Big response time!
Okay, bigger post time!
First a giant disclaimer: I don't know a thing about art or artists
I'm realizing I need to highlight that more as otherwise I'll totally miss stuff and end up making somebody feel bad or something
Don't worry to much about that. I, at least, understand, and think you brought up some good points here.
I really like both dwarves posted so far, and especially would like to see how the first one would look textured.
Having two of them does bring up a tricky point tho: How do we collaborate and make choices in the artist space?
[Bold mine]
Boy do I hear you. That may be about to become a large issue. We really need to figure this out before we get to deep into the art side of things.
This is where my coder nature defeats me. It is easy to collaborate with code, since it is just an implementation of a concept that can be tweaked till you don't even recognize the code, yet it remains the same concept. Immortius did major refactoring to the block manifestation system I started, but I'm thrilled to see that as now it just works even better with more solid code (btw, I suck at code too). That's not so easy with art - re-use is far trickier. Add to that the international nature of the project and the potential for language issues / misunderstandings.
Quite right. Art re-use seems to me to be much more tricky.
So I'm figuring (correct me if I'm wrong) that we need to arrive at a general poly count / level of detail range and other guidelines like that to have the models be fairly similar. And maybe we can use dwarves as the proof of concept example to see how dwarves at different levels of detail would compare with each other? In theory this might be doable even without a more concrete game concept, since the models need to fit nicely with the world, regardless of the theme or flavor to the world.
This is were things get complicated. Simply setting a general poly count (or other rather simplistic guides like that) is not going to cut it, yet we definitely need some sort of bigger guiding standard. I don't have much experience in this area either unfortunately (as I generally work by myself), but do have some ideas. First, there should be a "design sheet", some place where all the modeling,texturing, rigging, animation, etc. guidelines/tips/recommendations are. I already did this personally to some extent when I made my dwarf. I set myself a 12x128 texture, I made the model perfectly pixel proportional , etc. Stuff like that would go a long way in "unifying" the look, at least, of stuff. That would not really be enough though probably, at least not if we start getting a lot more than just 3-4 of us artists.
The reason for this is that you could still get stuff that fulfills all technical guidelines and still looks "wrong". The only way to remedy this as far as I know is to have some sort of "Art director" or "Art lead" that could kind of "moderate" all the incoming art assets. I don't know how this would exactly work though being an open-source project.
With guidelines in place then we could actually divvy out specific art issues so at that point we only have one person working per race or other grouping, with feedback from others or outright requests for alternative takes by the author?
Yes, you could and that would be a good idea to break up the load. Again though, you are going to get really varying results even
if everything is up to the guidelines standards.
At the same time, can we actually use multiple similar models for the same thing? Could we have mountain dwarves and plains dwarves, looking differently (like the two examples in this thread) in the same world, without clashing in style? If that would be a concern, I'm not an expert
Similar models for the same thing? Yes, if they look good together. Having a few different models for each character would be really nice actually. Here, though, I have to point out that I would not consider glasz's and my models to be "similar" in this regard as they both have different design guidelines (not saying that either is better). For instance, his has floating arms, hands, and legless feet. If you saw both of these in a game, at the very least, it would be rather odd looking (at least to me). I think that design differences like this are definitely a concern if we want a game that looks like it has a nice "cohesive world".
Begla indicated on IRC that the poly count for either model here should be well below any point where the game would have any sort of trouble rending a pile of them running around. So that's great. I'm figuring it isn't a big issue either to have multiple variety texture sets? Almost as in DF where different professions = different looks
Yeah, I would have guessed that their poly count wouldn't be a huge concern. As for different texture sets/skins, that is a great way to introduce some nice, simple variety.
(Also, so I can put it somewhere: plug for maybe having a race inspired by
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pequeninos?)
Those interesting I guess...
All in all, I think you brought up some very relevant points. Stuff we need to figure out. I also have to submit a bit of a disclaimer. I am very much an art perfectionist so "world cohesiveness" is a rather important point for me. I really have to be carefull what I say because I don't want to make anybody feel to bad.
Projects like this tend to attract rather a lot of inexperienced/new artists though. If someone doesn't have firm hand and everything gets included...
