Today University, Tomorrow 0AD

[Nantchev]

I am about to finish university in about 1 week and am able to contribute.

Capabilities include: animation, 3D Modelling and texturing, in that decreasing order of strength.

Essentially, what stuff can I get on with? Where is it and who are the important art people worth knowing?

I have found the animation pipeline, Art design style and the custom query pages.

Any other page(s) worth knowing about?

My portfolio is here

Adrian Nantchev

nantchev.com

[RoekeloosNL]

Looks really good Nantchev, i wish you the best of luck with 0.A.D

Hope to see some nice Animations/Models from you.

[iNcog]

hehe, i'm also waiting for uni to finish to start playing 0 AD a lot.

fix path finding first though

[Nantchev]

'Fix path finding'? Please explain. Do the links not work for you?

[niektb]

Pathfinding is something réally diiferent, even not related to art:

http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=17649&page=2#entry292404

Even though, it is something the programmers should take care of. The artists can't help with that.

[sanderd17]

iNog, no reason to unnecessary clutter other topics. Pathfinder discussion belongs in the pathfinder topic.

Nantchev, don't worry about that pathfinder stuff. It's a programming thing. Welcome to our forums.

I'll send a PM to Enrique so he comes take a look here. Enrique is our art dept leader and is the most important person to know. You can take a look here and see if something fits you already: http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=17730

Animating for the game isn't the easiest thing to do, and animations were broken for a long time (originals lost, and unable to recreate the bones needed to make new animations). But Enrique figured this out just some months ago (so we have some recent animations on old meshes, like the testudo animation).

Anyway, he'll know more about all that stuff.

[niektb]

[...]

I'll send a PM to Enrique so he comes take a look here. Enrique is our art dept leader and is the most important person to know. You can take a look here and see if something fits you already: http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=17730

[...]

Not neccesary: I already did before Nantchev even posted this topic and notified him from the topic too.

Edited May 26, 2014 by niektb

[thamlett]

You could join CoM. We need 3d artists and modelers.

[niektb]

You could join CoM. We need 3d artists and modelers.

Hehe, he already did

But I pointed him partially to the main game since we do not have very much animators + we (at CoM) have right now not so much animation tasks available.

Edited May 26, 2014 by niektb

[Stan`]

Yeah because nearly all the animals will be cross mods .

[Radagast.]

Hiho Adrian,

yeah, cross mod, cross project, as cross as the engine funcionality (as long as proper no custom rig or skeleton is used (in the latter there is a workaround by defining a custom <skeleton>/bone mapping or 'targeting' to the standard skeleton bone hierarchy)).

Enrique is indeed the man to ask, plenty tutorials on topic 0AD art spread across the forum.

To follow the wolf animation process might give some insights.

Strannik is another talented + active animator around.

(I don't know if there is a list of tutorials grouped by category somewhere.)

The remaining active artists are:

2D := UI + texturing + all sort of other digital graphics

3D := modeling + UV unwrapping et alia

(please cry out if I forgot someone or forgot skills)

- LordGood (drawings, 2D, 3D),

- Pureon (2D, 3D)

- Mythos_Ruler (2D, 0 A.D. Project Leader)

- Lion (2D, 3D)

- Trinketos (3D, texturing)

- idanwin (3D, texturing)

- stanislas (3D, texturing, animation)

- niektb (primitives, texturing)

- Micket (3D, 2D)

- Ludo (3D, texturing)

- Le Druide Galois (drawings, 2D)

- Ayakashi (drawings, 2D)

- thamlett (2D),

- (more, web designers like Jeru, Mish et alia who could surely also create 2D art like icons and portraits)

Edited May 28, 2014 by Hephaestion

[niektb]

You can remove 3D from my name I never modeled a single models except a 4 poly counting bullet. (Guess what shape it had)

Edited May 26, 2014 by niektb

[Stan`]

You forgot yourself my german friend.

[RoekeloosNL]

You could join CoM. We need 3d artists and modelers.

I think its more important to help on the main game then mods since the game is far from finished.

Edited May 26, 2014 by RoekeloosNL

[Radagast.]

You can remove 3D from my name I never modeled a single models except a 4 poly counting bullet. (Guess what shape it had)

Though you fixed the Egyptian Civil center and other 3d models (including props) and thus are pretty much capable of plugging your thousands of cubes together to a giant viking ship.

I think its more important to help on the main game then mods since the game is far from finished.

True I'm afraid. And it must change in the next years. (I can't await it myself for 0AD to be completed.)

The Modders always recruit in the interest of the main efforts (as we did try to redirect applications from the Scion Development forum to the main team in this forum and in other places and was the case for Nantchev).

Finally if modders joined the main team, this would be ideal (it would lessen the stretch on Enrique who has to commit the work of several people from the forums).

You forgot yourself my german friend.

I'm not significant. I'm not happy with the overall situation. I'm deadlocked. I have to accelerate or our projects go watership down.

Edited May 26, 2014 by Hephaestion

[thamlett]

You also forgot my somewhat pathetic attempts at 2D art (including our first sig ), but it really doesn't matter. I agree that we have to accelerate though. We have sifted out most of the chaff, we just need to grind the wheat now.

[Radagast.]

Sorry, indeed that's not to neglect. Will add you. I'm sure I forgot more ... to my knowledge all web designers at least.

[niektb]

[...]

- niektb (cubes, texturing)

[...]

Hehe, it was a pyramid

[Radagast.]

Btw. on topic Animation: I mainly recall Rob Kimball:

- Exaggerate the animations as you want the human observer to see difference between animations which look similar but have subtle + important differences.

- "Starts and Stops – The animation must be played in cycles. The pose you start the animation with must look like the animation you finish with in your last frame (except for death animations). Your starting pose must also be the same or very close to the same across all your animation files. This is to ensure the transition from a standing, to a fidget, to a walk, or an attack will appear seamless."

- Try to pay attention to animation speed in relation to object's ingame movement (depends a bit on object size too), this is quite difficult and even as we can set the animation speed in the xml it easily happens that units float (i.e. the movement speed doesn't fit the animation and it looks awkward).

@niek: Pyramid or triangle? Pyramid is interesting .. never built something out of those, must be crazy work but more flexible lol.

[Enrique]

I am about to finish university in about 1 week and am able to contribute.

Capabilities include: animation, 3D Modelling and texturing, in that decreasing order of strength.

Essentially, what stuff can I get on with? Where is it and who are the important art people worth knowing?

I have found the animation pipeline, Art design style and the custom query pages.

Any other page(s) worth knowing about?

My portfolio is here

Adrian Nantchev

nantchev.com

Hello Nantchev, welcome!

Sorry for replying so late but I've been busy these last days.

I wanted to ask, when you say animation is your strength, do you refer also to rigging?

We have some modeled animals made by Micket that need rigging and animations:

- Rhino

- Oryx

- Cheetah

- Auroch

- Partridge

- Gorilla

The animations needed for each one are:

- Idles (two or three variations, the more the better)

- walk

- run

- attack (two or three variations, if applicable)

- death

I'll try to help you with whatever doubts you may have about the process of getting the animations in-game. However, I use Blender3D for everything so I cannot give you technical detail about other software if you use it, but someone may help you here in the forums.

The animations should loop (except death animation, obvious) and you'll have to create your own rig for best rig usage/animation. You can use IKs and other constraints since the animations need to be baked frame by frame in order to export them to .DAE format (but some constraints may not work properly when baked, depending on the 3D software)

Feel free to ask any questions and tell us which task you'd like to start.

Looking forward to your contributions!