Art Lead Application - 3D Artist/Texture Artist

[Enrique]

Hello Kicking_Bird,

Regarding terrain textures:

As already noted by a lot people in the thread, several terrain textures have quite some age already (as you already know the project has been going on for several years). Normal/Parallax, Specularity and AO maps were introduced in 2012 after the roman set was done. These features weren’t planned, and an awesome contributor took it and implemented them by his own (which is one of the many benefits of open source development). Before that, several artists had just a basic lighting render model where they did the best they could to make things look nice, which involved textures with shadows and highlights in them and contrast noise to counter the plain lighting.

With this background, you can see that nobody made these textures like they are “on purpose” or “by mistake”, but it was a workaround of the possibilities of the engine at that time. Surely they can be improved, you’re more than welcome to start working on it and show us what you can achieve.

Regarding LOD:

It isn’t implemented. The contributor who made the sweet graphic improvements had it planned after he implemented deferred lighting, but sadly he disappeared from the forums and project before that (one of the inconveniences of open source). That’s the main reason artists have to work with more-limited-than-standards polycount and make use of hard edges and smoothing groups to deal with shapes and can’t go chamfering every edge. Another thing we have to deal working for 0AD is the fact that the diffuse and normal maps are shared between all the strutures sets, which doesn’t give you all the freedom you want when using them and it pushes the improvisation and creativity of the artist to make use of them in the best way possible. The only non-shared maps between same civs structures are AO maps, which are just greyscale images and doesn’t eat so much memory space than having one normalmap and one diffuse texture for each one. (And since there’s no LOD system, we can’t make use of lower res textures dynamically either)

This shared textures also generates the problem of the different pixel density ratios, where even if you make your best effort designing the texture and trying to make each piece the closest to its final size on the model, there will always be situations where pixel density will vary in the model since the texture wasn’t specifically designed for that particular model.

Regarding the Persian wonder:

The current one in the game seems to not be as accurate as it could be, so the last decision about it was to use the Gate of all Nations. I started it some time ago but didn’t finish it yet. You can check the direction I took here: http://wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=17552

I have an updated version with more detailed/accurate columns I can upload if you would like to take it from there, unless you want to start from scratch.

Last thing, I’d like to take a look at your work examples and/or older projects. Sadly the link you provided in the first post is not working for me (not found)

And welcome to the forums by the way!

[historic_bruno]

Great perspective Enrique, can you make a list of features the artists would most want from the engine? It sounds like you have a few in mind already, but if they aren't formally documented (with Trac ticket, design discussion, meeting topics, etc.) I'm afraid they will never happen. The more specifics, the better. Except wraitii and Philip, most of the programmers don't really think about that stuff, so it's good to have this feedback for planning. We should also have more artist involvement in the staff meetings for that reason.

[Enrique]

Will do Ben. I'll not take into account what I think it could be made into the game or not, so it will be an extensive read...

[wraitii]

That seems like a good idea.