KoW - D.R.E.A.M.

[King of Worms]

My hands are obviously still full, but I could put that on a pause and touch up faces for you if you need it done to move on to the next thing

They look really really good! Like, I never imagined we'd have proper townies.

Thanks mate, Im quite happy with the results, its fascinating what you can recover from the 5KB image
There was some color noise on the closeups I just got rid off with my setup of denoising. I do the final round on the closeups atm, there was some work needed for those 2 frame animations to look good. I think I will finish in 1 hour.

Thanks for the offer of help, I very appreciate it! I think I will pack it up and send it your way. But no rush, work on you own pace. This might be a good distraction from all those heads, its something a bit different. You dont need to go into a big detail, otherwise the closeup images will be too different from the low detail ones which are used at distance. Just make em look more humanoid Some have messed up facial features a bit, some look ok as they are. You will see and judge by yourself.

EDIT: here it is https://mega.nz/#!r3ZjhYQY!Vk_Wy4yDEqAY ... qSNV61eNoo

Its 48 files. Each set has two frames ending with _5-0 and _5-1
I guess you need to do just one frame and I can copy the new face to the other frame, it appears they are always the same. That would be "just" 24 faces to do.

[Adrinus]

Cool, took a look and I think I can make a good difference, might fix a few webbed fingers too

How do the bits of armor etc. look on the paperdoll these days? I heard something about outlines for cropping out hair etc. for different helmets and such, will we need to make some of those once the new faces are done?

Edit: Here's a look at what I got:

Spoiler!

[King of Worms]

Cool, took a look and I think I can make a good difference, might fix a few webbed fingers too

How do the bits of armor etc. look on the paperdoll these days? I heard something about outlines for cropping out hair etc. for different helmets and such, will we need to make some of those once the new faces are done?

Edit: Here's a look at what I got:

Spoiler!

Great results! I love that style 100% And yes, the hands are sometimes quite crazy as well

The way the faces are being remade now (staying inside the canvas) will provide the best compatibility with current masks, so hopefully that will save us some work in the future. Also the bodies are very simillar to vanilla in terms of size/outline so that will help as well.

Ive tryed some clothing upscales, and it looked great, just the way the body sprite merged with the clothing was very rough in case of for example the cloaks (still 320*200) but Ive found there are actually the "inside" parts of the cloaks, and I think when I upscale them, than - fingers crossed - those will fit the bodies automatically (because of the same upscale algo used on both)

Im not sure what should be the next step. Armors, clothing, weapons? I think the weapons might be the easiest with cca 600 files needed. That would be a ok warm up

Im still scared of it, it will be a LOT of work. The new batch renaming tool will help with 100s of files which will need the material suffixes (_Iron etc)
I can do the base weapon upscales quite reliably tho. So it might be possible afterall. Than we might do the handheld weapons which we see on the display when we fight. That will be a big boost to the visuals Id say. Or we finish up the paperdoll 1st, with armors and clothing...

[Adrinus]

It seems like all of those changes are in your arena, so go at it as you like.

I'm hoping that most of the upscales for paperdoll: armor, shields, weapons etc. will be pretty good, since AI seems to be pretty smart with non-organic things.

[King of Worms]

It all looks good but a chain mail, that is problematic because its just a pixelated mess
I will need to experiment with different upscale settings as well. But chainmail will be PITA.
Clothing and weapons so far seem quite easy to upscale (But upscale is the smallest part of the work, coloring all the verions etc will be crazy)

Some armors tests

Spoiler!

32-0.final.png (35.04 KiB) Viewed 1071 times

34-0.final.png (70.22 KiB) Viewed 1071 times

5-0.final.png (44.1 KiB) Viewed 1071 times

[King of Worms]

Im not sure I can do this... its insane amount of absolutely dull work
Ok I can upscale the 24 times 2 weapons for male and female. I can cut em out. I can manually correct the outlines.
Than what?

Iron
Steel
Chain
Silver
Elven
Dwarven
Mithril
Adamantium
Ebony
Orcish
Daedric

Yes, so I will pick a wepon. And I will try to make a colour of lets say Mithril. How does that even freaking look like? So after some searching of the internet, I will maybe have a clue. I will fiddle with sliders to get that recolor on a specific area of ONE weapon. Done. Repeat 24 times. Done

Next material is iron. Repeat. Steel. Repeat. Silver. Repeat. Than I end up with 24 * 10 = 240 files and I can move on to the freaking male version and repeat 240 times.

I want to puke just from the idea.

[King of Worms]

It doesnt make any sense, than someone comes, compiles a shader in one day, applyes it to the paperdoll window and he has it all upscaled.
This fucking paperdoll is a work for one year. Just no, Im sorry.

And thats the EASIEST PART of it all. Clothing is INSANE amount of work compared to this. This is even worse than building a house with a pitchfork, this is building a town with one finger. I will not do it.

[Adrinus]

Man... You need to relax a bit with it.

Take it from me, doing hundreds of the same thing over and over:
Make yourself happy. Get a happy sortta bouncy tune in your head that you enjoy, and just imagine you're an old country farmer, slowly whittling away at a piece of wood: just watching the day roll by.

Put on an audio podcast or something interesting (and funny) I suggest MBMBAM (My Brother My Brother and Me), and "whittle". Try not to do it too often, but once in a while step back and admire how much work you've done.

You just gotta slow down, down to country farmer speed.

And if not... Well, throw it on me. I can country farmer.

[King of Worms]

I do this for two years already, I know how to handle insane jobs, but this is beyond it. With all the respect (and I mean it) the heads, how many of them? 200? I did 500 portraits and it was no problem, its like 2% of total DREAM work. But this paperdoll, its something else. Im not sure anyone really understands the scope of the work

[Adrinus]

Let me see an example of the process, from start to finish, and then a recolor. Maybe laying it out we can think of a better way.