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[Rose]

I feel those smoothed walls would look better as constructed walls.

[clinodev]

Soooo, are these final art for smoothed natural stone walls, which is what I understand them to be from context in the DevLog?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

https://bay12games.com/dwarves/imgs/walls_floors.png

Maybe they got accidentally switched with boulder or block constructed walls?

[Meph]

Those are constructed walls. ^^

[voliol]

Hey niiice.

Are the stairs/door material-based color-wise?

[clinodev]

I'm so glad to hear that!

Any chance of a pic of a smoothed natural stone section? A nice 3 tile "L" shaped pillar, maybe, to show inside and outside corners?

He clearly intended to show the smoothed case, right? 

[Toady One]

This is a more complicated question.  Back when I added constructed walls, the intent, and as I recollect, the prevailing sentiment, was allowing you to patch up holes in your walls without the fort looking like a patchwork.  I agree the smoothed picture will look better, but as I currently understand it, we shouldn't make constructed walls look different.  Unless opinions have changed.  Obviously an option would be best, but that's fiddly, and keeping the default the same way may avoid an outcry.

[clinodev]

Speaking for myself, I love the idea of rough constructed walls matching rough natural walls, and block walls matching smoothed stone walls (after all, mere humans manage it pretty well.)

I don't like these walls for smooth walls of either variety, though. The general consensus for tileset artists has been that smoothed natural walls are marble tile in a bank smooth, which is a good look in a fortress when you've put the dwarfpower into it.

Here's a Phoebus screenshot with rough, soil, and smoothed for an example.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[PatrikLundell]

Personally I'd like smoothed walls to look smooth, built walls from blocks to look smooth and bricked, built walls from raw stone to look bricked and rough, and raw walls to look rough. This would allow me to see what is what, and not try to designate built walls for mining, for instance. It can be noted that I'm not the color etc. matching type of player who might have different priorities.

However, I won't complain if the decision goes in another direction, as the artists will do a good job with whatever direction is taken, and, to refer to clinodev's post, I'm quite comfortable with Phoebus' take on it as well.

Edit: If it's sufficiently quick to implement, a switch either in the game or a tileset manipulation order to use different or the same tile for constructed and built walls might allow multiple parties to be satisfied.

[Warmist]

The new pictures look so good i might convert from ASCII. Very very nice!

[Vordak]

I see transition tiles between different types of floor, but do not see transition tiles between different material ramps.

[Uthimienure]

Personally I'd like smoothed walls to look smooth, built walls from blocks to look smooth and bricked, built walls from raw stone to look bricked and rough, and raw walls to look rough. This would allow me to see what is what, and not try to designate built walls for mining, for instance. It can be noted that I'm not the color etc. matching type of player who might have different priorities.

However, I won't complain if the decision goes in another direction, as the artists will do a good job with whatever direction is taken, and, to refer to clinodev's post, I'm quite comfortable with Phoebus' take on it as well.

Edit: If it's sufficiently quick to implement, a switch either in the game or a tileset manipulation order to use different or the same tile for constructed and built walls might allow multiple parties to be satisfied.

+1

... with my added thought for "built walls from raw stone to look bricked and rough" is this could use larger blocks rather than the usual brick look because they are built from squared-off or fitted boulder chunks rather than rectangular blocks, like a fieldstone wall in r/l.

[Thîkut Däselturel]

Love the details. Though I was wondering if it was an artistic decision to make the colours have a washed-out/desaturated appearance?

Without going into too much colour theory, I might recommend laying off the white and black values. Contrary to what might seem intuitive, adding white and black does not necessarily create brighter or darker colours but instead reduces the saturation. This can result in your colour palette becoming washed out and give a milky, faded look.

On colours, highlights and shadows:

• It's not wrong to add black to shadows, however shadows are seldom solely black and adding too much black can dull your image and drain it of vividness(if this is the look you are going for though, it can be done better by preferentially using 'cool' colours on the colour wheel). To create a contrast and the illusion of dark and light, you must come to grasp with what are commonly referred to as 'cool' and 'warm' colours on the colour wheel.

Above you can see several depictions of colour wheels divided between 'cool' and 'warm' colours. By separating highlights and shades between the two sections, we are able to create contrast without desaturating our colours. Depending on how you want the image to feel you can play around with what you want to be warm and cool. Usually the colour temperature of the light source determines the colour temperature of the shadows, e.g. cool light, warm shadows and vice versa.

Furthermore, I want to politely comment on the addition of white. In real life, white light does not change the saturation levels of the colour that it is hitting because of this, it is not necessary to add white in order to create a sense of brightness(though I could be wrong). To get something that really pops try to use as little white and black as possible, it should be no more than ten percent of the image. If you are looking to create a scene that looks moody, dark or realistic, you may be better off using either lots of cool browns or cool blues/purples/reds. White and black are good tools but are traps, and great adversaries to be tamed and used with vigilence, they can really make or break a colour palette!

Otherwise, fantastic work!

—Stux

[Mike Mayday]

Hello Thikut,
I'm wondering - are you talking about just the ramps (in which case there is a specific reason why they look like this and I'm going to discuss it) or are you saying all the sprites presented so far show this problem (in which case it appears I'm much worse about it than I thought)?

[Thîkut Däselturel]

Hey,

I hope my response wasn't too scathing. I studied at college for art and design/graphic design aswell but nobody took the time to tell me anything substantial about colour theory(I had to do some reading on it myself). It's reasonably complicated and the rabbit-hole goes deep so I wouldn't worry too much about it.

What I found to be most apparent was the grass tiles in particular, the highlights on it are perfect but I get the sense that the midtones are possibly suffering from too much desaturation perhaps due to adding too much white to the green.

[Mike Mayday]

I see! No, the response wasn't scathing at all to me, it was very valuable. I didn't study art (all I had was some basic drawing / painting / colour theory classes when studying architecture) but I'm very careful about paying attention to colour balance - to the best of my limited ability.
The current desaturated look of the grass was intentional on my side, anything more saturated than that (the original grass tile I created was A LOT more saturated) I found personally tiring, distracting and too strong.
So I try to do exactly what you described when creating individual creature / object etc. sprites, but I try to keep it muted for sprites that cover large areas.

I'm very interested in talking about it more, perhaps I'm doing something wrong and there's a way to achieve both goals at the same time.
In any case, once I get my hands on the actual game to experiment on the fly, I'm definitely going to work on this subject a lot more.