new icons from manikus

[manikus]

Here are a few I did after seeing Uatu's awesome undersea collection.

They are a great white shark, hammerhead shark, and a dolphin.

Enjoy!

[Uatu]

Very nice! Shading is very realistic, as are the forms themselves. The dolphin looks very cute The shark is animated very nicely, too - quite scary!

Actually, one thing I was thinking about - do undersea creatures need shadows? I made my first non-upright undersea creature today, and left it without, since, I dunno, it seemed kind of strange with a shadow, but I am not sure... (Doesn't help that my icon is nearly black, so that a shadow would completely obscure the picture... but your shadows look fine with your icons)

[manikus]

I thought about this very issue for a long time. Reference pictures I was using showed nearly black shadows for the pictures of sharks as they were in clear (Caribbean) shallow waters. The dolphin pictures had no shadows as they were in deep water and there was no visible bottom for the shadow to fall on.
The other thing that I noticed was that the shadow took on the tone of the medium - blue water had dark blue shadows, green water had dark green shadows, etc. It wasn't just the shadow that was tinted however, but the creatures themselves. So, I thought I would leave the tinting up to the user. It would be super cool if we could use an alpha layer in combat (we can use a grey scale one in the viewport).

[Ziroc]

Very cool! Almost looks like a render! Hmmm shadows are ok I guess.. it really depends on what depth they are at from the floor of the ocean/sea/lake.. since the character is gonna be on the bottom, I guess shadows would be ok--maybe distort them or soften them a bit--refraction.

NICE STUFF! More! More!

[Ziroc]

BTW--don't you LOVE that you can attach files now? SO nice. I added some more file formats to be allowed. Any other formats we need? (I saw your rtf file issue)..

[manikus]

Originally Posted by Ziroc BTW--don't you LOVE that you can attach files now? SO nice. I added some more file formats to be allowed. Any other formats we need? (I saw your rtf file issue)..

Awesome.

[Uatu]

Hmm - interesting about the shadows. Yeah, it WOULD be much better if we had alpha transparency for the shadows - for example, perhaps we could set pure black (0,0,0) as partially transparent (as long as we avoid using this color for anything but shadows in our art).

As it is, my ixitxachitls (did I get that right?) are nearly black themselves, so black shadows would obscure them completely, unless I make the shadows somehow really small...

[manikus]

I think that would be cool. I try never to do any of my shadows at 0,0,0 just b/c I hope some day we'll be able to do this. (I know that some slip through b/c I forget... )

I would like a totally different layer that would work like the alpha blending overlays for the viewport (i.e. the auto-darken feature) but would allow me to substitute a color of my choice or load a graphic to be blended; with the latter you could do clouds or dust storms or fire...

[Uatu]

Hmm - that sounds like an interesting idea I do find making shadows the most boring part of creating icons, though, and would prefer to minimalize that part of the task if possible

(Plus, having separate files for monsters and shadows would complicate things and take up extra space on servers )

[manikus]

I was unclear, I think. Icons would stay the way they are, but (in my dream world ) there would be another layer available for the combat (not connected with any other graphics) that could be turned on for alpha blending purposes.