blender 3d

[alexcgilliland]

I was thinking of using blender to model units in 3d and then take png exports to use as animation frames. Has anyone tried this or something similar? How does the Wesnoth artistic community feel about this? this last question is off topic but does anyone know if mpeg2 or other video formats could be played by wesnoth as story line?

[thespaceinvader]

People have tried with various 3D programs. It's so far not been particularly successful, primarily because 3D produces a totally different look than 2D drawing does, and, without simply over-tracing it, is difficult to get to the standard Wesnoth needs from its non-sprite artwork.

And currently, i don't think wesnoth supports videos of any kind. All the animations (sprite scale) are done one .png image per frame, and animated entirely by the game engine. That's not really a practical way to do storyline animations i don't think, if only due to the sheer number of files you'd have to download to get a worthwhile animation...

[Sgt. Groovy]

I'd say 3d-animations could be useful for trying out different things much faster and easier than drawing. Once you'd have the right movements down, you would have to overdraw the frames to get the right look.

[Jetrel]

1] What Sgt. Groovy said.

2] If someone were to provide very good 3d animations, we might consider adding support for playing them. However, "very good" is defined as something that would not be embarrassing in a commercial product. We'd practically want something the quality of a CG movie. Honestly, the best route to go, if we were to consider adding cutscenes, would be to do cell-shaded animation. Using a tool like flash, it is possible to do some pretty professional-looking stuff: http://biteycastle.com/ But even that is exceedingly difficult, and requires extremely high levels of skill to do anything decent.

It's basically a fool's errand, if you ask me.

[Telvannia]

If you want to use 3D art for the good of wesnoth, click on the link in my signature. That is a addon for wesnoth set in space, done mainly in 3D.

And about using blender for spiriting, there are problems with it, for example most wesnoth sprites tend to have dark outlines, which i find pretty hard to do in blender, if you know away go ahead and do it. But tell me at some point...

[alexcgilliland]

for dark outlines open the png in gimp, select the entire background with the magic wand tool, press crtl [ for select inverse, press alt e then s to open edit menu stroke, select width and your done. inside lines require a bit more finesse with the magic wand tool, but then drawing a sprite pixel by pixel requires quite a bit of finesse as well.

what 3d program are you using for spacenoth?

[Telvannia]

for dark outlines open the png in gimp, select the entire background with the magic wand tool, press crtl [ for select inverse, press alt e then s to open edit menu stroke, select width and your done. inside lines require a bit more finesse with the magic wand tool, but then drawing a sprite pixel by pixel requires quite a bit of finesse as well.

Thing is they have dark outlines within the image, and as far as i know you cant create the same effect in blender.

what 3d program are you using for spacenoth?

I use blender, but other people there use povray.

[Sgt. Groovy]

I think 3-d animations for story art is a bit over the top for a 2-d game (and as Jetryl said, not easy to do well enough), but still frame story art made in a 3-d program is another matter.