from a different race isn't exactly a simple village raid. On the other hand, orcs have easy access to large teams of oarsmen, which probably would provide more precise and reliable control anyway.
A nice rowing animation would be SUPER awesome, but I'd say it's no more necessary than animations for making sails billow in the wind on other ships.

About trolls. Maybe we should go for giant rafts instead of viking style boats? That would leave viking style for dwarfs

Yeah, tethering together a bunch of logs with a sail wouldn't be beyond trolls, and I definitely like the sound of viking long-ships for dwarves.

Another random thought to throw out: how about canoes? I guess they're problematic, since the sprite would have to prominently include passengers.

[Wussel]

Yep, I would relate fire/air/wind and cold/ice/water on the basic magic level. 3 or 5 petals if you read my other topic. You would need 3 shamans to constantly blow a ship. Or a scroll for 8 hours. Or a Crystal which never blows out. The asumption is, that in case of battle each ship will have its own magic wind bubble as engine.

I am actually considering submergable ships in case of somebody is wielding water magic. Like for undeads, mermen and nagas. I would like the idea, that they could go faster, if not submerged. Not sure how to implement that.

If you want a flying ship, water magic will not do the trick. Moreover the levitation spell is tricky. So any advanced mage with arcane damage should be able to do the levitation trick. But without fire damage there will be no wind. Moreover you would need precation for not to loose the levitation spell as this might result in fatal crash.

I would in all cases take a specialist to set the spell and any capable mage/shaman/whatever as deputy maintainer. So basically all sailing ships (military grade) should have a magic user asigned to the crew as specialist. Think of it like the navigator they had when exploration of the sea started.

Rowing might work especially with water magic ships, if they want to save on magic. But graphic and animation might be a problem.