===[TASK]=== Roma Helmets

[wackyserious]

@Alexandermb This could help you visualize the cuirass. Not the perfect fit but the cuirass shows the shape and boundaries of the m_armor mesh.

[Lion.Kanzen]

Can you upload here to explore from the forum it self.

https://sketchfab.com/

[Alexandermb]

Attic:



Montefortino:

Edited June 17, 2018 by Alexandermb

[Stan`]

You you can add transparency, by using the transparent texture as a mask in the options ?

[Lion.Kanzen]

with this I can do hero helmets because I can change the perspective

[wackyserious]

For review: Plumed variants for Montefortino

@LordGood @Stan`

helmet-extraordinarii.rar

[Lion.Kanzen]

Attic Helmet.

Edited July 24, 2019 by Lion.Kanzen

[Alexandermb]

For helmets @wowgetoffyourcellphone this may be suittable for your mod i belive thought none of the helmets were made having this one in mind before.

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[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

29 minutes ago, Alexandermb said:

For helmets @wowgetoffyourcellphone this may be suittable for your mod i belive thought none of the helmets were made having this one in mind before.

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Would be a neat upgrade for the Praetorians or something. Cavalry Masks is already a tech for the Imperial Romans. Could be one for the Sassanids too.  

[Alexandermb]

Just now, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Would be a neat upgrade for the Praetorians or something. Cavalry Masks is already a tech for the Imperial Romans. Could be one for the Sassanids too.  

Do they have an special helmet i could do for them for attach the mask properly?

 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

17 minutes ago, Alexandermb said:

Do they have an special helmet i could do for them for attach the mask properly?

 

Edited August 25, 2019 by wowgetoffyourcellphone

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

[Alexandermb]

Baked a whole new gallic type B H F helmets, working with the mask:

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Helmets:

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This is the old one ive did before:

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[Alexandermb]

And type I (same type H but bronze as reference is pretty much similar)

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[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Please minimize the noise aspect of the textures. That is the major problem with the new shield textures. Otherwise I am all for more Imperial Roman helmets. Look up some others, like the Imperial Italic.

[Alexandermb]

6 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Please minimize the noise aspect of the textures. That is the major problem with the new shield textures. Otherwise I am all for more Imperial Roman helmets. Look up some others, like the Imperial Italic.

The texture don't have noise this time (only in the ear zone wich is mostly because of the bake itself not by me) every texture is 1024 and with default bake, the gray zones are the material itself wich is supposed to be like that, otherwise the bake will look dull and pretty much ugly.

The texture won't need the material if we could use something like skyrim does with cubemaps or reflections. The reflection will override most of the texture and will look pretty much polished and brilliant, and the gray (dirt) zone will give the effect of material (otherwise will look like glass).

In other words if i remove "noise" helmet will look Pure white, already gone throught that.

[Alexandermb]

Cubemaps in skyrim: add faked reflections to the object and gives a polished look like mixing very well with dirtier textures for don't make it look like a glass.

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Having that in 0.A.D. as a 4th texture would give to the bronze, Silver, Iron, Gold and every metal surface you imagine Aspis, Helmets, Chamfrons, Armors the shiny effect wich overrides the texture.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

2 minutes ago, Alexandermb said:

Cubemaps in skyrim: add faked reflections to the object and gives a polished look like mixing very well with dirtier textures for don't make it look like a glass.

  Hide contents

Having that in 0.A.D. as a 4th texture would give to the bronze, Silver, Iron, Gold and every metal surface you imagine Aspis, Helmets, Chamfrons, Armors the shiny effect wich overrides the texture.

Cool and all, but does an RTS need this? Serious question. 

[Alexandermb]

24 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Cool and all, but does an RTS need this? Serious question. 

Following that logic why would i've update horses, ships, helmets and any asset if we already had them? we are an RTS we already had the assets we just need to focus on performance but im not a programmer.

So let just sit on the "throne" and let other RTS go above 0.A.D. The king AoE 2 DE is coming wich will take out some of the community surely but probably will return later when they get bored of the same formula over and over. Warcraft 3 Reforged will take also another piece of the community but this one is bigger since this have a bigger community and also modders.

Really don't know why always reach the same question or the same spot of "Why would we need this? we are just an RTS for low end pcs" when there are tons of games with art ready assets and finished with proper mechanichs with their unique features, "People don't zoom often" People do zoom often if they have a reason to, just like every1 does in Total War saga, their assets, their units, their animations, their models, their real scale size buildings and siege artillery, their stunishing "dirty" assets:

Since i have my own thoughts in my country i wondered "Why i would be satisfied with this when it could be better?" the real question is; Why would i stop here with this when it could be way better? Why stop the assets just with 512 textures if we could have an option to toggle texture quality from 128 to 2048 even if we are just an RTS.

if it doesnt add a huge performance impact and if we could have an option to disable it, then why not add it? The game should focus on both communities, Low End and High End even when most of the community is low end.

Spoiler

If i would have feel satisfied with the game in the current state, cavalry would still be the first meshes, helmets would still be the same, shields would be the same 128x128 blurried whitout details and just a paint over because that was the objective in those days.

Don't get this as a rude answer, but thats my feeling as an artist whitout proper resources to work with, and as a player wich looks to the future of the game bored of playing a game over and over and over with the same formula, looking for something i could modify not only to satisfy my needs but also the ones of the community if possible.

If i had a better pc or if my country would be in a better state i've probably will be playing Monster Hunter World, Assassins Creed Odisey, Final Fantasy XV, Bloodborne, Dark souls 3, Phantom Pain (Again) Resident Evil 2, Biohazard, The Evil Within 2, Rome total War 2 (Yes i can't play this) Total Warhammer 2, Total War Attila properly. i would spent my free time playing another huge game because this one doesn't really tie me at this stage. i've barely play and spent most of the time looking what i can improve from the art assets until others can fix the performance, until others implement a more realistic and immersive perspective of the game for play, maybe the city like mods being developed or the survival mod angen worked before, but at this moment i would spent my time playing AoE 2 DE if i wouldn't like mod the game.


But again, this isn't a rude answer, this is just my feeling each time i've read "why would we need this if we are just an RTS?"

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Well, the horses and other improvements are working within the graphics engine that exists now. Making prop textures extra noisy in anticipation of a graphics feature that may or may not come, well, that's something different yes? 512x512 shield textures are unnecessary right? There's no moment in any standard match where a shield will take up a fifth of the screen yeah? So, there are times where you do have to ask if some things are necessary or not. And just because I question the need for a pet graphics feature you want doesn't mean I question all of the other awesome stuff you do.

[Alexandermb]

24 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Well, the horses and other improvements are working within the graphics engine that exists now. Making prop textures extra noisy in anticipation of a graphics feature that may or may not come, well, that's something different yes? 512x512 shield textures are unnecessary right? There's no moment in any standard match where a shield will take up a fifth of the screen yeah? So, there are times where you do have to ask if some things are necessary or not. And just because I question the need for a pet graphics feature you want doesn't mean I question all of the other awesome stuff you do.

Again, the "noise" is the procedural material of metal i've use for bake the "metal" like textures, because baking whitout any noise at all will look just like a plain plastic texture not in preparation of a feature "i want" i've already seen the whole bake, because i don't just do the firtst bake i see, i do several bakes looking wich one doesn't look dull and blurry.

Before the textures being 128 doesn't even have any detail and no one could say if a helmet had bronze rivots or if it was just a cap:

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A shield i can't really say what im looking with this, unless i have the proper knowledge of what is behind and aspis or how it looks and aspis handgrip

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I can't really tell if the right side shields are a shield or just a bread slice if they wouldn't have the theban club painted:

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Here they are at a "gameplay" distance, don't see the noise from here

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But here, in the left side shield i can see the whole "noise"  with that outdated texture wich didn't have any detail in mind besides the pattern and the player color plus the way too low resolution for an asset in this time, while back in those days it was "standard".

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having the shield in 512 was just a mistake of mine because props should be 256, thats the amount of files i've handle every time wich i don't always remember wich ones were resized or if they would have been resized, but that doesn't mean having 512 texture for assets is bad just because they won't be seen in "gameplay" perspective.

Minerals aren't just a shiny glassy looking material whitout imperfections in fact imperfections make the texture have the realism:

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Perfectly handle dand polished materials aren't accurate, they are just hollywood look. a helmet used in battle would be dirtier and filled with scratches same goes to aspis, same goes to greaves, they would have mud, dirt, dust, scratches, creases, blunts. wish i had a perfect material with all those details mixed but that require me to work for weeks in a material with a proper computer where i could preview the material every second and not every 2 hours.

And yes, for a new player lover of art, andwich properly appreciate the assets of any games they will be like: "Oh let me pause the game for a second to Appreciate this Helmet, This Horse, this Tree, this Sword, this Sheath, this Bodie Texture" otherwise there wouldn't be modders at all like the ones in the skyrim community wich turned the game 1000000 times better than the actual developers, because they had vision, and they wanted to improve with their vision the artistical assets because they took the time to stop and look a prop and think: Mmmh this could be better if i do something. 

Same would happen to 0.A.D. maybe not tomorrow, maybe not today. But maybe after alpha 24 release wich have the greatest art improvements from flora to props, Maybe this will call the attention of a new artist or a new dev saying "im interesting on how it is looking this game, i will take a closer look"


As an artist i consider what is best graphical speaking for the game, because the community of player will accept what is given and if not, feedback will be taken into account and will prob do something about.

This is like a restaurant, if someone would ask something new, they wouldn't give the same dish from any other restaurant, they will give the best they can. Same goes to 0.A.D. if the oportunity of giving the best graphic is given why would be refused just because 1 player is used to look the game as it always gonna have the same look?

Thinking "it works now" is giving up on "it could work better", same case would be if the game is finished with pathfinder with 0 lag and devs think, this is it, this is done, no more work will be done from this point. What about Navmesh? What about implementing physics to walls and capes? What about adding ship boarding?

But as my point of view, giving an alpha with lets use an example "ray traicing" gives a good impact, why it would care the opinion of 1-10 players against 1000?. Same case applies to reflections on helmets and shields, same goes to instancing.

If some dev wishes to implement it even as a toggleable option, and it gives a good impact would i ask ? Nah, the game works now, why i would implement that if the game works just like this.

Games works perfectly whitout antialias, but someday a guy wished to implement it and was working on it and now its gone i belive. Would i say Nah, its really needed in an RTS Game when i played AoE 2 and Empire Earth i didn't had Antialias and never enabled it because my pc wasn't good enough, why should the game and the community would want Antialias because i don't want it.

Maybe one day, standard resolution for games would be even for low end pcs 1024p and we will end having with outdated textures again.

[Alexandermb]

This is an example of a fake material from blender:

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It looks perfect right? Well, baking whit that will gave me just a pure white paint bake instead of a "metal" like bake. Baking with reflections give the fake look of metal in blender but applied to the game where there isn't any reflection becomes a dull paint brush over a helmet pretty much ugly and useless.

Thats how tricky is to bake textures of metal surfaces.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Okay.  

[LordGood]

What I've seen other games do is keep the noise baked into a single map, there is no noise bake on the base texture or normals, but in specular to give it varying shinyness  for an ever so slight dirty texture

I've been wanting to give this  a try for a while, though helmets and shields are probably the best candidates to test this out on

[Sundiata]

@Alexandermb I really love the work you do! But I guess you know that by now. Maybe it doesn't get said enough, but you art contributions all look fantastic, and I love to come to the forum and see what you're up to this time. I'm one of those people who zooms in a lot. A lot! In single player I remove the camera restrictions almost by default, and love to bring the camera down to a really low angle every once in a while to "see things from my soldiers' perspective". I've been doing this for years before ever even joining the forums. I've noticed friends of mine zooming in like that to appreciate the art up close as well. We notice details a lot, and love them. The more the better, lol... 

I also agree that it's good practice to make new art assets of the highest quality, even if they're not immediately useful or need to be downscaled for their final inclusion in the game. I think it's obviously a bad idea to constantly be playing catch up with bigger titles... 

Currently there are issues on the game-engine side, which limit the productivity and effectiveness of the art contributions. Artists should make the best art they can, and game engine needs to be updated to implement industry standard functionalities like anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, instancing and LOD systems (aren't there dynamic LOD systems that don't require any new modeling work?). Aside from all the other stuff that needs to be done to bring the performance up to scratch, like pathfinder improvements, moving as much as makes sense to C++... if I understand correctly there was even some GUI stuff that causes lag...  

I think asking artists to make sub-standard models or textures, because the engine can't handle what is considered low-poly by most other engines is not so good. (20.000 poly's is considered low-poly, pretty much everywhere these days). I don't think anybody still uses 256x256 textures anymore, so having 512x512 or even higher variants on hand for when the engine gets on point is a good idea. We shouldn't be thinking about what looks acceptable today, but ask will it still look acceptable 2 or 3 years from now. The game is still in alpha, and if it gets released with models and textures from the previous decade, it's going to look like a game from the previous decade. We need to think ahead about these things... The same person that's complaining about not being able to run this game on a 10 year old potato is eventually going to buy a new computer, and ditch 0AD in a heartbeat because it looks so outdated compared to all the other games he can now run on his system.