New Dire-Wolf image?

[Creative Mechanism]

do you think the model of the wolf is too long or that it's a problem of perspective. I'm attaching a side view of the wolf without any foreshortening. If it's the perspective of the wolf, that would be very important to know.

[Darth Fool]

Given the side view I would say it is probably a perspective effect. I don't think that wesnoth has much in the way of foreshortening in the unit graphics.

I still think that the goblin could use being moved forward a little farther forward, but it also does not look as bad from this side view.

[Creative Mechanism]

here's the same image without foreshortening. I don't like it as much, but that's because I made a shoddy model (easy enought to fix). Does the wolf look better, or do you think it's because I'm taking this from 45 degree off the ground level? If I lowered it, the wolf would appear to shorten-up dramatically.

[Darth Fool]

I think it is a definite improvement.

[Eleazar]

just as a warning: I think a tutorial on how to make Wesnoth style images from blender would be do-able. The modeling and animation that goes into creating a model in blender, I think, would be a little too much for a Wesnoth tutorial. The skeleton creation and rigging alone would take pages and pages of text.

That being said, it would be unusual if I was not surprised and proven wrong by the creativity and skill of the open source community.

I'm sure there are already tons of tutorials for 3D in general and Blender in particular. What would be useful, (once we figure it out) is a tutorial about the particualar steps and settings best suited to making Wesnoth art with blender, with perhaps likes to more basic tutorials by others.

Blender, BTW, is another flagship for OSS. In a few years it's come out of nowhere to be able to challenge on some levels multi-thousand dollar proffessional packages.

[Creative Mechanism]

Larger wolf, pointier face, orthagonal view, higher goblin...any other suggestions or comments before I paint the outlines on this set?

I'm still concerned about making the wolf bigger: at this size the shadow of the tail doesn't fit in the frame. With a little editing I don't think it would be too noticible. What do you think?

[Darth Fool]

Graphics for animation frames can extend beyond the 72x72 border. Only the standing image must fit within the hex.

edit: although, I wouldn't make the wolf any bigger than it is now. Also, the standing image could have the wolf sitting.

[SmokemJags]

Is it just me, or does the 'look' of that unit remind anyone else of units from the Heroes of Might and Magic series?
Especially Heroes of Might and Magic IV.

Hell of a lot better than anything I could do, but I can't shake the resemblance.

Note: Couldn't find any animated gifs or something of that nature from the game which would probably show it a lot better, but here is a link to some stills.
http://www.heroesofmightandmagic.com/he ... ture.shtml

[Jetrel]

These are exactly the perspective and foreshortening that we are looking for! Perfect!


Now, we simply need to figure out how to make these look like they have the same line/shading style as our in-game images.

[Creative Mechanism]

Here are the images with hand drawn outlines. This is actually a very time consuming process, as is adding the eyes and things like that. I don't mind at all, but I think there might be a way to get blender to recognize where a line should be drawn. I'll do a little research tonight and see what I can do. Otherwise I will add eyes and other features.

Thank you again for all your help and suggestions.

[deonjo]

WOAH this looks sweet. Man, I would like to control an entire Army of them

[Darth Fool]

Out of curiosity, are you using cell shading on these?

[gpetersz]

These images are quite good, the only problem is Wesnoth's style is totally different at the moment (and I like that better). Wesnoth current style is (in my opinion) much more flat, clean, comic like (a bit manga is in it maybe).
These realistic renders will not fit into this world at the moment.

Using 3D renders in non-3D games are very tricky to achieve a consistent and non-artificial look. I very rarely found a game that utilized it to full potential.

Anyway, good work.

[Creative Mechanism]

Yes, I'm using cel-shading. It's easy enough to create outlines, but not that easy to create outlines that look very convincing.

gpetersz: I'm far from being done, but what do you think separates these images from the current flat, clean, comic like style? The fact that Wesnoth images are created on a 72 by 72 grid makes me think that it shouldn't be too difficult to mimic the style. Even if it meant making some alteration to half of the pixels, I'd guess a single animation of between 4 and 8 frames could be converted in an afternoon. I haven't figured out how to do it yet, but I'm confident that it could be done. First I need to figure out what's different. What, specifically, bothers you about the current images (imagining I've added details like the eyes in the sample at the bottom of the previous page of the post)?

[scott]

The current wolf rider is not viewed at 45°. We're not-quite-even with the rider and slightly above the wolf. I would say most units are viewed at 15° above.



That's the biggest difference so far.