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 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:
Will it fit H3 mechanics? For example giving this faction advantage on water will make it useless on maps with small amounts of water. Giving it no water advantage will look weird (mermaid who does not have bonuses for water? WTF)
If this town will be part of new H3-based game - there are already several quite unique town projects for HoTA/WoG 3.59 (with water-related Cove and Haven). Creating some generic faction similar to one of H3 faction will be more useful IMO. Think of Rampart\Nature town which will have mermaids as unit.
If you really want to make such faction then go for it but I don’t like this idea of “Yet another original town #9001”.
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.
Animations I have for project Legends also have more frames then the ones in h3 (and often the number of frames varies for example some creature have longer walk animation etc. )
Nice to know there is that option (I felt like a little kid in an airplane cockpit in that post :D) but it doesn’t change the fact I don’t know particles and making an animation which includes water secretion and gathering it up on 1 spot to form a missile is something that can only be done with particles or maybe 2d drawn. Unless some1 shows up that knows how to do this its not on the menu atm.
Well its a sea oriented faction but other than that they don’t have much in common. the creatures vary a lot and if anything else they would make a nice nemesis for the pirates :).
As a town if its finished I don’t want this race to be a separate mode but a mode which would integrate towns like cove and hopefully other towns like bastion kronwerk etc.
Agreed this topic should have way more graphics and way less text but that thread you mentioned is more of a plot discussion instead of a new town so I am gonna make a separate topic dedicated for towns
It was just a suggestion. But, you don’t have to use particles. Just design the creature to have a trunk (like the elephant trunk) somewhere on the body. For example, on the shoulder, if it’s human-like. Or, if the creature has a tail (like the scorpion), make it accumulate the bubble there and hold it all the time. When it’s time to attack, it could just throw it with the movement of the tail. Of course, it doesn’t have to be a large bubble.
You know, I had the impression those were hand drawn! I think they would look cooler in 3D, though. I do agree that it’s less work for a 2D artist to do them, but since they’re just four, I think it could justify the effort.
I will try to do a drawing of one the secondary skills and see what I get.
When I do portraits, I always use a reference image (because I’m not experienced enough to do without), but I don’t put it underneath. That’s like “cheating”. But here, the goal is to do them faster, so I think I’ll use this method.
@val-gaav
Wow, that looks really good. It’s made with the exact style of H3.
I agree with OutSane though, they don’t seem to have a lot of things in common.
I have an idea on the town. It could be completely submerged in water and at the surface just have something (don’t know what yet). This way, it could be the only town that could be placed in the middle of the sea. It could have a ship yard built by default and heroes oriented towards navigation.
Think about the resolution though . All other projects do theirs towns for 800x600 and 256 colors. With VCMI new town and creatures could be targeted for something more up to todays standards like fe. 1366x768 and high color .
This is where basing your work around Vcmi gives you an advantage over WoG modders.
It worked for Hota why not work for this “atlantean” city(still looking for a name). For lore sake these creatures are a lot more powerfull but are forced to fight outside their naturals surrounding which balances things out
I am not dedicated to this town yet I am still probing(right now I would much rather work on a town like bastion which allready has a team but those guys arent very open with their work and language also is a huge problem cause everything is in russian).
About that rampart/nature idea I actually had something similar in mind before I even mentioned this sea oriented faction. I didn’t mention it because because when I saw the two towns creature lists the “atlantean” one looked a lot nicer.
Anyway since you mention the other town I was thinking about is a land race made of naturally magical creatures, they have would have buildings made predominantly of marble and here is a list of the creatures:
1 grant humanoid body and a head of a horse, they actually exist as a mythological creature which is a big plus for me
2 leprechaun (range)
3 sky hounds>chamrosh>cynogriffin (flyer) something like a griffin but instead of a lion its half dog half eagle
4 changeling>morphlings allready exists in wog just needs incorporating
5 faerie>Fay (range) fractal escape
6 troll (tank) cheap shot allready exists in h3 just needs incorporating
7 chimera>tarasque (flyer) body of a lion, head of a goat, a serpent for a tail and wings of an eagle
I am trying to make this town as less crazy as possible. By that I mean still using the old h3 formula. mythological creature that are recognized as much as possible, no wild game altering mechanics.
Town will definitely be submerged at least partially
There is no limit (apart from 48 FPS maximum) but long animations will be annoying. Probably better to keep them at the same length.
Most of their content (like units or buildings) is 3d models so they can be re-rendered. Bastion even released 3d town fly-by: youtube.com/watch?v=1mJyDwty9ek
Edit:
Nice! Green book is looking great:) Little complain about red one - bolts are too big and one of them is missing a pair - looks a bit weird for me.
its not missing first I put one but it looked really dull, this way it looks better, and on the huge bolts they actually used covers that big for bolts in the old books (probably for decoration) and IMO it should look a little weird
yea I’ve drooled over that video a few years ago its really good. Hope to see it ingame
Thanks
Hold on its not done till its an icon with all the specs (128x128 res, 8 bit, background texture) :). I just did the expert version gonna upload em all when I am done
On how much it took I am not really sure. It was less than 20 hours of actual work I’d say around 15, but on the bright side I can reuse the models (necromancy would be just copy paste and modify the skull + a red flame image background for egz. the books are also used in scholarship and other icons)
I also took Ivan’s advice to make the frontal bolts a bit smaller
128x128? For secondary skills (as well as most other hero-related icons) H3 uses these sizes:
44x44 - for example in exchange window
58x64 - hero screen
82x93 - messages (e.g. Witch hut, Scholar).
Regarding 8 bit - yes, all H3 content must be 8-bit. Palette is quite specific so your 8-bit images won’t work in H3. VCMI can load 32 or 24 bit images correctly but there are several issues:
There are multiple places where VCMI assumes that image have palette (8-bit images). Battles and adventure map are probably most difficult to fix, interface requires some work, towns should be ready.
In H3 animation or image sets (like primary\secondary skills) have its own format (def) which makes replacing them more complicated.
Transparency - it’s really slow. Better not to use it right now unless really needed.
At this point all you can do is to render icons at sizes I mentioned and upload them with their 3d models so it will be possible to tweak\re-render them anytime.
I’ll fix the code so it will accept 32 bit images at least for hero-related icons. After this you’ll have to wait for next release or development build.
I find it amazing that h3 looks so good with only 256 colors lol. Also amazing how much time it takes to handle one [size=75] tiny icon [/size]. now I am thinking of rendering the images big (HD 2048 pixels) and after that down sampling will do minimal damage to them. For that I am gonna need to make a new background texture.
Gonna upload the models too so if any1 else comes along can use them too. Any prefered format for the models btw? Cause I am using softimage which is kinda the underdog in 3d application?
Update: Wuhu! found a way to convert it to 8bit without burning up the image. Well almost there now(1 down 27 more to go :P).
you dont have to make 32 bit support for images on my account, although I guess that would improve the platform that would improve the platform.
It’s not 256-colors game actually - H3 screenshot usually have ~3000 colors. For pure 256-color game you should check HoMM2. In H3 each individual image is 256-color but all of them are printed on 16-bit color screen.
Don’t know much about them. Something that will work in as many apps as possible?
I have to do this at some point anyway. Currently replacing animation or image sets is too complicated for regular user IMO.
And note regarding images rendering - use .png or other lossless formats like targa with 24 bit color depth (or 32 - it’s basically same). Jpg’s or 16-bit depth will decrease image quality a bit.
I was not using JPG photobucket seems to convert all images to jpg after you upload them. don’t know why but it forces me to upload the usable images in a zip archive
BTW, by portrait, I mean 2D art, as in painting.
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