Dune Wars Art Thread

I'll reduce the size of the sword and the boots, and do something about the hair. They have cropped white hair from the original, but they do look bald I agree. I'll try and do some longer blond hair for the Aryan look described in the book.

When making human units, the available animations play a big part in determining what you do. I decided a while back to use the Samurai animations, but perhaps for a future revision I could try with the Archer melee anims. That's the only two blade fighting animation I can think of.

We could add a helmet of some kind to improve the imposing-ness, but I sort of want to hold something back for potential Burseg or Bashar of the Corps special units. At least I didn't go with the David Lynch rad-suit style...

I'm hopeful that there are other reasonably plunderable materials in Dawn of War. In particular, some of the vehicles can be adapted. I wouldn't want to use too much, but with some heavy adaptation and retexturing it can be a decent source.

Deliverator said:

When making human units, the available animations play a big part in determining what you do. I decided a while back to use the Samurai animations, but perhaps for a future revision I could try with the Archer melee anims. That's the only two blade fighting animation I can think of.

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Are those really the only choices? Is there anything useful in scout, swordsman, jaguar, gallic warrior? Did FFH add any animations or just a bunch of reskin/new models on the existing anims?

I wasn't clear there. I meant animations with a weapon in both hands when I said 'two blade'. There aren't many of those - the Archer has two knifes and the Berserker has two axes - the latter could be worth a go - but I'll have to rerig the model. Scout, Swordsman, Jaguar and Celtic Warrior each have a single weapon.

FFH2 uses mostly vanilla animations. They have done a handful of custom animations but it's a very small number. Animating something like the worm or a vehicle is easy compared with human animation.

Yeah, I understand the issue with animations. The samurai anim is fine. Perhaps is we used the miniseries Sarduakar as a base without the ridiculous hats they wear.

Deliverator said:

I wasn't clear there. I meant animations with a weapon in both hands when I said 'two blade'. There aren't many of those - the Archer has two knifes and the Berserker has two axes - the latter could be worth a go - but I'll have to rerig the model. Scout, Swordsman, Jaguar and Celtic Warrior each have a single weapon.

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I agree swords/daggers are important for Dune, but *two* swords/daggers are not so critical for me. Since we cannot (easily) make new animations, it may be better to have some one-weapon units rather than a bunch of two-weapon units all with the same anims.

Perhaps is we used the miniseries Sarduakar as a base without the ridiculous hats they wear.

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hehehe...they looked so foolish...thats not what i call intimidating troops, more like painters with guns

Since we cannot (easily) make new animations, it may be better to have some one-weapon units rather than a bunch of two-weapon units all with the same anims.

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I'm not planning to give all units two swords - it is just something for the Sardaukar. Other melee units can make use of the single weapon anims. I don't want to reuse animations too many times - there is enough variety in the vanilla anims not to have to.

Anyway, I've been finishing off a few things so here's an...

Art Update

+ Revised Spice
- I've fiddled with the transparency to eliminate the flickering gaps between the tiles. The side effect of this is the edges are a bit more harsh, but I still think it's an improvement.
- Somehow all the tile variations I did got merged out of the XML at some point, I've included the XML to put the variations back in.
- Lowered the height of the spice so it is closer to the sea bed (desert floor). It looked a bit wierd hovering at sea level.



+ Sardaukar
Since the initial version I have:
- Tweaked the proportions in particular the boots.
- Rigged to the Berserker animations and given two swords - they now look much more like deadly martial artists. I actually tweaked some of the animations and used the Celtic Warrior idle animation since the Berserker idle looked stupid. I should really animate the cloaks properly but that can wait.
- I tried blond hair, but it really wasn't working so I've gone for black.
They still need some refinement and optimization but they'll do for now.



+ Thopter
I suggest we use this for the Scout thopter for now, later when I create more thopter variants I reckon we make this the Falcon Thopter.
Since Lord Tirian produced the brilliant texture for it I have:
- smoothed out the mesh some more
- created ranged animations since it previously had air fighter/bomber anims.
- tweaked the rigging of the wings for a more natural look
- added weapon effects and death explosions. The hurt animation smaller explosions aren't working yet for some reason.
The animations/effects need further work, but it is release worthy I think.



+ Fedaykin / Fremen Solider
- Reduced size of textures to 256x256
- Removed silly fidget animation - I'll dig out a better one at some point
- Tweaked model so that cloak wraps around the body more and the legs are less thin

+ Included Blood Mod - only implemented for Fedaykin / Sardaukar - will roll out to other human units soon

That's it. All the XML changes are in a readme.txt file, so you can plug them in at your leisure. File attached.

Hey Deliverator,

awesome update!

Btw, I got most parts of the homeworld screen working, next I have to teach the ai to use it.

I really like the idea of using some modification of the crawler graphic for on spice tiles, so workers build a "Spice Harvester". And then use the existing graphics as a drilling station on polar ice.

It just feels kindof wrong to build building temporary refineries out on the sands; the sands have harvesters, refineries should be back in the towns.

great work deliverator!

ill try to get a patch over davids last update with the new art ,

along with some tech trimming and unit rover/scorpions unit as we discussed later on this week.

awesome work.

goodluck koma! i bet its gonna be a blast!

Ahriman said:

I really like the idea of using some modification of the crawler graphic for on spice tiles, so workers build a "Spice Harvester". And then use the existing graphics as a drilling station on polar ice.

It just feels kindof wrong to build building temporary refineries out on the sands; the sands have harvesters, refineries should be back in the towns.

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My plan once the new harvester improvement graphic posted previously is complete is to create a Worker Carryall unit as an upgrade for Desert Worker. Then we can have Carryalls deploying Harvesters which will be much more Dune-vibed. I'd like to base it on this dropship.

I actually already use scout thopters and carryalls on harvester duty, helps keep them away from worms. Basically I load 2-3 workers into a transport, move them over the spice tile, have them build the refinery, then move them to another tile (or away if a worm is adjacent). Significantly increases the rate of claiming spice tiles.

So I'm not sure if a new unit is needed (though that would help the AI I guess).

Noticed from installing the mod on my other PC that the spice still has gaps on some resolutions. Try again...

I've done some more work on the harvester, doing a proper unwrap and experimenting with the projection paint feature in Blender to get a better texture. The texture is still pretty dodgy, but the UV unwrap is much better. I'm hoping someone will rise to the challenge and improve the texture. I've included a PNG with the face layout to help with retexturing and a better reference shot that I took. If we can get a better texture the final touch can be to add smoke to the smoke stack.

Very nice. Should we move the refinery graphic to the ice drilling rig then? Better new art than vanilla oil rig art.

Yes. Good idea.

I wanted to make the starting set of units more consistent so I have taken a head from one of danrell's units and put it on the desert camo navy seal to make a new Soldier. You can just plop the soldier folder straight into assets/art/units and it will work. Change fScale to 0.45 in CIV4ArtDefines_Unit.xml or they'll be really small.



Also, I'm trying to find models to make thopter variants, I have a few to try. This one worked out pretty well - it's a Thunderhawk from Dawn of War - this can be one of the heavy duty thopters.

Both look great, well done.

A while back I tried out sandstorms as "effects" rather than "units". I threw this away quickly, but I need to go back. As units, sandstorms cannot enter plots with other units and cannot pass the Great Wall. Also, I want to add *rain* storms, which pass over everything and don't damage anything (except spice).

I did not keep enough archives, apparently, and I no longer have the sandstorm *effect* anywhere. I have tried using the sandstorm unit nif as an effect, but that does not seem to show up. I don't know what the actual difference is, but I guess there is one.

Deliverator, do you have or could you recreate the sandstorm as an effect? Also, you had submitted a "cloud" bonus a while back. For the rainstorm, I did not want to have a big, heavy thundercloud like we had before. I liked the cloud bonus for this. Can you also find/create/recreate the cloud bonus as an effect?

The sand-sunami 10 second version is still in this post.

It is quite easy to recolour the original Gods of Old Sunami so that it has the same colour and transparency of the Cloud bonus, if that's what you'd like.