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digiartst -> RE: Better Graphics (4/24/2012 7:43:51 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: The Gray Mouser
quote:
ORIGINAL: Jason Petho
I have seen mention of enhancing the graphics for the Campaign Series.
This leads to some question:
1. What kind of graphics are you wanting, exactly -- provide images, if possible.
2. Is it the map graphics? The unit graphics? Or both?
3. How does using a higher bit system help?
Thank you for the answers.
Jason Petho
I personally think the 3d terrain is great. Similarly I think 90% of the vehicle graphics are all I need in a wargame. The weak link graphic wise for me are the infantry units which seam, hmm..... fuzzy??, dis-proportionate to the vehicles??, lacking in clarity?? ( and especially hard to see with bases off.) I might be wrong but I often found myself reading the original Talonsoft paper manuals on the porceline throne, and I recall that maybe the vehicle graphics were actually images based off actual painted miniatures? If this the case and the infantry units were hand made , then I can understand why they have completely different looks... IMHO if the infantry graphics could be leveled up to the detail of the tanks etc that would be a huge eye candy bonus.
Gentlemen: I was a part of the old Talonsoft graphics team for East Front 2 and West Front. I was not paid staff but a fan. I became a part of the team based on all the graphics mods I did.
To answer your questions, Talonsoft used GHQ Miniatures primed and took photos of them on white lit for no shadow, the miniature was on a small turntable with marks to line up the 6 angles needed for the vehicle.
With East Front 2 they did not have alot of miniatures of the poles or hungarians to call upon . Charlie Uncliss from Talonsoft asked me if I could build the vehicles they needed from line drawing they would provide for me, I built almost all the Romanian units and many of the Polish and Italian trucks and guns that had no miniature representation. also the 6 rad german scout car and one of the other 4 wheel scout cars, basically anything they did not have a miniature for. The reproduction of the rulebook leaves off alot of the old credits or you would see my special thanks credit in the back of the manual.
When I first got East Front the German units were all desert color, so my first mod was to make the units Grey with mud,these are the standard units you see in the Game now. Basically in photoshop I retinted the units grey and pulled keys to only make the brown paint turn grey. I also made snow, and Western Front Camo units, but back in those days you had to manually load the different graphics because they did not write the progam to change the art by Season untill West front came along.
I only did the vehicles so I do not know how the did the terrain. but I was turning out 1 vehicle in 3d a night and I did about 40 vehicles in total ,when I did the camo I chose the big vehicles that the camo would show on the most, that took awhile to digitally paint all the camo schemes so that was the slowest, to turn the brow to grey was the fastest, do a magic wand on the brown and desaturate it , any brown edges left over looked like mud or dirt so that was Ok. To increase the graphic quality would be to increase resolution of the various art pieces, but there are thousands of pieces, now granded the pieces seem to hold up fairly well to a 200% blowup in photoshop then some retouching to bring the blurryness back into sharp but still we are talking about thousands of assets. Would I love to see it you bet.
Could the game engine handle a double the resolution type revamp or would its centers be off and new code have to be written to support the new graphics? That I do not know.
I do know the Mr Rose and the Talonsoft team were a great team to work with, and have to me turned out the best graphics for this level of wargame still to this day. I am also so happy Matrix got this game and have done what they have done so far to improve it.
Here is an example of the tiger tank graphic up-rezed to double resolution. I then adjusted the various values contrast,whites and blacks and got the tiger detail back. Could I get it sharper sure I could with additional reworking in photoshop.
[image]http://i135.photobucket.com/albums/q134/Longhornn/up00088.jpg[/image]
The up resed infanrty would give you more to work with , I remember experimenting with waffen SS Camo for the infantry and just not having enough resolution to make it look good, but again the infantry you see in the game came from miniature figures ,sprayed with primer then digitally painted. To get the scale right as some people have wanted which is the infantry in correct size to the vehicles or towns,and still have great detail when zoomed into,it would mean the vehicles would have to be triple res at least. which would mean a simple up-rez would fall apart in detail and have to be replaced by new vehicle artwork from scratch or if Matrix was lucky and was given the high res photos that were taken of the original miniatures ,matrix could digitally paint on the high res pictures making a highly detailed piece of artwork.
I do not see Matrix investing into that so for me I just enjoy the amazing artwork that took at least a year to make by a team of very talented artists.
I hope this kinda sheds a light on how Talonsoft did the original artwork
Digiartst
Formally known as Jager56 for Talonsoft
and part of the Beta Brigade
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