Avian Faction portraits and sprites

[francophone]

I look forward can play with this faction.

[orangebox]

artisticdude : Ah, you're right. The shadow makes no sense with the horizontal motion. It was done wrongly XD, the motion should've been the other way around (when the unit moves upward, the shadow should've moved to the right instead of the left).

Here's a rough on a campaign/story character. The protagonist, only child to one of the nomadic avian tribes' leader. I've not written the story in any way yet, but I can't wait to depict her

Forgive the style, it was much easier for me to draw in :X May change the color of her wings though.

[The_Other]

The position of the shadow should remain relatively constant (since the unit is bobbing vertically and not moving horizontally)

But judging by the shading, the unit (like all well-drawn Wesnoth sprites) is not lit from directly above, but rather from above and to one side. So surely the shadow would move horizontally? If I stand in the sun and watch my shadow while jumping up and down (A) I will look like an idiot, and (B) the shadow of any given body part will 'slide' away from its 'resting position', then return as I descend.

It doesn't seem to be moving correctly, though. I'm not a great artist, but logic suggests that when the unit moves up, the shadow should slightly shrink and move noticeably to (our) left, before returning when the unit moves down. Please note, though, that I can never get unit shadows to look right (when I occasionally draw sprites, I tend to leave the shadow out in the hope that somebody competent will add it at some point!), so I may be talking nonsense!

[francophone]

I love drawing of Sarantsatsral. This is not the style of portraits of Wesnoth. It is not forbidden for add-ons. If it is for a campaign that is even more welcome, I think.
I think that the hair and scarf could be taken for female sprite of unit. A little like the mages: males have a hood over their head, females are bare head. You could cagouler avians males and give a scarf at females with hair overflowing with front and back.

[artisticdude]

The position of the shadow should remain relatively constant (since the unit is bobbing vertically and not moving horizontally)

But judging by the shading, the unit (like all well-drawn Wesnoth sprites) is not lit from directly above, but rather from above and to one side. So surely the shadow would move horizontally? If I stand in the sun and watch my shadow while jumping up and down (A) I will look like an idiot, and (B) the shadow of any given body part will 'slide' away from its 'resting position', then return as I descend.

It doesn't seem to be moving correctly, though. I'm not a great artist, but logic suggests that when the unit moves up, the shadow should slightly shrink and move noticeably to (our) left, before returning when the unit moves down. Please note, though, that I can never get unit shadows to look right (when I occasionally draw sprites, I tend to leave the shadow out in the hope that somebody competent will add it at some point!), so I may be talking nonsense!

Technically, you're right. However, if you look at any of the flying units in mainline (bats, drakes), you'll notice that the shadow is always immediately below them. I can't personally provide the reason for this, but IMO it helps visually show that the unit is flying by having something immediately below it for the user to compare it to. If the shadow were off to the side (as technically it would be, given the position of the lightsource) it would be harder to create the relationship between the unit and the shadow that tells the viewer that the unit is flying, not just bouncing up and down on the hex above on which the unit is actually positioned.

[homunculus]

as far as i have seen wesnoth sprites, i confirm what artisticdude just said.
units are lit from southeast (actually more from above and slightly southeast), but the cast shadow on the ground is as if the light was straight from above.
i have done it wrongly before i noticed it myself, i hope it will be included in the wiki somehow to avoid such confusion in the future.

for illustration, the cast shadow of the hanging ball-on-chain in mage of light standing frames (see how there is no shadow of chain visible, while the chain is hanging straight down):
http://www.wesnoth.org/units/1.10/mainl ... Light.html

[orangebox]

Sorry guys, temporary hiatus (maybe for a week) as I need to catch up with my assignments. Spent too much time on this :9

That's an interesting idea franco. However I'd like to have the campaign protagonist character to stand out as much as possible; thus her general design should be as different as possible to the other units and much more attractive looking. (with the bright apple colored hair and all)

Originally, what The_Other mentioned is what I was going for. However I got too distracted from trying to perfect the animation on the other parts that I actually neglected the shadows a little too much. But as artisticdude and homunculus have mentioned, the mainline wesnoth sprites has shadows directly below. I suppose it'll have to change accordingly. After all, I'm trying to uniform my sprites to the mainline Wesnothian style as much as possible.

For portraits, I might use different sets altogether. One for the campaign, hopefully with my personally preferred stylization and another set to be merged with Wesnoth. Thanks for the great feedback and the support!

Edit 1:

I've a question. Should my death animation be on ground or flying?

[alexanderthegre]

I've a question. Should my death animation be on ground or flying?

Maybe it could crash.

[em3]

The issue here is that an avian can be killed either while it's flying or while it's on ground. I don't think a single animation will work for both states.

[Iris]

The issue here is that an avian can be killed either while it's flying or while it's on ground. I don't think a single animation will work for both states.

Note that it’s technically possible to have multiple death animations in WML, each one filtering on different aspects such as terrain or attack damage type; Woses do the latter in mainline.

[orangebox]

Awesome, now I'll have to work two of them XD

I've noticed in drake's death animation, (if I'm looking correctly in the game) that they sort of simply disappear from the scene instead of a fall-down-to-knee death animation. Is that true? I'd like to know where I can find the death animation though - as point of reference.

[Crendgrim]

AFAIK, the drakes do not come with their own death animation. Instead, they are using the standard one which gets applied if there is no death animation specified in a [unit_type]: They simply fade out.

[artisticdude]

What Crendgrim said. Units that simply "fade out" when they die usually lack a death animation, so the game defaults to fading out the baseframe. Units that have an actual death animation will only face out once their death animation has played (and the fading effect will then be applied to the last frame in that death animation, rather than the baseframe).

I'd like to know where I can find the death animation though - as point of reference.

If you locate your gamedata directory, the unit death animations should be in data/core/images/units/[whatever folder the unit you are looking for is contained in] with the rest of the unit's images and animations.

[Telchin]

Interestingly, while drakes don't have death animations now, their old sprites (last seen in 1.6 IIRC) had death animations. Instead of just falling, they burned to ashes. I guess that the artist doing the new sprites didn't have time for death animations (as making new sprites for a whole faction is a huge task). Note that I'm not complaining about the sprite change as the new sprites are better.

[orangebox]

Thanks for leading me to the useful graphics in my wesnoth folder lol. That has made me realize something; do you guys think that my lengthy animation will be suitable for the in-game animations? (especially the attack animation)

Also, would someone be kind enough to actually try and put it together for one unit (specifically the Kingfisher, since it has the most complete animations) to test it out?