Bridges

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lurker
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Bridges

Post by lurker »

Hello, all,

I have been playing wesnoth, and reading the forums, for some time now (the latter for the pretty pictures :P ). IMHO, wesnoth lacks some important piece of infrastructure, namely stone bridges, so I have tried to create one. The attached file shows what I have so far. Now I could use some feedback, namely...
stonebridge.png
Artistic: Anything totally wrong with the bridge? Could it be used, when finished? I know, that the shadow under the bridge is missing, and the whole bridge is not pixel art. The latter is a real problem, because I am not really an artist: I found myself totally unable to paint with the gimp. I "constructed" with Inkscape instead. I was going to try to reduce the final color count by using gimp's "posterize" filter, but have no idea wether this will work...

Terrain WML: As can be seen in the picture, the bridge overlaps its tile not only on the nw and se side, but potentially also on the s and sw tile. Morover, these two tile overlays depend on wether the base tile is water or land. Is such an arrangement possible? I fear that the wooden bridge uses a staight-from-above kind of perspective exactly to avoid these issues?

Thanks in advance

Lurker
Last edited by lurker on September 20th, 2010, 6:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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woodmouse
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Re: stone bridge

Post by woodmouse »

I think it looks nice. But I'm not a real art-person, so it doesn't matter what I say though.
But hmm, as far as I know, not all terrains are fully pixel art...?
Lurker wrote:I was going to try to reduce the final color count by using gimp's "posterize" filter, but have no idea wether this will work...
Hmm, I doubt that'd work, but maybe if you did that and then some fixes or something.. But I'm not sure.
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lurker
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Re: stone bridge

Post by lurker »

woodmouse wrote:But hmm, as far as I know, not all terrains are fully pixel art...?
That is good news. So perhaps I will get away without that much postprocessing. Now my main concern is the WML. One of these days I will have a look at that wonderful and mysterious bridge-macro and see how it works.

Greetings

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TheJM
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Re: stone bridge

Post by TheJM »

It looks really nice. I would suggest adding some grain to it, either by hand (lol) or using one of the noise filters. As it is, it looks closer to metal because of how clean it is.
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lurker
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Re: stone bridge

Post by lurker »

TheJM wrote:It looks really nice. I would suggest adding some grain to it, either by hand (lol) or using one of the noise filters. As it is, it looks closer to metal because of how clean it is.
Good point, especially the floor does not look like having been outdoor for very long. And using a filter is indeed a good idea, otherwise that would have been one of those fearsome postprocessing tasks.

Thanks

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Unnheulu
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Re: stone bridge

Post by Unnheulu »

The perspective looks slightly out to me, although, if it's in vector, it probably shouldn't be too hard to fix. (Famous last words)
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Re: stone bridge

Post by doofus-01 »

lurker wrote:I fear that the wooden bridge uses a staight-from-above kind of perspective exactly to avoid these issues?
I think the wood bridges are the way they are because they are old graphics. There is an underground bridge that is more like what you are trying to do, though last I checked it did not look good in all situations.
lurker wrote:I "constructed" with Inkscape instead. I was going to try to reduce the final color count by using gimp's "posterize" filter, but have no idea wether this will work...
It may be possible, but I doubt you can fake it with a filter. If you post an Inkscaped bridge that you are happy with, I can try to draw over it. If it looks OK, then we can move on to other directions and transitions. Terrain doesn't need to be pixel art.
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Sgt. Groovy
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Re: stone bridge

Post by Sgt. Groovy »

The perspective looks slightly off, at least it doesn't really "sit" in its surroundings, but then again, you used water without transitions, so it's not easy to say.

The design of the bridge is nice, though I would have made the rails a bit thicker. The rendering is too clean and smooth, but before you try any raster effects, you can try few things in Inkscape, like making the individual stones wary in color a bit, trying to make the gaps look like deep gaps instead of painted lines, etc. Like always, reference is your friend.

If you liked to post the original Inkscape file, I could take a look, I have some familiarity with more advanced SVG techniques.
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lurker
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Re: stone bridge

Post by lurker »

Hello, Unnheulu, Doofus, Groovy,

thanks for your comments (and sorry for replying late - the forum software is no friend of mine).

About perspective: I think I know what you mean - the whole bridge looks too "flat", especially in comparison to the
wooden bridge. However, I am using an almost(1) pure isometric projection: x- and y-axes both have a 30 degree angle
with the horizontal, z-axis is straight up. I even tried to make the rails higher, but i wanted to keep them notably
smaller than the walls of the loyalist castle, so there is an upper limit to that.

Many of the villages in wesnoth seem not to use an isometric projection, often the x- or y-axis is much steeper. However
I am not sure I can do that with the bridge: I think the bridge must stay in line with straight diagonal streets
(which have a 30 degree angle with the horizontal simply because of the hexagonal raster of wesnoth) to not
look horribly misplaced, and so at least the long side (y-axis in my current
picture) has to use exactly 30 degrees. Of course I could try to make the short side steeper, but I fear that two such
bridges, one ne-sw, the other nw-se, would look out of place with each other.

About small rails: Yes you are right. Again, I made them so thin, because the loyalist castle's walls are also just
one pixel thick. But I have added the four pylons since and now they are too thin. (Btw. I added the pylons because without
them the whole bridge looked dull. My original intention was to stay as close as possible to those romanesque bridges
with the typical gabled rails, which never seem to have such pylons.)

About background without transitions: That is, because I frankly have no idea how those transitions work in game. Will
the engine paint the normal land-water transition, an then the bridge on top? In that case the pier will have to stand on
a submerged part of the road - or it has to become much thicker, to cover the whole transition. Or will the engine replace
the normal transition with whatever I am going to provide? In that case the current fade-out piers could be used.

About SVG: I always intended to commit the SVG file along with the final PNGs. So here it is (packed as zip, because the forum does not allow me to upload SVGs).

Greetings

Lurker

(1) almost, because due to excessive tweaking the x axis is a bit too steep, somewhere between 30 and 35 degrees.
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Sgt. Groovy
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Re: stone bridge

Post by Sgt. Groovy »

The perspective issues in Wesnoth are a bit quirky, there is no surefire formula that would always work. Also, don't look for the other structures too much for detail reference, everything is somewhat symbolical in representation, the most important part is that the bridge works well on its own.

I've taken a cursory look at the SVG and there is lot room for improvement with simple things. The most important would be to give each stone some shading of its own to make them three-dimensional, and this effect can well be exaggerated. But before you go deeper in, it would be good to study the existing bridge design carefully. Right now your design only works as a standalone one-hex bridge, which is not bad on itself but has very limited use. The wood bridge has a central component that connects to bridge ends as transitions or to another central components to make multi-hex bridges. If you want something similar, the upward curving design isn't very good, because it would make multi-hex bridge very bumpy. The rising part should be wholly in the transition components and the central component should be level (and containing some struts).
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Alarantalara
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Re: stone bridge

Post by Alarantalara »

First, some time ago, mesilliac posted a complete description on how perspective should work in Wesnoth. A quick summary of some of the most useful parts:
The projection angle should be 33.6 degrees, so somewhere between 30 and 35 is actually better than 30.
Something drawn from top-down should be squished vertically by 1/3 to 66.666...% of its original height.
Something drawn from side on should be squished by 1/4 to 75% of its original height.
For 3D art, the viewing angle is 41.81 degrees from the vertical.

More details are here.

The engine will paint the transitions under the bridge unless you tell it not to. Also, you probably won't want to use the bridge macro, since it depends on a lack of sides to the bridge. It's possible to have it draw over the sides and look okay, but it's still limited. I've been working on a variation of the bridge macro for mine rails that solves the joint problems, but since it is for railways, it ignores the difference between ending on water and land.
If you do want to try using the bridge macro, it treats bridge ends separately from the span, so if the part that fits in the hex tiles well and you have nice end pieces, it should appear fine for straight lines. If you also overlap on the s and sw tile, the bridge macro will chop them off, so see if you can avoid that. Also, since the projection dictates that a n-s bridge must be drawn wider, you'll want to avoid the edges anyway to make sure that that bridge fits.
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lurker
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Re: stone bridge

Post by lurker »

Hello again,

@Groovy:
I thought about the bumpiness of the multi-hex bridge, too. My plan was to create a rather broad transition
which would go in a straight line between two adjacent bumps.

Shading the individual stones will be quite a lot of work, that is better left to after I got the basic design right.
And there, I must say I am not happy with the transitions: Since the engine is going to paint the land-water
transitions, I have to rethink the arc construction. Actually, today morning, on the way to work, I had an idea
which I will try out as a next step.

@Alarantalara
The link to the "wesomtric" perspecitve was quite interesting. Hard to say wether the missing 3.7 degrees of the y-axis will be very notable, but they might, especially on a multi-hex extension of the bridge. I will have to keep that in mind. With the new idea I mentioned above, I might be able to keep the piers out of the s,sw-tiles. But not so sure about the shadow of the bridge. However that shadow would be over any terrain being on those tiles, so maybe that is not such a big problem.

So, thank you all for your thoughts and cooperation. The discussion definitely clarified some important points for
me. While I try out the new arc construction, I think I will go silent for a couple of days, and then will come back
when I have some progress to show.

Thanks

Lurker
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lurker
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Re: stone bridge

Post by lurker »

Hello, again,

As I mentioned in my last post, I tried to change the bridge design to move the piers into the water.
That turned out to have been a really bad idea, the piers became so big that there was no place left
for the water.

So I kept the old basic design and instead tried to incorporate some of the suggestions made on this
list:

I fixed the perspective (those 3.7 degrees turned out to be very clearly visible, and they suddenly made
two instances of the bridge fit together seamlessly, that was a very useful hint indeed).

Then I tried to make the bridge less shiny using some filters (the inkscape "clouds" effect and then
a little tweaking of the turbulence parameters did it for me). Finally I made the individual stones stand
out and made the rails thicker in the process. Oh, and I added the shadow under the bridge.

I must say, I am actually quite happy with the result. Next I will try to chop the image in pieces and see
whether the bridge macro will swallow them. I attach the svg as well as the raw bridge png to this post,
just in case a more skilled WMLer wants to take that on :wink:

Greetings

Lurker
testbridge.png
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Spell
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Re: stone bridge

Post by Spell »

You should try to put the bridge in front of the castle. Then you will see how the perspective have to be.
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lurker
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Re: stone bridge

Post by lurker »

Spell wrote:You should try to put the bridge in front of the castle. Then you will see how the perspective have to be.
Do you think it is still wrong?
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