Gryphon Walking Corpse Variation

[iceiceice]

One thing which always bothered me is that mainline wesnoth does not have a proper walking corpse variation for gryphons. Instead, the Drake walking corpse sprites are reused. But, the Drakish walking corpse has quite different movetype and resistances, so this is fairly confusing as a player.

I had some time to kill, and I've decided to try to scratch this itch and exercise my (meager, laughable) art skills and gimp skills, and make something suitable. What I have is sort of a recolor / repaint / frankensprite of various of the gryphon sprites.

I have made a base frame and an attack frame, to show sort of where I am thinking of going with this.

There's considerable question about how the animation should actually work.

What I had in mind was, the gryphon walking corpse doesn't have its wings constantly flapping, or if it does, they flap in a sort of off-beat way that conveys that the gryphon is weak and can only fly 5 hexes rather than 8. When it attacks, rather than dive-bombing like the living gryphon, it just rears up on its hind legs and does something more like the walking corpse attack.

Plan is to eventually team color it similarly to the gryphon rider team coloring.

I don't think there are major anatomical problems right now (could be wrong).

The problems I am aware of / specific questions that I have are:

• the palette needs to be improved -- when I zoom in to 8x, I'm relatively happy with it, but when I go back to 1x, it looks very washed out. Not sure what the best way to fix this is right now. Anyone have specific suggestions?
• Need some feedback on the shading esp. on the gryphon body. It might be that with a palette improvement it will work, but here also I have issues where the shading looks okay up close and not zoomed out.
• In the attack frame, is the wing mounted on the gryphons body too far back? Is the head positioned badly? Do I need to redraw the head for this frame, or can it look okay this way?
• In the baseframe, there were some edits to try to make the wing seem more broken or tattered. I think it's a bit harder to execute this also on the attack frame. Also, I didn't really edit the details on the head, other than to recolor it. Would like specific suggestions for the head.

Any comments or crits are welcome, I have no delusions of grandeur here

baseframe

gryphon-corpse.png (1.26 KiB) Viewed 4154 times

attack frame

gryphon-corpse-attack.png (1.18 KiB) Viewed 4154 times

I have uploaded my gimp files also.

~iceiceice~

[ForestDragon]

nice, here are some suggestions:
1.the naked back is good, but i think it's too smooth, maybe add a few wounds?
2.wings should be a bit less perfect (should have minor damaged parts)
3.in the baseframe, you have him hold his wings at a nearly perfect horizontal angle, maybe they should hang down a bit. the attack frame's wings look alright

[Eagle_11]

You'll have to way more zombiefy it, try comparing drake zombie to any winged drake and see how the wings got torn and corroded out. It doesnt make sense for only his head to remain feathered, currently looks like got his body shaved, but still alive.

[Addan-Shem]

I'd suggest a custom pose, the corpse being too weak to fly with a straight back like a healthy one, combining several existing walking dead palettes colorwise. Something like this, perhaps?

gryphon-corpse.png (3.48 KiB) Viewed 4056 times

You mentioned it attacks rearing on the hind legs, so I tried to offer a pose that could be both for flying and standing. There might be some shading and anatomical issues on this one as well (I'm a bit concerned about its front left leg). I'm also afraid the posture might be too humanoid now.

Ideas for the wings: they might flap upwards weakly, twitching, then quickly and forcibly pulled down, almost breaking in the process, maybe losing a few feathers with every flap (if it's not too much). Perhaps it would help itself push off the ground with its rear paws in case it's standing.

[iceiceice]

Ok, I will try to do is head then I guess.

Going to have to think about it for a while, the only undead bird example I have is chocobone... I guess maybe I want to go for a look where his feathers become dark and patchy around his head? But it will take me quite a bit of trial and error to get there.

Thanks for comments.

Addan-shem: That looks pretty good, might play with your base frame instead.

[Addan-Shem]

Addan-shem: That looks pretty good, might play with your base frame instead.

Thanks! In that case:

gryphon-corpse-alt.png (3.41 KiB) Viewed 4016 times

Tried to make its head even more decayed as well as fixing a few issues. I hope this helps.

[iceiceice]

Addan-Shem: I particularly like your take on the wings, where you have the bony "arm" of the wing, and extending from that the the feathers get darker at their tips.

[Eagle_11]

I think you could make some more changes to make it more decaying looking, can try losing the lower half of it's beak, some spacing inbetween feathers and perhaps couple missing 'row's on wings, around the chest area can make an hole in the flesh showing some ribcage, that tail has to look less alive, like being barely able to lift it, can try changing color of bones to an bleached yellow hue. Also im not sure what those green things on his head are, looks like patches of some sort of algae(?) that grow on it.