One of my personal pet peeves with mods is when their art doesn't blend well with the stock game stuff, so in order to try to improve such permanent art issue, I put on my tinker cap and with some reverse-renderigeering techniques I came up with this:
I set up a simple scene in 3dsmax which fares well in mimicking civ's art-deco icon art. Pretty much any model can be rendered in this scene and it'll look very similar to the game's stock icons. Firaxis used some mixed technique of photoshopping and 3d rendering to do their icons however (minute optical discrepancies can be seen in some icons), but this is similar enough to civ's icon style.
In flat icons and deep icons it also performs reasonably well, it creates a gradient on flat surfaces making them pleasant to the eye and the cyan-backlight is there as well.
And because I used a no-frills and no-tricks approach to this, the illumination has such coherence that special effects such as displacement and bump mapping are viable.
The downside? Well this scene was made in mental ray and 3dsmax 2010, and we all know autodesk is not very friendly with backwards compatibility. However I reckon any 3dsmax since 3dsmax 9 can render a scene with my setup.
It uses the arch design materials and exposure control from mental ray, a skylight and two area lights, all features supported by 3dsmax, if it wasn't for the arch-design shader it could work all the way back to max 7.
If someone's interested in the scene parameters or the scene itself send a PM to me.
I set up a simple scene in 3dsmax which fares well in mimicking civ's art-deco icon art. Pretty much any model can be rendered in this scene and it'll look very similar to the game's stock icons. Firaxis used some mixed technique of photoshopping and 3d rendering to do their icons however (minute optical discrepancies can be seen in some icons), but this is similar enough to civ's icon style.
In flat icons and deep icons it also performs reasonably well, it creates a gradient on flat surfaces making them pleasant to the eye and the cyan-backlight is there as well.
And because I used a no-frills and no-tricks approach to this, the illumination has such coherence that special effects such as displacement and bump mapping are viable.
The downside? Well this scene was made in mental ray and 3dsmax 2010, and we all know autodesk is not very friendly with backwards compatibility. However I reckon any 3dsmax since 3dsmax 9 can render a scene with my setup.
It uses the arch design materials and exposure control from mental ray, a skylight and two area lights, all features supported by 3dsmax, if it wasn't for the arch-design shader it could work all the way back to max 7.
If someone's interested in the scene parameters or the scene itself send a PM to me.
