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Up Topic Development / Art Workshop / Polishing graphics
- - By roboclonk [de] Date 2022-04-04 10:13
Hey everyone,

I worked on some OpenClonk graphics and refined them since I heard many people saying that OpenClonk's graphics look indie and unpolished. It is still a work in progress since I haven't put that much time into it yet. But here is a screenshot of the changes I made.

(The trees are just a test. I think they are too detailed)

The kitchen is more refined and I worked on the Clonk. His face looks a bit different and I'm reworking the animations.

Although these graphics look quite expensive with many polygons, they're actually not. The trees and the kitchen use normals maps and pngs as graphics instead of 3d meshes.


I also expanded Randrian's OpenClonk exporter a bit and just added the normal map rendering functionality, so you can render the world normals of arbitrary graphics.

What do you think? :)
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Parent - - By Zapper [de] Date 2022-04-04 16:05
Great to see some motivation! :D

Some random things, though I was never one of the art people:
From what I understood, the "looks like an indie game" comments were never targeted at our graphics being not detailed enough or that each single graphic looked "unpolished" in itself.
I thought the main criticism was always that the different objects never seemed to fit together 100% and it was easy to spot that they were done by different people with different modelling workflows.

As an example of what I mean:
In your screenshots there are around 6 different colors for the material "wood" (birch, shovel, kitchen roof branch, kitchen building, kitchen knife, fireplace wood). At some point we tried to fix that a bit and normalized some wood tones (look at the tools in the top bar; they were all changed to use the same color for the wood (one that has a nice contrast to the ground)).

Similarly, there are different detail levels for different objects and different buildings also have e.g. different thicknesses of their wooden beams.

But, adding normal maps to things that do not use the 3D functionality is great!

PS: Here are some old ancient tree concepts by Matthi: https://forum.openclonk.org/topic_show.pl?pid=23986#pid23986
Parent - - By roboclonk [de] Date 2022-04-04 21:43 Edited 2022-04-04 21:46
Yeah, its been too long since there was no real activity here, so I thought I could contribute something ^^

Ah, I see what you mean. I noticed the different textures for the same materials. Many things look patched together. Some textures are from photos, others are hand-painted.. so they don't fit that well

But some 3D models also look unfinished like the kitchen. The backwall didn't have a texture for example. Others models have stretched or blurry textures, etc. Something that bugs me a little are the low-poly looks on some. I assume they were made with little polygon counts for performance reasons, but like you said, some things don't use the 3D functionality. So with some tricks, the graphics could look way smoother if 2D sprites were used :)

Edit: Ooh the sketches from Matthi look cool :D
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Parent - - By Clonkonaut Date 2022-04-04 23:24
Texturing was a huge problem for us to be honest. Many people who contributed models didn't feel confident enough (I guess) to also provide textures. It didn't help that we had no workflow, no readily usable materials to slap onto stuff. So some of the models, especially buildings, were modelled by one person and then textured by someone else (sometimes by a dev with rudimentary knowledge of this process). This is why you'll find unfinished or simply weird textures throughout the graphics.
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Parent - By roboclonk [de] Date 2022-04-05 08:39
aah okay

I could retexture some of the models or maybe reusing the textures and change the UV layout a bit
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Parent - - By Clonkonaut Date 2022-04-04 23:26
Cool. :) I never managed to properly export the clonk model - I tried many times but couldn't do it. :(
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Parent - By roboclonk [de] Date 2022-04-05 08:36
Thanks :)
I had many problems myself. I changed a few things in the exporter to make the process easier. For instance, It didn't find the OgreXMLConverter.exe sometimes, so I gave it the path to it directly, since it is stored in the exporter folder anyway
I didn't manage to contact Randrian on this, I wanted to make a pull request on his repository so other people can use it. With his last commit, the exporter didn't even work anymore :(

Other than that, I changed many things on the Clonk rig. I combined the control rig and deform rig. On export only the deform bones are used and other are filtered automatically. It only uses the bones with the deform checkbox checked.
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Up Topic Development / Art Workshop / Polishing graphics

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