Unit Maker of the Month: July 2006 jury thread

Which unit deserves the honor of being the "Unit of the Month, July 2006"?

  • LizardmenRule! - Modern Inquisitor

    Votes: 5 8.3%
  • Vingrjoe - Des Moines Class Heavy Cruiser

    Votes: 11 18.3%
  • Plotinus - Dominican Friar

    Votes: 19 31.7%
  • Aaglo - Ork Rokkit Launcha

    Votes: 6 10.0%
  • Orthanc - Calormen Ship

    Votes: 4 6.7%
  • Supa - King Ghidorah

    Votes: 8 13.3%
  • Utahjazz7 - Macedonian Elephant

    Votes: 7 11.7%

  • Total voters
    60
  • Poll closed .
I wonder if he was voted for, because he is a mod...
Nah, people probably just go nuts over that kind of unit, so Plontinus wins.:D
 
Well fought and well won! Congratulations MR. New Moderator, I said it before, this really is your week!

:thumbsup:
 
Yes, which is nice as I've had a truly vile week in RL.

I didn't actually realise until just now that I really can edit the votes on polls. Let's all hope my moral fibre is up to the challenge...
 
For the first time (i think) the thing i voted won the contest.
Congrats Plotinus. :thumbsup:
 
Congratulations, Plotinus!

I don't know if the pen is mightier than the sword, but in this case, the preacher is.
 
GOod job Plotinus! I'm glad that you won, and that for the first time for me as well, the entry I voted for won! I guess that's what you call a win-win situation. :D

Seriously, though, that was one piece of work you entered, and I'd like to know where you got your thunder storm FX from.... I may have use for them in future projects....
 
Thanks, all.

[Hikaro] Compliments from veteran creators are especially encouraging. The thunderstorm took an enormously long time to do (although it wasn't nearly so bad as the cloak). Basically, I looked on the internet for a cloud animation, and it was surprisingly hard to find one. I don't have the link any more for the site where I got this one, but it had a number of computer-generated animations. I downloaded one and opened it up in Adobe Premiere, where I exported about twenty frames. Then I used NeoPaint to turn them all black and white, and also to create templates based upon them for the transparency. Then I basically treated them the same way as Kinboat's smoke animation - created a number of square primitives, mapped each frame onto one of them, parented them to an invisible ball, and displayed them in sequence throughout the animation.

The lightning is simply images mapped onto square primitives. In retrospect, the whole effect isn't really as impressive as I'd hoped when I conceived it, but I did want to do a lightning effect that was a little different from others that have been made. I got the idea of a cloud appearing and vanishing again from Populous II! I had to do quite a lot of postwork on the final storyboard to clean it up. In particular, the parts where the cloud appears and disappears - which looked great in the initial renders - went very pixellated once it was converted to 256 colours with a Civ-friendly palette. It still looks a bit pixellated even now, after I went through it manually smoothing it. I've found that transparency effects have a tendency to look rather clunky in-game, which is a shame.

Anyway, feel free to run the animations through Flicster and cut 'n' paste the spell effect out, if you so desire.
 
Sure do... As for using spell/smoke effects in poser, I usually find it's much, much easier just to make the animation and render it in poser, then use the desired FX animation (whether created in another program or downloaded somewhere) as a C&P source (using Animation shop to export it frame by frame if necesarry).... That's what I did with kinboat's smoke prop... I just used the frames that he got his images from, modified them in PsP, and pasted them over the frames of my animations.
 
Congrats to Plotinus, my vote went to aaglo, but the friar was a great entry as well.
 
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