Portrait Art Style

[Darth Fool]

Ok, here is something that has popped up a couple of times that I find incongruent with wesnoth development. It has been said that certain art work while perhaps good enough quality wise is not the right style to be included. In particular I am referring to portrait art, not unit artwork for which this seems a fine rule. For portraits, however, I think that this rule handicaps us significantly, and I am actually mystified by its origins. A little digging found this quote from jetryl a long time ago:
http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic. ... =style+art

When it comes to new art there should only be 3 qualifications:
1. Is it a generally desirable improvement (as determined by the devs & to a far lesser extent on consensus)?
2. Is is better than what we currently have (or nothing)?
3. Is it complete (of lesser importance)?

If a piece of art meets these criteria the emphasis should be on getting it into CVS. After it is in CVS worry about refining it more. I've watched a lot of 'better' art almost 'die a death of a thousand cuts' in the forums. It is far more important to get the 'better' art in, than to make it 'perfect' first. If for no other reason that 'perfect' is different in most people's eyes, but 'better' is far easier to achieve.

What makes the wheels of this game turn is people doing stuff that is good enough, rather than perfect. Other people will make it better, later.

If it fits exactly those three qualifications you listed above, we should move forward by using it.

A quick running of wc on the data and images directories gives the following:

Code: Select all

einstein:~/wesnoth mcnabb$ ls data/units| wc
     181     181    3967
einstein:~/wesnoth mcnabb$ ls images/portraits/core/*/* | wc
      38      38    2072

To me this is a clear indicator that we can not afford a rule that all portraits must be the same style. I agree that working towards having all portraits that are used within a particular main-line campaign should be of the same style is a good idea, perhaps even a good rule, but portraits for units that are not used in mainline campaigns should be judged on the 3 criteria above, not on whether it matches the styles of the other portraits. We can worry about matching styles when we have all the portraits done.

Now, I didn't want to step on toes by committing portraits that meet these criteria by my standards, which as a coder are probably too low, but I don't want the art developers who have much better judgement on the quality of the work than I do to not include portraits because it is not the right style.

If we reach the point where we have so many high quality portraits that we can afford to reject them based on style, than we ought to consider instead having a multiple different styles of portraits for the campaign developers to choose from.

And to clarify, by style I don't mean technical issues like 'must be on a black background'. Ok, maybe that was obvious.

[Eleazar]

DFool, i think in general, the art commiting process isn't going as well as it could, but i don't think "style" is a major aspect of this.

The fact that there is so little activity on "Polished Art in the Open forum..." seems to indicate that:
1) most devs/trusted think the status quo is fine and/or not worth bothering about, or
2) most devs/trusted don't think they should or are qualified to "nominate" art for inclusion.*

It's quite possible that we're being too picky in reguards to quality-- which is probably mostly a result of too much art, too few art devs and the fact that it's more fun to commit good art than merely OK art.

I havn't noticed much art being rejected on stylistic grounds. I'm not sure where the conversation took place, but i believe i'm on pretty much the same page as Jetryl as what that minimum stylistic mainline standards are. These stylistic standards conveniently correspond with one of the easiest, most efficient methods of producing decent digital art.

Portraits are something of a unique situation in that "placeholders" are not especially important.


* As an exparament i'm going to create a similar forum in the open art forum.

[turin]

It sounds to me like the topic he is referencing the the Dark Adept portrait thread.

I would say that dfool is wrong in this case. Committing a portrait in the wrong style is like committing a one-frame animation - it isn't worth the committer's effort. The benefit is minuscule.


My changes to the current process would be -

1. get more art devs. there have to be some artists considered to have the requisite skills to get SVN access. Zebulon is a good example. I don't see why he doesn't just get SVN access.

2. Make it clear that non-art devs can still commit art. If the animation is clearly good enough, commit it! I would commit more art myself, since I can usually judge when an animation is ready for in-game, but I never seem to find the time. But I don't think non-art-devs should be worried about committing bad art. Chances are you will commit more good art than bad art, so even if the art devs have to later remove some bad art you commit it still saves time.

[Ranger M]

Actually, I have been wandering about exactly what the wesnoth style for portraits is, because all of the submitted portraits (by potential contributers) and the new ones (the Lis'ar and Konrad ones being good examples) and I would assume the new UTBS ones mentioned (although I haven't seen them yet), are very different to the current normal unit ones. Have the Wesnoth style/expectations for art changed since they were made? Or are the new ones just better versions, style wise, of the old ones?

[turin]

None of the current portraits contradict fundamentally in style, although obviously each artist has their own. They are all essentially comic-book/anime, will cell shading. (Pickside is probably most comic-book-ish, Jetryl most anime-ish.)

[Jetrel]

I agree with Turin and Eleazar on this one. The line for "good enough" on portraits is rather steep.

In fact, I joined this game for precisely that reason - rather than being an improvement, I feel that the original portraits for the main characters were a regression when they were first included. That the game would have been better off with using the sprites for the dialogue.

(Esp. Lisar, with that wonderful sprite fmunoz drew for her).