Oh, wow! Personally, I am glad that the game is catching attention of professional artists, it is what we really need to kickstart the whole graphical improvement project, which in turn should attract even more attention to the game.
As I understand, the biggest problem is that in the current state of the project, graphical improvements are sorta hard to implement, this is a very raw feature, which is only present thanks to Lacus' work, but isn't perfect at this point. Sadly, not too many coders can help with it and DFUnity itself is in early stages of development and Interkarma has his hands full.
Overall, I agree with Vladimir's points. I am not a texture artist and this job looks extremely difficult to me, someone very far away from being a professional artist, but if we can have painted textures - that would be awesome!
Preserving the original style and atmosphere is very important, though I am a bit more relaxed here than some
Just as long as it doesn't look extremely realistic or too cartoonish, it should be fine. The style of the game is awesome, but I wouldn't mind a few changes here and there, as long as they fit the style. Like, I wouldn't mind actually seeing enemies wearing something else, not just cyan clothes!
I do think that we should help Vladimir technically as much as we can, just because it seems like a rare opportunity to involve someone experienced with the project. We do need that. And let's be real, he would probably get busy with other projects soon, so it might be advantegous to get a head start ASAP.
But for Vladimir, I want to ask to give as much details on how you would go about doing your work, so even if you leave working the project at some point, we might try and replicate the work on our own. Just to preserve the overall style. We are not professionals, but we would appreciate tips and instructions, at least most important ones, it might be helpful to future artists.
Final thought:
Let's create a new folder on this forum, inside "Creator Workshop", next to "Mods & Features General", and call it "DFUnity Graphical Project" (for example). There we will create several topics for objects, that need to be remade (flora, dungeon objects, rocks, etc.), as well as general discussion for the project and technical discussion topic.
Otherwise, it is getting a bit out of hand on the rest of the forum and this should allow us to focus our efforts on most important tasks, both graphical and technical. I think that we should be able to find some temporary solution for now, for example, helping to port Vladimir's work to the game.