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I consider it an essential part of Dwaf Fortress, and can't play without it.

119 (18.4%)

I use it for pretty screenshots, but otherwise don't use it during play.

211 (32.7%)

I only try it occasionally.

174 (27%)

I have no idea why I'm even in this thread, I don't use it.

141 (21.9%)

Total Members Voted: 642

[chrisadams3997]

Pretty Picture Time

Spoiler: Standard Zoom (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: A Little Closer (click to show/hide)

You might have noticed I've still got one more tiling issue to squash on the N/S diagonals, and I haven't handled the less common ramp configuarations yet, then I'm going to revisit the walls and floors using the same lighting and approach as I used for the ramps and make it all mesh together.

[buckets]

Why are all the sprites being remade in blender?

[Lord Inquisitor]

approving of blender usage

[Isher]

Why are all the sprites being remade in blender?

The price of 3dsmax is mentioned as a factor a page or two back.

[chrisadams3997]

Why are all the sprites being remade in blender?

Why not? 

But seriously, if you mean as opposed to pixel art, we already have that pretty well covered.  Personally, I kinda like the more photorealistic effect you can get modelling and I can take advantage of higher resolution sprites, which 3D modeling is quite conducive to producing.

For many people, they may prefer the pixel art, or their computers may not be well suited to handling the larger images, but the smaller resolution sprites aren't going anywhere.

Now, if you mean the program itself as opposed to another, as someone who's used 3dsMax a good bit in the past and just started learning blender, I'm amazed by it's capabilities for a free program, and in many respects it's more intuitive to use.  I'm liking it.  Still got a lot to learn though.

[Caldfir]

Regarding the streams, that, right there, is what we in the industry call a bug.

I actually did some poking around a while back and all it is is that dfhack can now read the brook tiles a little more effectively, and stonesense just doesn't have any art for them.  Essentially all that needs to be done is to specify a tile for them to use (blank tile?).  Same thing with all the new river ramps.  It is simple enough to probe in stonesense to find the tiletype codes, but I haven't bothered doing anything about it on account of all the spritework going on of late. 

That and I'm being lazy.

<caldfir beaches himself like a whale on the couch>

[buckets]

Why are all the sprites being remade in blender?

Why not? 

But seriously, if you mean as opposed to pixel art, we already have that pretty well covered.  Personally, I kinda like the more photorealistic effect you can get modelling and I can take advantage of higher resolution sprites, which 3D modeling is quite conducive to producing.

For many people, they may prefer the pixel art, or their computers may not be well suited to handling the larger images, but the smaller resolution sprites aren't going anywhere.

Now, if you mean the program itself as opposed to another, as someone who's used 3dsMax a good bit in the past and just started learning blender, I'm amazed by it's capabilities for a free program, and in many respects it's more intuitive to use.  I'm liking it.  Still got a lot to learn though.

Well yeah, I was more worried about what was wrong with the pixel art sprites but if this is just an alternative that's all good.

I've never realy used blender so I can't form an opinion of it. I've even heard of a few studios using it to create the odd movie with though, so that's certainly something.

[chrisadams3997]

Alright, after entirely too much work for just one tile, I've finally finished reworking the rough rock walls to something I like:



Besides just getting the shadows and 'texture' of the walls just right and making them tile well, I decided I really wanted to try to capture the essence of the larger rock pattern of the traditional stonesense walls, so -after much trial and error- I built such a texture into the top of the walls.  Next I've got to make the floors match the new walls (which will be much easier).  From further zooms:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Solifuge]

There's definitely something to be said for symbolic rendering, as opposed to focusing purely on realism.

Bolder lines might keep it readable at low-zoom, but otherwise they look nice!

[Rose]

Since we're making rendered items, I feel I should share a little tutorial for making shadowed objects.

The easy and fast way of getting a sprite is just to render something in space and save the render with alpha, resulting in this:

I chose a glass mug for this demonstration for hardmode.

This looks fine, but there's no shadows, and quite often, you end up with a black fringe around it, though it's not visible here cus firefox is smarter about that than stonesense is.

To fix this, there's a way of rendering the sprite that takes a little more work, but, provided you aren't using a shitty renderer like I am, gives better results.

First thing we do is slap a floor under our object. bitches love floors. Then, we make three renders, one normal, one with the object having a matte black material applied, and one with the object hidden.

If your object is transparent, you want to make the matte black material to have the same transparency.

Now is the fun part. First, we will get a mask of the object and it's shadow.

Take the black object, and the empty render, put them on two layers, with the empty on top, and set to divide blend mode, if you have it. If you don't, then this tutorial is not for you. You should get a mask, that looks like so.


Keep this somewhere.

Next, we take the black layer, stick it on top of the normal layer, and set the blending mode to subtract. You should get the object and shadow against a black background.



Now, we take said image, and put an inverted version of the mask image on top of it, set to divide again. This will result in the following lsd trip.



Now it's just a matter of applying the mask onto this image to get the final sprite.



Hope this helps.

[chrisadams3997]

Nice tutorial and very cool approach, I'd actually avoid shadows myself however for one primary reason;  many objects don't have enough room on the tile to fit one in there, and it would be very, um, inconvenient, for half the items to have shadows and half not to.

[Rose]

Well, all the creatures already have shadows, soo...

[chrisadams3997]

My point was simply that for an object, let's say, a table, that takes up most of the tile, only part of the shadow would fit in the space for the sprite.  Creature shadows don't quite follow the same rules, they aren't part of the sprite and just 'float' underneath it.  Not trying to be argumentative, just pointing out the problem we'd run into.

[Rose]

yeah, it would be a bit of work for things like tables... hm..

[guitarxe]

I've heard of some kind of large address aware "patch" for DF floating around. What effect would that have on SS and the out of memory issue with the CTRL+F5?

Here's the original thread for that.

So then... yes? It should solve the issue? Except that people would have to have the .exe "patched" for it to work.

Japa, Do you think you could allow CTRL+F5 again, but make some kind of warning first or something that it might crash if runs out of memory?