WSAS: Milestone Three

[thespaceinvader]

Just committed the Warden animations. That's that branch finished. I'm going to mess around a bit with the Gladiator, and see what I can come up with after lunch. And do a little more on the portrait.

EDIT: valkier - mildly useful, but armour just isn't that thick. Youo've been playing too much Warcraft, I suspect Armour plates that thick (given the size of the Drake, they'd be about an inch thick...) would be ludicrously heavy.

Unless kitty has any further issues with this, I call it done.

[thespaceinvader]

Bumpery: tweaked Gladiator and Enforcer base frames. In accordance with the descriptions and the fact that they lose firststrike, I've dramatically shortened their pierce weapons - I intend to do single-handed thrusting attacks with them. I've also added the second set of claws to both, and team-coloured them. Gonna start on some blocking until jet gets back.

[melinath]

The way the spears are drawn, it looks more like perspective than actual shortness. (This might have to do with the hands.) Also, the enforcer looks a little off-balance with his - the massive head wouldn't balance with the short shaft unless he holds it farther up.

[thespaceinvader]

Difficult to make it seem otherwise, unfortunately. I'll talk them over with jet when I see him.

[Skrim]

The claw-blade thingies on the Enforcer's right hand look a bit closer-together than the ones on it's left hand, from my perspective. The big-ass trident also looks irritatingly dominant, covering much of the Drake itself. Perhaps if it was rotated a bit instead of perpendicular to the viewer, it would look a bit better. However, I'm no artist, just a layman giving opinions.


The Gladiator looks plain badass, as it's supposed to be. It has none of the nitpicking problems of the Enforcer

[thespaceinvader]

MM, getting those claws right is a PAIN. Their perspective, parallelness and closeness together makes them very tough to fit in properly. I'll wait and see what jet has to say about them.

EDIT: committed this version to trunk, at 450x450 pixels, making him roughly the height of a horse. I plan to make the level 3s for this line in particular, and the other heavy drakes, 500x500 final size, to emphasize their sheer size. The glider line won't be this big in body, though their wings will probably stretch up that far.

[Lizard]

the 205 x 205 seems to lack interpolation, or is the jitter (hoping that is the right word) intended?

[Turuk]

YOU RANG?!

........

Don't give up on it yet. It has a lot of potential and a great start. Take some time and give it the attention it deserves.

Critique Guidelines

[Jetrel]

Thanks, Turuk.

YOU RANG?!

........

Don't give up on it yet. It has a lot of potential and a great start. Take some time and give it the attention it deserves.

Valkier, I understand that you probably inserted the statement at the end to not sound uniformly negative by only listing what was wrong; and that you also tried to be original with it, because you didn't want it to sound like impersonal "boilerplate text". Unfortunately, the very specific choice of words, chiefly the implication that his work on the portrait was only beginning, came off as really condescending.

I'm not scolding you for breaking rules; I don't think you intended to be condescending, just take note of the potential for those kinds of implications in your future posts. Critiques in general are unfortunately volatile things that need to be handled carefully. I know I don't personally do the best job with them all the time.

[Valkier]

Thanks, Turuk.

YOU RANG?!

........

Don't give up on it yet. It has a lot of potential and a great start. Take some time and give it the attention it deserves.

Valkier, I understand that you probably inserted the statement at the end to not sound uniformly negative by only listing what was wrong; and that you also tried to be original with it, because you didn't want it to sound like impersonal "boilerplate text". Unfortunately, the very specific choice of words, chiefly the implication that his work on the portrait was only beginning, came off as really condescending.

I'm not scolding you for breaking rules; I don't think you intended to be condescending, just take note of the potential for those kinds of implications in your future posts. Critiques in general are unfortunately volatile things that need to be handled carefully. I know I don't personally do the best job with them all the time.

My apologies. I'll try to choose my words more carefully.

[thespaceinvader]

the 205 x 205 seems to lack interpolation, or is the jitter (hoping that is the right word) intended?

It could probably do with being a little cleaner - I've had some trouble scaling this chap, and had to use some unusual techniques. I might rework it, I'll ask kitty or jet if they think it necessary.

[Jetrel]

When kitty scales down her portraits, she applies a tiny bit of "sharpen edges" - I did that, and reduced the opacity of the sharpened-version by 75% relative to the original.

[thespaceinvader]

Ah, it's that step of putting the sharpened version at reduced opacity over the original that I was missing - thanks, i'll commit the fix.

Also, Clasher spear blocking.

The south will probably need an extra frame of windup to turn the spear more, and to turn the body in a little.

EDIT: and south.

[kitty]

Ah, it's that step of putting the sharpened version at reduced opacity over the original that I was missing - thanks, i'll commit the fix.

Huh, the reduced opacity over the original version sounds adventurous, I don't know if the gimp is capable of doing that but in photoshop one can apply a filer (or in fact most actions) and afterwards fade them away again. Thus I simply sharpen the pic and afterwards fade the sharpening effect down to about 25%

[thespaceinvader]

You can't do that, that I know of... But doing it on a duplicate layer, and fading that should accomplish the same effect.

Normally, I just scale and then sharpen by 10 for the big ones, and 25 for the small ones. But this guy proved troublesome, the lineart kept coming out really grainy - I think the unusually large working size caused the problem. But I managed to work round it.