UFO:Alien Invasion
Development => Artwork => Topic started by: MCR on May 05, 2010, 06:45:04 pm
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Some wip shots:
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3x quadrupled resolution for the Ortnok-bodies without armor:
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Comparison skins, before & after the tuning (2 examples, still wip):
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Ortnok-Head in light armor original (head1=head2=head3) & the new heads:
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You're definitely improving! Can we have some screenshots from an angle that will actually be seen in-game?
Also, take note that the game has a tendency to exaggerate color contrast, turning darks into near-blacks and lights into near-whites. I think this has caused your protruding veins to look a little bit too big. Reducing the darkness of their shadow might help that.
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IMHO the possible camera angles & pitchshift & zoom limits should be changed & camera freedom enhanced not only for the developer but also for the player, so I will take care that (almost) no seams will be visible from any angle, which is the most demanding part of work here...
Also the shaders are being massively upgraded @ the moment & noone can tell exactly now how colors, shading & things will look in-game soon ;)
But all of those things will be adjusted to perfectly fit the new look once the shader upgrades are done & you can be sure that the new rendering style will enhance gfx big time...
Do also not forget that those will get additional normalmaps applied also & maybe even some oth..
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Ortnok-Army :o
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Is it okay for everyone here, if I finish this & make the commit afterwards or are there any important suggestions left ?
I hope the glowing eyes are okay also, because they really 'fit' the Ortnoks well...
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not from my side
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I will use 24bit pngs as this is the best format available for us @ the moment regarding textures, but filesizes WILL be much bigger (but quality also), because I quadruple many body resolutions & I do not want to tell you about the heads ;)
We could save filesize by using jpgs, because here we do not need transparency @ all & md2s have problems with textures using the alpha channel anyway, but it really is not recommended to use jpgs as textures, because of many reasons, I will just post one funny link here describing those called 'JPEG's are Evil too.':
http://www.sjbaker.org/steve/omniv/jpegs_are_evil_too.html
This is quite important information regarding jpgs & textures, so that is why I do not want to use jpgs anymore, when creating new textures...
Also I will NOT change the texture-resolution-references inside the .md2 files as the perl-script sometimes is having troubles doing that...
There will be no problems whatsoever in-game, everything will work fluently this way...
@Mattn: Please tell me if this information is read out somewhere by the code, because if it is needed somewhere I could try to manipulate the md2s with a hex-editor as the perl-scripts sometimes 'damage' the md2s somehow...
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no jpeg - use png - what is the resolution you are using?
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heads: 512x512
bodies: 512x512
essentially the same resolution like the one that is already used for Ortnoks with medium & light armor...
But those filesizes would also increase as I am making different head versions for them & am increasing contrast & sharpness, so they will not looked 'washed out' anymore....
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that's still ok ;)
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regarding the filesizes, you can look to the screenshots I posted before in this thread, there you can make out the difference easily (filesizes & quality)...
I can never get them so small like with jpg, even @ the same resolution...
But there will be no performance issues because of that ;), I read png is decompressed very fast & is a very good lossless texture format...
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btw. don't just delete the jpeg and add the pngs
move the jpeg to the png filename and the copy the png over - otherwise we would lose the svn version history.
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Thanks for the tip, will try to do it this way...
One last question.
Version 1:
That means renaming jpg->png, then copying over the png, then svn commit ?
or
Version 2:
renaming jpg->png, svn commit, then copying over the png, then again svn commit ?
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the first please
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I was not sure if Tortoise SVN would recognize the first version automatically, but if you are sure I will do it like this...
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You have to do svn rename, not regular rename.
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Thanks.
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Upgrades done, mostly 32bit rgba pngs, although we could convert most of them to 24bit rgb or even index the colors to make the files smaller...
The heads for the Ortnoks with medium armor are not finished yet, feel also free to test stuff already in trunk & tell me if you find something important we should improve regarding the new Ortnok textures...
I hope you like them. ::)
Please do not forget that I had to upgrade those without changing their overall being & was using low-res & artifact riddled source files, so things may not be that perfect as they maybe should, but I think it is quite an improvement ;)
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I had some funny minutes & added some 'race-specific' names to our aliens...
I had very much fun inventing those names, I would say they 'fit the races' better now, left the already very funny names for the Tamans unchanged, but added names for Ortnok & Shevaar...
Feel free to change them if you do not like those, but I really think I know how our aliens would be named after looking @ them & modifying their looks for hours... ;)