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[alcohol_dependent]

So I've returned from a DF hiatus. Currently I am between careers, I worked in TV for a while and have made the decision to become a 3D artist.

That means two things: I have a lot of time on my hands and I'm working on my portfolio. I deeply desire to play with all the fresh new DF features and hopefully turn the massive timesink that DF can be into an opportunity for ☼DF Art☼, complete with spikey embellishments.

In a nutshell I'll be designing a DF fort in DF, and then recreating it in some cool high res 3d in Z Brush and Max, but of course, I'll need your help.

What sort of fort/area should I embark on? What will make for the most fantastic environment and thus the best portfolio fodder? Which dwarves should be immortalized? Who will make the major decisions of this fort for me?! That's right, we're doing this coliseum style.

I need the dwarfy concepts that only a dynamic game of DF can provide.  I also want to play with the new features and I don't know anything about them. What do you say, fellows? Where and how should I dig the dungeon?

At the end of the fort, I'll strive to depict the fort's history through the fortress death mask in 3D stills -- which should be easy considering the dwarves capacity for epic posthumous storytelling. During the life of the fort I'll keep everyone updated on any interesting progressions and ask for advice at whatever crossroads the community can "help" with..

With that said, I'll start looking around at embarks tonight. If anyone comes up with any good ideas for an embark/game, then I'm all ears, otherwise I'll pick something suitably epic and begin. Thinking no less than an amazing fortress built around/beneath/inside a major river.

[Girlinhat]

Something above-ground.  Underground forts are convenient, but not much to look at.  My "Skystones" idea would fit nicely, if only a new version hadn't come out and I was too lazy to restart it.

[wierd]

(Looks both ways...)

I sometimes use my expensive catia CAD/CAM seat at work to mock up fortresses...  I've also used it to make various nurbs surface based art assets. I converted one of the higher resolution ones into a blender file and upped it to opengameart.org some time ago...  (its my attempt at a reasonably faithful recreation of a certain disney wardrobe from a certain movie, sans all the carvings. I have a version with the carvings I made for a friend, but due to disney's vampire lawyers, I don't share it. I want to avoid that particular ambush.)

My software is made for designing airplanes, not furniture though... so it lacks some of the more artsy features of nurbs based art sofware, like maya. (The shell iges exports come into maya just fine though.)

Sorry to hijack your thread like that... but I was wondering if you were really sure about creating a 3d render of a df fortress... given the large voxels it would use. (Would end up looking like a capture from minecraft without lots of artistic license.) Not to mention the large numbers of actor and furniture models to properly populate the scene.

I spent 6 mo alone on the highres wardrobe.  Doing this as a oneman show and trying to look suave is not going to be an easy feat.

[Girlinhat]

I think the final recreation wouldn't be a 1:1 model, because you can already get that done in Overseer pretty much.  What he'd be doing was taking the layout and approximate lengths and sizes, and building something artistic off that.  Less blocky.  While you might do a circle in cubes, he'd do an actual circle.

At least that's how I took it.

[wierd]

He's still gonna need trees, dwarves, axes, swords, armors, elves, camels, etc....

The need for actors in the scene are what I was getting at. 

(Eg, here is the "I took 6 mo to make it" wardrobe actor.)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

high polygon wardrobe

A good scene needs good objects, and good objects take care and time.

[rtg593]

My current embark is over a 26-tile wide major river, with 2 rivers flowing into it, one with a 17 z-level waterfall, the other with a 14 z-level waterfall. I uploaded the initial embark save, it has flying lungfish all over the place, but it is also a FPS nightmare, lol. Need a really good computer to run this, I don't got it:p Damming all 3 rivers to improve things.

That being said, it might be epic enough for your purposes, 17 z-level deep canyon over a major river? :p

http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=5805 if you want to check it out.

[Girlinhat]

Well, depends on how fancy he's going.  Overseer renders trees as a brown cone with several upside-down green cones.  The details can be as exacting or as "heavy brush stroke" as desired.

[wierd]

In art communities, the rules for your portfolio are:

Pick the 5 very best projects you have ever worked on.  Toss out 3 of them.

Do this for every 5 years of work.


You keep only the "OMG, that is effin crazy awesome!" Stuff in your portfolio.


*edit

I don't mean to be a pessimist, or to discourage.  I only want the OP to be sure of what he/she is doing if she is building a portfolio for serious work.  I only make models for a hobby, and there is a reason for that. Art is very cuthroat.

[Girlinhat]

Ah, well yeah.  If this is a portfolio, then that would require a lot of work.

[alcohol_dependent]

Something above-ground.  Underground forts are convenient, but not much to look at.  My "Skystones" idea would fit nicely, if only a new version hadn't come out and I was too lazy to restart it.

An underground fortress could still be awesome. In fact, they are highly awesome. Just think of the darkness -- then.. a hall, lined with massive pillars, an army of 10 foot statues of armored dwarves bearing torches, immortalized in stone and illuminating a lone, forboding rock throne that reaches up toward the full height of the towering cavern ceiling above.

The skyline won't be the selling point, more the narration of the dwarf fort events through a few potent illustrations.

I spent 6 mo alone on the highres wardrobe.  Doing this as a oneman show and trying to look suave is not going to be an easy feat.

Don't know why that wardrobe took so long to make.. also don't know anything about your software? But it would only take a few minutes for me to make that wardrobe or something with a similar level of definition in max. If you're interested in doing any kind of artistic modeling, check out some new software! It sounds like yours is made for very precisely defining measurements and that sort of thing. If you just need visuals you can make and render something like that very very quickly. I can show you how if you're interested.

I think the final recreation wouldn't be a 1:1 model, because you can already get that done in Overseer pretty much.  What he'd be doing was taking the layout and approximate lengths and sizes, and building something artistic off that.  Less blocky.  While you might do a circle in cubes, he'd do an actual circle.

At least that's how I took it.

Yeah, its going to look legitimate. I mean much more than blocks and circles. Am shooting for Blizzard promo CG quality and that sort of thing since that's what I'll need to be putting out to be competitive.

17 z-level deep canyon over a major river? :p

http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=5805 if you want to check it out.

Checking now..


edit: Ack, gunna stick to the latest release. Do want something like that though.

[wierd]

The time was for the carvings. (Which are not in that one. That took about 2 days to that point. The 6mo version is not for sharing, but has the lion head standards, and the bas-relief carvings done freehanded.)

Catia is made for precision measurements. Yes.  (Not artwork.)  The nurbs model for the "with carvings" is somewhere around 60mb. it was never made into a poly mesh.

(Also, made with stolen time on the 25k seat at work. I have to do actual work for my employer too. )

I do models as a hobby. My software is not made for it, and I stick with the engineering software because it makes me crazy good at doing off the wall stuff with it, which is good for an engineer to be able to do.

(My software would let me build a gun model all the way down to screws and springs, for instance.)

Again, just for fun.  I don't do models for money. My engineering paycheck is easier, and less cuthroat. I left IT for engineering for the same reason. I don't want ulcers when I am old.

I just wanted to make sure you weren't being starry-eyed, and naive, and were going into this with eyes open, and a can-do attitude, because you'll need it.

That's all.

[rtg593]

The latest bugfixes didn't break savegames, they just corrected something with necromancers and eyelids, I believe, neither of which I've had any trouble with in this world. I just haven't updated the exe yet:p So it should still work fine, if you decide you like it.


EDIT: Since the updates were bugfixes, I imagine the worldgen seeds would still work? If so, you could just gen the world in the newest version without worrying about manually fixing the eyelid message error thing manually:p

Justa thought.

[alcohol_dependent]

The latest bugfixes didn't break savegames, they just corrected something with necromancers and eyelids, I believe, neither of which I've had any trouble with in this world. I just haven't updated the exe yet:p So it should still work fine, if you decide you like it.


EDIT: Since the updates were bugfixes, I imagine the worldgen seeds would still work? If so, you could just gen the world in the newest version without worrying about manually fixing the eyelid message error thing manually:p

Justa thought.

I just got a great embark with hematite and flux everywhere, untamed wilds, a river meets a major river. Cliffs nearby are 15zs tall. Give me your seed and I'll check your embark!

[rtg593]

This is the seed for the one you looked at:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Created in DF v0.34.03.

[WORLD_GEN]
   [TITLE:CREATE WORLD NOW = 5355555]
   [SEED:ftEGReO2c8bj5vvnx2pG]
   [HISTORY_SEED:vSsr22j2MdROfy5UNHdc]
   [NAME_SEED:brINH01PTSH2Up95rvV6]
   [CREATURE_SEED:qH2AeeQkq0SFkHqqIBNG]
   [DIM:257:257]
   [EMBARK_POINTS:1274]
   [END_YEAR:250]
   [BEAST_END_YEAR:250:-1]
   [REVEAL_ALL_HISTORY:1]
   [CULL_HISTORICAL_FIGURES:0]
   [ELEVATION:1:400:1600:1600]
   [RAINFALL:0:100:400:400]
   [TEMPERATURE:25:75:400:400]
   [DRAINAGE:0:100:400:400]
   [VOLCANISM:0:100:400:400]
   [SAVAGERY:0:100:400:400]
   [ELEVATION_FREQUENCY:1:1:1:1:1:1]
   [RAIN_FREQUENCY:1:1:1:1:1:1]
   [DRAINAGE_FREQUENCY:1:1:1:1:1:1]
   [TEMPERATURE_FREQUENCY:1:1:1:1:1:1]
   [SAVAGERY_FREQUENCY:3:1:2:3:4:5]
   [VOLCANISM_FREQUENCY:1:1:1:1:1:1]
   [MINERAL_SCARCITY:100]
   [MEGABEAST_CAP:150]
   [SEMIMEGABEAST_CAP:300]
   [TITAN_NUMBER:66]
   [TITAN_ATTACK_TRIGGER:80:0:100000]
   [DEMON_NUMBER:52]
   [NIGHT_TROLL_NUMBER:26]
   [BOGEYMAN_NUMBER:26]
   [VAMPIRE_NUMBER:26]
   [WEREBEAST_NUMBER:26]
   [SECRET_NUMBER:52]
   [REGIONAL_INTERACTION_NUMBER:52]
   [DISTURBANCE_INTERACTION_NUMBER:52]
   [EVIL_CLOUD_NUMBER:26]
   [EVIL_RAIN_NUMBER:26]
   [GOOD_SQ_COUNTS:24:244:0]
   [EVIL_SQ_COUNTS:24:244:0]
   [PEAK_NUMBER_MIN:12]
   [PARTIAL_OCEAN_EDGE_MIN:0]
   [COMPLETE_OCEAN_EDGE_MIN:4]
   [VOLCANO_MIN:4]
   [REGION_COUNTS:SWAMP:252:1:1]
   [REGION_COUNTS:DESERT:252:1:1]
   [REGION_COUNTS:FOREST:1008:3:2]
   [REGION_COUNTS:MOUNTAINS:2016:2:2]
   [REGION_COUNTS:OCEAN:2016:1:1]
   [REGION_COUNTS:GLACIER:63:0:0]
   [REGION_COUNTS:TUNDRA:126:0:0]
   [REGION_COUNTS:GRASSLAND:2016:3:2]
   [REGION_COUNTS:HILLS:2016:3:2]
   [EROSION_CYCLE_COUNT:250]
   [RIVER_MINS:100:100]
   [PERIODICALLY_ERODE_EXTREMES:1]
   [OROGRAPHIC_PRECIPITATION:1]
   [SUBREGION_MAX:3500]
   [CAVERN_LAYER_COUNT:3]
   [CAVERN_LAYER_OPENNESS_MIN:0]
   [CAVERN_LAYER_OPENNESS_MAX:100]
   [CAVERN_LAYER_PASSAGE_DENSITY_MIN:0]
   [CAVERN_LAYER_PASSAGE_DENSITY_MAX:100]
   [CAVERN_LAYER_WATER_MIN:0]
   [CAVERN_LAYER_WATER_MAX:100]
   [HAVE_BOTTOM_LAYER_1:1]
   [HAVE_BOTTOM_LAYER_2:1]
   [LEVELS_ABOVE_GROUND:15]
   [LEVELS_ABOVE_LAYER_1:5]
   [LEVELS_ABOVE_LAYER_2:1]
   [LEVELS_ABOVE_LAYER_3:1]
   [LEVELS_ABOVE_LAYER_4:1]
   [LEVELS_ABOVE_LAYER_5:2]
   [LEVELS_AT_BOTTOM:1]
   [CAVE_MIN_SIZE:5]
   [CAVE_MAX_SIZE:25]
   [MOUNTAIN_CAVE_MIN:80]
   [NON_MOUNTAIN_CAVE_MIN:120]
   [ALL_CAVES_VISIBLE:0]
   [SHOW_EMBARK_TUNNEL:2]
   [TOTAL_CIV_NUMBER:160]
   [TOTAL_CIV_POPULATION:15000]
   [SITE_CAP:2000]
   [PLAYABLE_CIVILIZATION_REQUIRED:1]
   [ELEVATION_RANGES:33000:4032:2016]
   [RAIN_RANGES:2016:4032:2016]
   [DRAINAGE_RANGES:2016:4032:2016]
   [SAVAGERY_RANGES:0:8256:16512]
   [VOLCANISM_RANGES:2016:4032:2016]

And here's the embark site:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Like I said, since they were just bugfixes, I think the seed should work for the newest version. Guess there's one way to find out:p

EDIT: For the life of me, I couldn't get a screencap with the flashing X, lol. So I updated the image, drew my own ;-) Nevermind, got it:p

[Kofthefens]

I have an interesting embark, uploading as I write. It is a haunted lake, with Untamed Wilds surrounding it. I can just imagine horrid, Lovecraftian creatures rising from the depths to put an end to all that dares invade its abode.

EDIT:
here it is: http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=5832