Following Valery19’s post , I believe we also need a parallel artwork thread for those who want to share stuff that could be possibly used on a VCMI-based mod/game. Keep in mind that this whole section can be used to discuss any other modding projects you might have aside from the VCMI CCP and that even the latter might make use of similar assets.
If you’re an artist and if you feel like donating some stuff you done before, this is also the place to share it.
Well here are reworked icons of the scholarship skill, basic, advanced and expert version if you make any use of them for the fork project.
Your three images are looking great. This is exactly what we need in matters of the design and art style for the content creation project in my opinion. Graphics which are made in 3D close to the original H3 but with a higher resolution and hi-res textures. I don’t like the polished cartoonish style of newer HoMMs.
I don’t know much about art but would it be possible for you to apply some dirty, not so clean, not so perfectly shaded or aligned, hand-drawn effect. Perhaps it would be nice to compare sth. like that. Most native 3D renderings are looking clean and exact but don’t meet the real world necessarily. Hand-drawn paintings are somehow more narrative, more interesting.
Perhaps it may be possible to combine the pros of hand-drawn 2d and rendered 3d anytime.
True they do look a bit too clean, especially when compared to h3 (which is partially because of the horrible resolution :P)
Its a lot easier to dirty them up with a photoshop touch up instead of trying to align everything as you want in 3d, but I am not the guy to turn to for 2d art :), so maybe some1 else can give them that extra make up they need so they fit seamlessly.
Looks nice. Don’t think that we have to follow original H3 that close but don’t see any problem with that.
Some things that bothering me:
Ayway - good to see some new stuff here - this is definitely better than nothing.
Appreciate the feedback guys, you actually pulled me off from a creature model I was working on that I hope to make a H3 sprite out of it.
this one : merfolk
I like the book you found and the bolts and lock mechanism are going in definitely. I will find some textures for weathered metal to apply for the book reinforcements, but I definitely want to preserve that old h3 icon feel.
Making my own custom textures is my weak side and some1 good with photoshop or some other 2d application could really help me out to do this fast and with better quality.
Gonna start reworking the books now
Awesome artwork for the icons! I say they look great like this. Not sure about the dirty look. Try to make them smaller and see how they look like.
Sometimes, when you apply a dirty look and scale them down, it doesn’t look so good.
Anyway, keep it up. They look really good.
Here are my 2 cents from a player’s perspective: I wouldn’t like to play a game which looks too alien, as compared to the game that was already so good that continues to mesmerize us after so many years. New graphic content for new game elements (new creatures, new skills) is okay, especially if it fits with the original graphics. But new graphic content to replace the old, is not necessary. I’m not saying it cannot be good, if we get the luck of having talented artists working on it, but it’s risky. I wouldn’t like to be in the position of hurting an artist’s feelings by giving negative comments, just because it would not match my taste of what H3 graphics should look like. So going for the H3 icon looks & feel is a safer approach.
What I would easier accept, would be to have alternative graphics used only when a skill is being tweaked through a mod. WoG did it by changing the font color of the skill name, which was good enough IMO, but I would be fine with a change of icon in that case also. But to be consistent, we would then need alternative icons for all skills (at least all which are regularly boosted in mods… which is more than half of them already).
For the rest, RandomEd took the words out of my mouth. I find the above already great. I don’t even mind the different camera angle or the clean look. Though prolly I wouldn’t mind changes as per above suggestions either. To be seen how they also look in small, if someone will have the time/mood/skill to do it.
Thanks and indeed - keep up the good work!
This is the main problem with doing anything with HoMMIII. People are so used to it, also in terms of graphics that many will not accept any changes. That’s why it’s easier to just do a new game.
@OutSane great icons and unit.
It’s not really a “problem”, and it’s not just valid for H3. Actually it’s not just valid for games, but for any product. If someone decides to do a make-over to an already successful product (let’s say a car), it can be a good move to increase its success even more, but it can as well be suicidal. It’s part of the skills an artist should have, if he wants his product to sell good: aside from knowing how to draw, and having the talent to create original content, it’s also useful to have the technical knowledge of understanding the artistic “approach” (if I can call it like this) of the existing product, to know what would go with it or not; and it also wouldn’t hurt to have a good grasp of what the public would love, accept or not swallow at all.
To go back to our game, take H4 & H5 for example. NWC took an original approach on H4 which really didn’t pay off. It’s undeniable that the game made new fans (who prefer it to this day), but it’s also undeniable that it sold 3 times less than H3, and that on a growing market and with a successful franchise behind (without H3 before it, it might not have sold even half of that). The new fans prove some of their ideas were good, but the lost fans prove they lost touch with what the public wanted. Ubival didn’t learn enough from the H4 (partial) failure either. They only looked at the numbers when deciding where to start, so they took H3, but they didn’t spend enough time to understand the game & the community, before taking decisions about the “new” content. H4 fans felt left out, while there were compromise solutions that wouldn’t have bothered the H3 fans. And some fans of any Heroes title were annoyed with some of the Warhammer elements put in there, at the expense of Heroes elements left out.
Sorry for hijacking the thread with this discussion. I don’t want to discourage creativity, just to advise on a bit of caution when it comes to replacing content. If that feels restrictive in any way for the artist, please ignore. I’d rather have more creative content in here to choose from, than not enough.
I really am probing right now for the best way to add something to this game.
Main problem is that if you want to do something wholesome you kinda need more than 1 person to do it. I was originally thinking of making the graphics for a whole new town (one of the towns i made a rough concept has that merfolk creature as a tier 1 unit). But then after searching the net I found maybe a dozen dead town ideas 
(including space orks…) which made me rethink that whole thing. So here I found the fork project for replacing H3 assets which if anything else had active members and a lot of work to be done.
So right now I am at a crossroads between:
anyway just because I want to see the icon through I will finish it up and on request here is a smaller version of the icons + the original one for reference as well as the progress I am making on making it more dirty
http://i1152.photobucket.com/albums/p495/dimovgoce/ExpertScholarshipLowRes.jpg http://i1152.photobucket.com/albums/p495/dimovgoce/oldExpertScholarship.jpg http://i1152.photobucket.com/albums/p495/dimovgoce/ExpertScholarWeatheredLowRes.jpg
Btw any1 has the background texture so I can insert it behind the image if you do I’d appreciate it
I think that it really looks good…. Thanks for your work!
Hello OutSane, and thank you so much for your contribution. It’s a great thing you’re attempting to remake some of the original artwork assets, but don’t let that restrain your creativity, if you think you got it in spades. Remember that aside the conservativeness of some hardcore HOMM3 fans aside, there are still plenty of mods that change the aspect of the original UI.
And on a short sidenote, I’ve been lurking the forums lately, and I’m somewhat disappointed by the lack of support from the Heroes Community. If things go like this, crowdfunding will not even be a possibility in the long run. Let’s just hope we can at least get more contributions like this in order to create a decent artwork repository.
Zamolxis, creating free content can bring burst of popularity to HoMM3 like this had happened with OpenTTD. And in case of free content modders will be able to use it for their own evil purposes.
OutSane, background texture is DIBOXBCK.PCX file. You can extract it from H3Bitmap.lod with this tool: wogarchive.ru/file.php?id=119
Dozen? Hundreds at least. And space orcs is quite solid idea compared to most “creative” ones.
There are several team-developed towns that look promising but mostly you’ll find only dead projects or horrible rips from other games.
I’m not surprised. As I said you won’t find a lot of good artists in HoMM community.
The best chance for this project to succeed is to create some amount of content that will attract new artists here. Crowdfunding may work at later stage when there will be something to show - I don’t think that you’ll attract enough people by idea alone.
thanks to everyone you’ve been helpfull both for feedback and advice.
It’s a shame we don’t have more people atm but like Ivan said hopefully more will join as we have something to show for.
If any1 has any ideas in which I can help I am ALL EARS.
In the meantime I’ll be working on this sea oriented town and hopefully will get somewhere.
If you are interested here is a list of the creatures I’ve cooked up
Anyway this is just a rough concept if you have any suggestions nothing is set in stone I have only finished the polymesh for the merfolk
To me, that icon looks exactly like the one in the game. If you scale it down even more, you probably won’t see the difference.
There’s one thing that no one mentioned. If we manage to replace all the graphics in the game (yeah, I know, it’s hard), then there won’t be any dependency on H3 and people won’t have to get those graphics.
Two or three weeks ago I was thinking of making a new Hero. With avatar, name, and some basic history. Now, I’m not an artist, but I think I could do the portrait in 12 hours or something. All was good, until I started thinking that no one would want this in the game. So, I kinda abandoned the idea and than forgot about it completely.
I think it would be great to replace (at least) some of the graphics. But the new graphics have to look almost exactly like the old ones. In your case, it’s totally acceptable by my standards.
Now, doing a new town is also an interesting thing. Maybe I can do the portrait of the heroes for your town? 
BTW, by portrait, I mean 2D art, as in painting.
I think you should continue with both. An idea would be to do the primary skills (as they are just 4) and get the feedback on those. After that, if they’re well received, you could do the secondary skills. Replacing those two sets of icons with high resolution ones would be great, IMO.
Thanks Ed for the support but to replace the old icons you need to satisfy the harder critics otherwise the time you put into it doesn’t really pay off. On a side note I like how the scholarship icon is turning up, recognizable in a blink of an eye and yet better than the old one but I’ll need others people eyes to confirm that.
I’d like to see the graphics replaced and improved but is not a realistic goal atm (like you mentioned 12 hours for a portrait). Doing a whole town from scratch is gonna be hard as hell but that one at least I can imagine happening.
On doing both I really need to choose to focus on one or on the end I’ll end up with 2 piles of unusable stuff.
On your offer for hero history if you are in the mood for it YES PRETTY PLEASE :D. Making up cool names for the heroes and writing an interesting history would be a great help. You could also choose starting secondary skills and creatures, also race should support commanders for WOG and those have separate histories as well. that’s 32 short hero +32 short commander histories (see how fast work piles up :D).
Anyway take it easy, as a project atm this race is where most h3 town ideas are: a whole lot of plans and a whole lot of nothing 
.
If it takes 12 hours to do a portrait then I am not sure you should be wasting your time like that. You could try to find a faster way that would blend in heroes but wont take months of work :). Anyway just names, histories and other details would be very nice.
I didn’t mention that it takes that much to make a detailed portrait with the size of 1000x1000 pixels, for example. But, if we scale it down to fit 256x256 the details won’t matter that much. So, by adding less detail, it should take less time to do. BTW, what’s the maximum size of a hero’s portrait?
I still think you should do the primary skills (only that for now). How much time do you think it would take? If it takes too much, I could try to do a drawing of them, although 3d is better.
I think this much amount of detail would be sufficient: lh3.googleusercontent.com/-LnNYrG-UfCk/TzN6X8S0m6I/AAAAAAAAAjs/p3gLlQ5mBN4/s512/pepper.png
If I smooth it, it should look a lot better, but with this one I wanted to leave it with an oil painting look.
I do have a suggestion for a creature. I don’t know how it should look like, but I thought it should have ranged attack and it should throw a ball of water. Before throwing, it will secrete the water (as this is a water creature). After upgrade, the water could be poisoned with acid and it could corrode weapons and armor, giving them less less attack skill and less defense skill. For hand to hand attack, the splash of water should have … well… splash damage, hitting neighboring units.
I will think about suggestions of story and other aspects.
That’s basically the reason behind my criticism - new content must be at least at the same quality as original one. Othervice no-one will use it.
Smaller one is a bit bigger than used in H3 (82x82), but hi-res would need something around 164x164. Which makes low-detailed texture quite notable for me.
Original game have 48x32 and 58x64 icons for heroes. But it should have version which is at least twice bigger for hi-res. Having full-scale hero portrait similar to one on H5 duel screen or something like Wesnoth portraits will be nice too.
Regarding water faction:
And there is already separate thread for plot\setting discussion - [forum.vcmi.eu/t/vcmi-ccp-on-creating-a-new-original-plot/461/1)
I didn’t say don’t do the portraits just if you are going to do this you should first think of a method that would make things easier and consistent. Maybe if you know some basic photoshop or gimp for example you could place a real photograph of a person as a background layer and then draw on top of it using it as a guideline. I think something like that would help you a lot and on the bonus side I think that’s how they did the originals in h3 so it would reinforce consistency. Don’t underestimate NWC they really knew what they were doing.
I have no idea sorry.
Primary skills? Ok that should not be too hard considering the first 2 will probably be half an hour of work
But there is another thing for which I facepalmed myself today. All the icons are 2d drawn and the person who drew them payed close attention to perspective and lightning. I really went banzai on that one without giving a closer look on the originals :D. It really is the way to go from a technical aspect.
For stilled one time images 2d is always the better choice while when it comes to re usability 3d is the better choice
Yes definitely no smoothing that fruit has h3 in it :).
well I was all ready thinking of giving the mermaids a splash wave missile
the secretion part is kinda too hard and considering how short h3 animation are I am not sure there is room for it (creature in h3 never charge up their attacks they are alway almost instant) and it requires use of particles for which I am a total noob.
But dripping water from some of the creatures would be a nice touch up.
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