On the last in game meeting some players expressed their willingness to create art for the game. On this thread I am going to give an excess of info on how we make things for PlaneShift. Most of these things will be made more clear if you speak with someone from the team directly and can also be found on the wiki
http://planeshift.top-ix.org/pswiki/index.php?title=Creating_Art_and_mods, I am still going to put that info here though, in hope that anyone who is thinking of contributing to the game will have a clear picture of what there is to be done.
Before anything else though I would like to make two things clear. First, how much you get involved with the team is entirely up to you but we will provide any support as long as you ask. Feel free to email Talad (pancallo@netscape.net) or me (daskaroliscg@gmail.com) directly, or join the prospect channel and speak with the team here
http://webchat.freenode.net/ (channel to join is #planeshift-prospects). If you wish to join the team as well you can create a profile here
http://194.116.72.94/nexus/login.phpSecond, for the art submitted to the team we will need a license signed that will grant the game rights on said art. This is to allow the team to edit those submissions in the future and to make sure no other games will use the same art. The credit still goes to the original artists as well as the right to show it as portfolio.
Creating small objectsSmall objects like herbs, food, teapots, spoons, amulets, fish, apples, pouches, books, glyphs, such thingies. New prospects that join the team are often given some of these to make as a first task to practice and determine their skill.
These are usually around 200 triangles or less, depends on the exact object. Texture remains smaller than 512x512 in most cases. Please don't simply create objects you would like to see added since there is a lot more to adding a brand new object to the game. Instead, it will be most helpful if you spot an object without a mesh and create that. You can also ask us directly what things we need and get a list of objects that are missing.
2D artIf you wish to create concept art feel free to do it. There is no guarantee your ideas will be used but they will be a help to the team. As always, speaking with us first will help.
On other things for 2D art, we often need icons, additions for the gui and textures to be made. For all of those you will need to contact the team though, as these tasks change all the time you will need information on what is needed currently.
Creating buildings or whole levelsThe latest buildings added in the game were the ones of Hydlaa. They are 1000-2000 triangles each and bear 2-4 textures that generally don't go over 1024x1024 in size.
If you want to create a single large building (example: creating a hospital for Hydlaa or Ojaveda's city hall or anything like that) you can probably afford a higher polycount with no serious problem.
If you are interested in creating a whole level like hydlaa_plaza though you will need to speak with the team for details on how to do it as simply adding buildings in a map will result to an overloaded and laggy area.
Creating character or monster modelsA planeshift character is made of 7-8 different meshes that total up to 2000 triangles. These are
chest,
arms,
legs,
hands,
feet,
head,
hair, eyes. These use 512x512 textures for the bigger parts (chest, legs, head), 256x256 for arms and hair and probably even smaller ones for the other parts. That's a general guideline, not too strict.
As soon as the character's meshes are created they need to be textured wearing their basic clothes, different textures for the
face will give us more customization options for the players, same with different meshes for the
hair.
After that we need texture replacements for
torso,
arms,
legs,
hands and
feet, those will create medium and light armor. The mesh will not change for these armors.
Heavy armor is the same but the mesh changes for the
torso part. This means you can add geometry for shoulderguards, metal plates or anything else you like for the chest piece.
Last mesh to be made, the magic robe. This one will replace
torso,
legs and
arms at the same time. If you wish part of the character's arms, legs or chest to be visible on the robe model you will need to integrate them to the robe's mesh and texture. A 1024x1024 texture might be acceptable for this mesh, if not we can scale them down later.
When all meshes are ready they need to be rigged on a skeleton. This one will have: a head bone, a jaw bone, a neck bone, two clavicle bones, three spine bones, a hip bone, two clavicle bones, two bones for each arm and leg, one bone for each foot, a bone for each hand two bones for each finger. You can also add two ponytail bones, wing and tail bones if the race has those. Just remember that adding too many bones can be a cause for lag later in the game. To create all this you can use either bones or biped.
All this will be done in a single file called a baserig. This is the file that will be used later to extract everything aside animations and textures into files that can be used from the game's engine.
The animations will be made in a different file each and exracted into .caf files using cal3d. For information on how to do that exactly you will have to contact the team or at least read the wiki. I am also not going to add the full list of animations here as there are 20 or more of them and many have special things to keep in mind when making them. If you contact us we will give you everything you need to create them.
More importantly, it is on the team's plans to improve all animations in the game and that could result on having some animations shared between characters. We have not discussed enough on this yet but it may be possible you won't have to make all or any animations for new characters in the future.
After all this is finished there is more to be done to integrate sockets for the character to hold different objects but I suppose you can talk with the team once you have been that far.
To create monsters the principles are pretty much the same only it is quite simpler. You need to create a single mesh, less than 2000 triangles preferably, and do the same as with characters. Monsters often have more than a single texture as they may come in different versions (example, the different kinds of arangma, rats, ulbernauts and more). They also have much less animations to be made.
The team usually has some tasks on priority. You are not restricted by that but if you would like to work on something but don't know what you could give a hand with those. For the moment these are:
- improve characters animations
- complete all wizard robes
- add klyros female
That will be all for the moment, if you feel there is anything I should specify please leave a comment below and I will.
