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

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RedHookGhost
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Re: KoW - D.R.E.A.M.

Post by RedHookGhost »

Thank you very much! :D Excited to see the results. Hopefully it fits together well.

Two more down.
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King of Worms
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Re: KoW - D.R.E.A.M.

Post by King of Worms »

Awesome, 12 faces in such a quality made so fast, Im happy, thank you!
No worries, Ill make em fit no matter what. Your colors and contrasts are consistent, so it wont be a huge deal hopefully :lol: Im sure it will be really good.

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MrFlibble
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Re: KoW - D.R.E.A.M.

Post by MrFlibble »

Amazing work, thank you!

I love it how DFU and the mods inspire people to create new art. Hopefully one day there will be a full set of community-remastered assets, with minimal reliance on AI upscales.

BTW, recently I was browsing through old conversations about Daggerfall's development history here and I was reminded of these high-res flats by epicurious7. I remember them being posted in DaggerXL forums a while back. I wonder if they were ever made use of in any DFU project?

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King of Worms
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Re: KoW - D.R.E.A.M.

Post by King of Worms »

Hi, those flats are of quite different style than the originals and I used my own which are 1) more vanilla friendly 2)all in same style.

Ad the AI - basically only thing which is AI generated in a Dream mod is the mobs and commoners, each of them having quite a LOT of manual input already anyway. And I very much doubt someone sane will redraw 6000 flats of mobs and 500 flats of commoners :)

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King of Worms
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Re: KoW - D.R.E.A.M.

Post by King of Worms »

PS: I used the body of the lady in blue, just changed the colors closer to the vanilla palette. I really like my sprites better...
PSS: For some reason I cant edit my own posts now...

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King of Worms
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Re: KoW - D.R.E.A.M.

Post by King of Worms »

Damn Im so used to be able to edit my posts....

Anyway, the mentioned sprites were released in this mod as a alternative https://www.nexusmods.com/daggerfallunity/mods/161

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RedHookGhost
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Re: KoW - D.R.E.A.M.

Post by RedHookGhost »

Two more (mostly) ready.

Face 7-0's hair I might come back later to change to something else. He looks more Redguard than Wood Elf, but I can't keep looking at him right now or I'll get stuck. Once I finish up the rest of the faces, if you want I can come back and rework it. For now though, I'll move on to the next images, so I can look at it with a fresh eye in the future.

If you think it's fine as is...great! XD
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King of Worms
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Re: KoW - D.R.E.A.M.

Post by King of Worms »

Hi RedHook, good choice on keeping the hair like that so you dont get stuck at it. I honestly think it looks great, it will offer some more variety to choose from. 1st impression I had from it (before Ive read the comment) was that I really like the hair, so.. :) Thanks a lot for all your contributions!

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MrFlibble
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Re: KoW - D.R.E.A.M.

Post by MrFlibble »

King of Worms wrote: Thu May 20, 2021 12:44 pm And I very much doubt someone sane will redraw 6000 flats of mobs and 500 flats of commoners :)
It's not that unrealistic actually. sebabdukeboss20 recently told me that there are already over 1,000 models in the library from which he made sprites for characters in Duke Nukem 3D mods/TCs (Alien Armageddon, Demon Throne and AMC TC). The amount of actual sprites for each character made from these models is way more than that of course (some are static flats of one or several frames from one angle, others are full animated sprite sheers with rotations etc.). These were created in some very realistic time frames, too.

Of course I'm not suggesting to redraw character sprites from scratch by hand, although this approach also works to some extent. But making 3D models and rendering high-resolution sprites from them is not an impossible task for a skilled artist. Considering that most human NPCs were made from two models (male and female human) and share most animations, this could be even less work to do. Same goes for all skeleton based enemies (IIRC Mark Jones just took a prefab skeleton model that came with the 3D tool that was used in Bethesda, but don't quote me on this), orcs and daedric humanoids.

The problem with AI upscales is that most Daggerfall sprite work is so low-detailed in the first place. Mark Jones' 3D characters had to be created on a very tight schedule, and since the target resolution was quite low, the original models were low-detailed as well. For example, no character has visible fingers save for vampires, and no AI model that has been used ever did anything to rectify this.

Also if this complete remastering approach were taken, it could address another issue, namely the art style inconsistency and the repetitive human NPC/enemy design. If you compare Daggerfall to Arena, it is all too noticeable how samey all the 3D rendered human enemies look with their green hoods and cloaks. They couldn't even implement the colour changing palette swap routine that was hinted at in the preview. At the same time, these 3D rendered characters look very different from both the player character paperdoll and the hand-drawn NPC flats.

Conversely, in Arena there is a much greater consistency in style between the paperdoll, static NPC flats and all enemies, and human adversaries also have very different, distinct appearances depending on their class (you can see some examples in this video). Now that would probably more of a mod in itself, but if an artist of sebabdukeboss20's calibre ever agreed to work on this we could perhaps see more diverse looking NPCs with yet more consistent, uniform style of art across the different varieties of them. Maybe rotations could be even added to static NPCs like Alien Armageddon does for captured babes.

Also I'm almost certain that villagers in Daggerfall were not originally intended to be one-hits and would attack them player of provoked, if only there was time to produce the necessary animation frames.

Of course, without a dedicated artist to actually do this it's all wishful thinking but still.

Here's a little comparison of the flats from Demon Throne and the originals from Daggerfall that inspired them. Quite a bit of artistic liberty was taken here but you can clearly see that although the new sprites are not even twice as large as the originals, they take each image to a completely different level of detail not to mention art style - something that no ESRGAN model that I tried was able to do.
comparison2x.png
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RedHookGhost
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Re: KoW - D.R.E.A.M.

Post by RedHookGhost »

Great! That's a relief, one less thing to worry about. :) Got the last two Bosmer here. Working on the Khajiit right now. Taking a little more time to figure out how catlike they should be.
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