Dune Wars Art Thread

[Deon]

Well, I don't try to beg you if you don't have a time, I understand everyone has his own priorities . Maybe if you know a good quick tutorial about rigging for civ4, it would be enough. The only unit I'd like to have a rigging now is a radscorpion, and I think it could be rigged to a spider skeleton.

 

[Slvynn]

I’ll make update for gamefont file today evening.
There will be:
Fixed Landsraad and Imperial religion icons.
New Spice resource small gamefont icon,
(http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=230866&d=1255382535) , graphic blue eye on orange/red background.
Water Consume/Starvation icons.

If need something more being fixed/redone related to gamefont - tell me.

another addition and proposition - remaking spy icons :
(check spoiler)

Spoiler :

Icrease Effect of Plant Unhapiness

promotion-simplified :

and another one (Improvisation?), lvl 2

another color combo:

rank 4?

detection evasion 2 rank

Smaller Head/Hand/Arrows are better, bc on unit promo-icons its much easier to differ different levels of promos.
Unsure about black or Terracotta , please give some thoughts ...

any feedback will be good :
If all team approve this style (vectorish-futuristic, (replacing old bitmapish-handrawn) i will make all promo icons (military) look same (most of them using old logos, but at more clean, "vectorish" look

 

[Deliverator]

Well, I don't try to beg you if you don't have a time, I understand everyone has his own priorities . Maybe if you know a good quick tutorial about rigging for civ4, it would be enough. The only unit I'd like to have a rigging now is a radscorpion, and I think it could be rigged to a spider skeleton.

I posted a rough guide to rigging meshes to existing skeletons here. The example is with a jet, but the principle is the same. I'm guessing the scorpion will want a stinger attack animation eventually. The most practical way would probably be to rig it to the spider and then customize the attack animation. I have created animations from scratch and learned how to edit existing animations so I know this is possible.

 

[Deon]

I can animate things in 3ds max, but I don't know how to make Civ4 "understand" which animation goes for attack, which goes for movement/run etc. Does it take some specific frames (let's say, 0-100 = attack, 101-200 = run etc.?). Also you may be interested in scorpion unit, there were no huge scorpions on arrakis but they should be pretty common in desert enviroment so some small (str 1-2?) barbarian scorpions could be good to add to the atmosphere and early barbarians (before soldiers).
Also, I'd suggest to replace "smugglers" with something more appropriate, even "unknown" would do the job (and would be good for Hidden Nationality units), which simply means that you cannot get the faction ID of the unit. It would be much better than "smugglers'" sand worms .

 

[Slvynn]

There is an option to divide barb factions (like it done in FF and FF+)
Arrakis - Sandworms and independent Freemen .
Smugglers - Just barb faction like it is now ( substract worms) , which build cities and harves spice.

 

[Deliverator]

I can animate things in 3ds max, but I don't know how to make Civ4 "understand" which animation goes for attack, which goes for movement/run etc. Does it take some specific frames (let's say, 0-100 = attack, 101-200 = run etc.?).

Each animation is a separate KF file. I use this tool to convert KFM to XML so that you can edit which KF is triggered by each action. You should also find Coyote's guide to animation in the Tutorials section. Each different kind of animation needs to be a particular length in frames. If you unpack the vanilla art you'll find JPGs with the different animations required and the number of frames allowed for each.

 

[davidlallen]

Offtopic, but having a real radscorp for Fury Road would be totally awesome. I actually created a Fury Road version 11 which supports BTS 3.19, but something went wrong with the dll. See this thread. It has a bunch of your new buildings, the power armor leaderhead, and one other leaderhead made by C.Roland.

 

[davidlallen]

another addition and proposition - remaking spy icons :
[...] any feedback will be good :
If all team approve this style (vectorish-futuristic, (replacing old bitmapish-handrawn) i will make all promo icons (military) look same (most of them using old logos, but at more clean, "vectorish" look

That looks like a great start! The hardest thing about icons, as opposed to real artwork, is that the icons show up at very small size. When you have a unit with promotions, and you click it, the promotions show up as 16x16 icons in the lower left. I have found it almost impossible to make art which is easily distinguishable at that size.

I think the simplest, largest design possible is important to help the user distinguish icons at small size. I have mentioned this several other times, for other projects, but I don't like having to put my head up next to the screen to see if this unit has Shock II, or the other one, so I choose the right unit to attack.

The unit icons are all based on a yellow/orange radial gradient background. I think having something which is high contrast but *not* the same background is a good idea. For example, all the promotion icons in vanilla are on a blue background.

If we keep black as the foreground drawing color, what would make a good background color so that all the icons don't look *too* similar?

 

[Deliverator]

How about inverting the colour scheme of this:

... so that you have symbols in gold on a deep chocolatey brown. Could look quite nice, and be distinctive. If we have gold on blue that will just be the same as vanilla.

It is important with the promotion icons to fill as much of the square as you can with the symbol. This will help it be recognisable at a smaller size.

I saved the unit icons in the uncompressed DDS format A1R5G5B5 which makes a big difference to quality, saving in DXT1/DXT3 can make icons look really rough. You can do this with Paint.NET, or you could just create the icons in BMP/PNG/TGA and I can convert to DDS in Paint.NET.

 

[Slvynn]

Yeah , sure, choco brown will be good i think,
Also , using hight contrast my ranks are quite recognizable, you can distinguish width of rank ribbon, as well , as bright (dark in vew version) spaces between them. So rank 3 will have much wider stuff, but also, each unit have all promos, so having 3 line promos all of them will show up on unit. There is a small preview, i think it will work, all we need to recognize is rank (i think its quite good while not taking all the space from icon, and what kind of promo line it is. (i think recognizable too)

I working in CorelDRAW/CorelPhotopaint X4 and prefer tga. I will convert TGA to DDS.

 

[Deon]

Offtopic, but having a real radscorp for Fury Road would be totally awesome. I actually created a Fury Road version 11 which supports BTS 3.19, but something went wrong with the dll. See this thread. It has a bunch of your new buildings, the power armor leaderhead, and one other leaderhead made by C.Roland.

It's not really offtopic, because for now I didn't hear a rejection of weak barbarian scorpions for the dune wars .
I've started to work on the texture, carapace and stinger only so far.

 

[Deliverator]

I don't think GIANT scorpions are really Dune - but I'm happy to have a go at rigging the scorpion at the weekend if you want. Perhaps we can discuss on the Fury Road forum...

 

[Deon]

Why should they be giant? Make a pack of 5-6 units, make them to have a size of half a man, and you get "desert scorpions" animal unit. I think that currently DuneWars lacks animal units and scorpions are #1 in the list of most probably units for a desert planet. In civ 4 there're lions and bears, and while they are not mentioned in most historical books which tell about civilizations, they are a nice gameplay feature of the Civ4.

I think you've read the wiki, but just in case :

Spoiler :

Specifically,the kinds of life forms that existed on Arrakis included:

* Poverty grass
* Ephemerals - chenopods, pigweeds, amarinth
* Scotch broom
* Low lupine
* Vine eucalyptus (from Caladan)
* Dwarf tamarisk
* Shore pine
* Candelilla
* Suguaro
* Bis-naga
* Shrubs and bushes, including camel sage, onion grass, gobi feather grass, wild alfalfa, burrow Bush, sand verbena, evening primrose, incense bush, smoke tree, creosote bush.

Various animals, including:

* Burrowing animals: kit fox, kangaroo mouse, desert hare, sand terrapin
* Predators, including the desert hawk, dwarf owl, eagle, desert owl
* Insects, namely scorpion, centipede, trapdoor spider, biting wasp, wormfly
* The desert bat

So there's a place for spiders and scorpions. You may have them to be rare, travel in packs and have a low strength, but it would be cool to have them .

 

[koma13]

I don't think GIANT scorpions are really Dune - but I'm happy to have a go at rigging the scorpion at the weekend if you want. Perhaps we can discuss on the Fury Road forum...

Btw, what happened to our desert hares (and hawks), I haven't seen them for a while.

 

[Deliverator]

They got axed, but I don't mind too much. I think there's enough variety in the bonuses without them. I'd like to replace Stone with something less generic, and improve the graphics for several of the bonuses, but I don't have a strong desire to have the hawks and hares back.

 

[Ahriman]

I don't think animals (other than worms) make sense in Dune. Military units arent' going to be destroyed by scorpions.

I don't really see any need for the hares and hawks. They don't really make sense as major resources with strategic impact.

I agree that the stone resource is also a bit lame. I suggest changing it to Ore. It was supposed to be a merge of iron and stone anyway.

The marble trade good resource is also currently very weak. Maybe with Wonder redesign there will be enough wonders that it would actualyl be worth getting. But a trade good whose only purpose is to boost wonders doesn't really make much sense either; why would you want to trade a good to other AIs whose only effect is to increase the speed at which you get wonders - if they get the wonder, then you don't.
The human will only trade it when there aren't any wonders they want (and so the AI gets nothing from it) and then they end the trade when they are racing for a marble wonder.

 

[Ahriman]

Another suggestion; can we have the water trader building provide its +3 water *with polar ice* resource?

Atm its too easy to trade for the water, then build the water trade buildings, then cancel the trade.

Or make the polar ice resource give +1 water in cities (instead of +1 health) and drop the water trader building from +3 down to +2 water.

 

[koma13]

I don't really see any need for the hares and hawks. They don't really make sense as major resources with strategic impact.

I think we should stop rejecting ideas only because there aren't full canonical to the dune universe. If animal units are fun to have in game, I don't see a reason why we should keep them out.

 

[davidlallen]

I agree that the stone resource is also a bit lame. I suggest changing it to Ore. It was supposed to be a merge of iron and stone anyway. ... The marble trade good resource is also currently very weak. Maybe with Wonder redesign there will be enough wonders that it would actualyl be worth getting.

Back in 1.4, I think, I went through the wonders and normalized them against vanilla. So there are about the same number as vanilla, and there are about the same number which get a build speedup from marble, and from stone.

I agree that wonders need to be redesigned from scratch. The only reason for marble and stone was to provide the wonder build speedup, so we can include those bonuses in the redesign.

BTW, which seems better to redesign first: wonders, or UU/UB? Those appear to be the only remaining items needing redesign.

 

[Slvynn]

UU/UB look more important, cause some civs lose their "canonical" flavour atm. My 5 cents