Mainline campaign sprites and animations needed

Contribute art for mainline Wesnoth.

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doofus-01
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Re: Mainline campaign sprites and animations needed

Post by doofus-01 »

Thanks.
vultraz wrote:The hair palette could use some work,
I'm color-blind, so if you don't like the palette, you'll need to be more specific.
zookeeper wrote:but for me the main thing that could use improvement is the pose
Fair enough, but maybe we could get the other stuff out of the way first, since she'll need more than one frame anyway.

I tried to make them slightly smaller, and the darker breastplate might help.
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Re: Mainline campaign sprites and animations needed

Post by beetlenaut »

Those look a lot nicer. The head and shoulder area of the second one is still bothering me though. I think her neck is too long; without the armor, he shoulders would be lower.
doofus-01 wrote:I'm color-blind, so if you don't like the palette, you'll need to be more specific.
It's too bright and saturated for hair. You could copy the palette used for the fencer, and that would match Lisar's portrait pretty well.
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doofus-01
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Re: Mainline campaign sprites and animations needed

Post by doofus-01 »

beetlenaut wrote:It's too bright and saturated for hair. You could copy the palette used for the fencer, and that would match Lisar's portrait pretty well.
OK, I toned down the yellow hair.
beetlenaut wrote:The head and shoulder area of the second one is still bothering me though. I think her neck is too long; without the armor, he shoulders would be lower.
I moved a shoulder pad up, moving her head down made her look like a dwarf.

I also took a pass at one of those annoying northern facing frames, didn't have enough time for the other one. Maybe next weekend.
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Re: Mainline campaign sprites and animations needed

Post by Jetrel »

:D So yeah, running into these was a pleasant surprise. I'll do what I can on my end to polish them up. (Do note that these edits are based on the sprites you posted a few days ago; I'll integrate your most recent changes, soon.) In the main, these are quite great - I've done a number of small tweaks to the pixel-patterning to simplify the breastplate a bit, and redid the face and hair. Here's a laundry list of small bits of thought on the subject:

- the breastplate had a bit of shape complication that falls below the rendering resolution for pixel art; I appreciate what you (maybe) were going for, but generally in stuff like wesnoth, it's a good idea to simplify some of the underlying shapes (i.e. having less overlapping 'plates' on plate mail), so that each of the individual plates has a good deal of room to visually establish itself and its surface normal.

- I markedly tightened the shoulders, but left the hips and wide-stance alone; generally the trick to making a sprite register as female is to have a low shoulder-to-hip ratio (potentially to the point of even having the hips wider than the shoulders, as this is not uncommon IRL). It's a little tougher in our particular sprites because the arms hang over the hips (obscuring their width), and shoulders often have exaggerated-size pauldrons (partly to make their presence register on tiny art, which is important to convey a stance, and partly for style).

- As for the hair, one thing you'll find when doing blonde hair is it has such a close palette with the color of the skin that if you want, you can straight-up share palette elements between the two. Blonde hair is really hard for most people, colorblind-or-not, to color, because (like iridescence in bird feathers), a substantial amount of its perceived color is environmental and based on reflected colors. In the same way that silver-age superman comics would always shade his hair with blue tones (which are appropriate under the reflected light of a blue sky, but totally inappropriate inside an office), blond hair often gets a garish yellow coloring which is only appropriate outdoors in high-noon sunlight - the "gold" comes not from directly reflected light, but from sunlight diffusing through it - there's some during bright sunny days, and the greatest amount of this actually comes when light is shining through it (i.e. the person is standing such that the sun is behind them).

The LAB color space is a good way to describe the right colors - one danger with a bright "lemon" yellow is that when yellow (in any color space) is darkened it often becomes slightly greenish - it's the same hue, but the human perception of it actually changes our perceived color identity of it when it becomes dark - when that same hue is darkened we stop perceiving it as yellow and begin perceiving it as green. Gold shifts something closer to a bright orange (which to the human eye is very close to yellow when bright, but when darkened, darkens to a warm brown which maintains the same "yellow" color identity.

So, in LAB, there are two color axes: A describes from -128 to 128 how green <-> magenta something is. B describes (again from -128 to 128) how blue <-> yellow something is. From what I understand of most typical colorblindness, this actually breaks out the colors into measuring exactly the component "red-green colorblind" people are blind to: the A component! Even if it's not directly visible, the computer can give an exact readout of *what it is*.


So when I'm doing blond colors (and generally skintones), I try to gradually increase the ratio of B : A as the palette gets darker and darker. On the very brightest elements (with L > 93), I can dip ever so slightly into the green area to give a slight "color-cancelling" effect that makes the brightest colors seem even brighter than normal. The very bright colors can get away with being mostly B and almost no A, the very darkest have more A than B.

Here are the actual colors I used for the hair:
L : A : B
99 : -8 : 32
90 : 0 : 80
72 : 21 : 54
51 : 35 : 21
29 : 32 : 10
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Re: Mainline campaign sprites and animations needed

Post by Jetrel »

When I do the next edit, I'll play with the pose a bit. Your proposed one for the first level is a good idea, though I might apply it to the L2 (due to the whole experience = confident, relaxed pose trope we often use). For both of these, we likely want a "en guarde" frame with the weapon active, more or less exactly as held now (which will be used as the endcap of the combat animation), and then a "relaxed" frame that gets used as the usual standing frame.

I talked with zookeeper about how I really, really don't like the "dual-wielding" thing we currently have kludged in for the sceptre. He argued that we ought to visibly display the sceptre because it's so central to the campaign, so what I decided would be a better idea is that we always show only one weapon, and when the character gets the sceptre, it replaces the sword as their primary weapon, and is held in the same pose/position as the sword was.

We then hammerspace the sword in the same way all other wesnothian dual-wielders do.
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Re: Mainline campaign sprites and animations needed

Post by Gyra_Solune »

By the by, the Monster Crab should probably have its description a little rewritten since it's now just a big crab and not some weird mutant. I can help!

New text:

In some regions, crabs have adapted to grow to truly enormous sizes, standing in similar stature to horses. They thrive in coastal areas, usually conserving their energy by lying in wait for food. When threatened, they stand more upright, raising their bodies to threaten their enemies and attacking with their massive claws that can easily maim or kill the offender. However, they are uncomfortable outside of their coastal habitat and fare poorly on dry land.


In addition, given it's a crab and all, it should probably be somewhat better on sand than 2 MP 30% defence!
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Re: Mainline campaign sprites and animations needed

Post by nuorc »

I noticed that the Elvish Scout lacks attack animations? When attacking melee, the whole sprite is moved towards the enemy and back, when attacking ranged an arrow comes flying, but the unit itself is not animated. When I read on http://units.wesnoth.org/trunk/animations.html that there are 7 (2) attack animations for the scout, I expected to find more pics in c:\Program Files (x86)\Battle for Wesnoth 1.12.5\data\core\images\units\elves-wood\ than I did.

I just wanted to ask if this was the known state of things.
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Re: Mainline campaign sprites and animations needed

Post by zookeeper »

nuorc wrote:I noticed that the Elvish Scout lacks attack animations? When attacking melee, the whole sprite is moved towards the enemy and back, when attacking ranged an arrow comes flying, but the unit itself is not animated. When I read on http://units.wesnoth.org/trunk/animations.html that there are 7 (2) attack animations for the scout, I expected to find more pics in c:\Program Files (x86)\Battle for Wesnoth 1.12.5\data\core\images\units\elves-wood\ than I did.

I just wanted to ask if this was the known state of things.
It is. The baseframes were updated, animations weren't, so currently they're animationless.
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Re: Mainline campaign sprites and animations needed

Post by nuorc »

@zookeeper: ok, thx. So, is the table outdated or did I look at the wrong place?
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Re: Mainline campaign sprites and animations needed

Post by zookeeper »

nuorc wrote:@zookeeper: ok, thx. So, is the table outdated or did I look at the wrong place?
Yes, that's certainly out of date, seeing how it's for "trunk" units, meaning before the migration from SVN to Git, which was years ago. I don't think there's a current table anywhere, but there's relatively little animating going on at the moment so one can pretty safely just use the latest development release as reference for what is missing.
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Re: Mainline campaign sprites and animations needed

Post by Aldarisvet »

zookeeper wrote:True, those Naga Hunter and Naga Guardian line sprites are perfectly good.
I found that new Naga Hunter sprites included in 1.13.4 still miss melee attack animations (probably because at the Era of Chaos level1 Naga Nunter has no melee attacks, but level2 have, so it was a possibility to frankenstein it).
If needed, they can be taken from Amaranthine Stone campaign. Or I just attach it here.
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Re: Mainline campaign sprites and animations needed

Post by zookeeper »

Aldarisvet wrote:I found that new Naga Hunter sprites included in 1.13.4 still miss melee attack animations (probably because at the Era of Chaos level1 Naga Nunter has no melee attacks, but level2 have, so it was a possibility to frankenstein it).
If needed, they can be taken from Amaranthine Stone campaign. Or I just attach it here.
Great, thanks, they're in. I also grabbed the (ranged) defense frame from there, and hastily edited together an additional (pretty bad) melee defense frame.
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Re: Mainline campaign sprites and animations needed

Post by zookeeper »

As requested on #wesnoth-dev, I committed the latest edits. Doesn't mean they need to be considered final or anything.
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Re: Mainline campaign sprites and animations needed

Post by doofus-01 »

zookeeper wrote:As requested on #wesnoth-dev, I committed the latest edits. Doesn't mean they need to be considered final or anything.
So, is Jetrel still working on this, or should I? I was glad to discover that he is still working on some things, like the elf sprites (desert and wood), but I don't know what else is going on, if anything.
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Re: Mainline campaign sprites and animations needed

Post by Jetrel »

doofus-01 wrote:
zookeeper wrote:As requested on #wesnoth-dev, I committed the latest edits. Doesn't mean they need to be considered final or anything.
So, is Jetrel still working on this, or should I? I was glad to discover that he is still working on some things, like the elf sprites (desert and wood), but I don't know what else is going on, if anything.
I've got nothing new since the many months ago I poked at this - by all means please do carry on, here.
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