All Things Art

What's up, everybody? As your friendly neighborhood CITY OF HEROES Art Lead, I wanted to create a dedicated space where you, the player, can post your questions and comments about anything in the game that's art related (costumes, environments, animation, fx, sound, UI, concept art, etc.). It's a direct line of communication between you and the COH Art Team, and what I'd really like to get out of it is to learn what the playerbase wants to see in upcoming releases.

A couple of quick ground rules to get us started:

1. Gotta keep it real: Ongoing development is of course my top priority, so my ability to respond to posts and PMs will be limited. If you don't get a direct reply, don't worry--rest assured that I'm reading everything that appears on this thread.

2. Patience, young Jedi: Posting on this thread won't necessarily expedite that special part you've wanted forever, but it'll at least keep it on the radar. We're always striving to give you guys what you want, but that comes in two flavors: variations on existing stuff, and brand-new stuff that expands the game into exciting new territory. Though we try to honor older requests (see: animated tails), it has to happen as a part of overall development.

3. This is why we can't have nice things: If something's logistically prohibitive, technically unfeasible, or aesthetically miss-matched with the game, I'll always try to level with you. Certain things just aren't on the agenda, and why dwell on those when we could be talking about all the awesome stuff that you get instead?!

4. Rein it in there, cowboy: Let's try to keep the dialogue measured and constructive. It's helpful to know what you like and don't like, but play it cool, y'know?


So yeah, what's on your mind?

I just wanted to say after running the new Posi TF last night that the new maps for it were amazing!

Very atmospheric and I found very creepy!

I would love to see more maps like this (and Im sure you have plenty of others up your sleeve for GR!).

One thing I was thinking is that there is a map Redside were there is a Crey Lab map which had been destroyed with wrecked walls and fires. Even the lifts work differently were you can jump down a tube to get to the next floor. I was wondering if that kind of setup can be used for some of the future maps you design?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwillinger Quote: 16. Has Paragon Studios redefined "player" to require your mouse to subscribe separately from your keyboard? If your mouse has greater processing power than your gfx card, the answer is yes.

A revamp of all the old hairstyles so they look as good as the newer ones?

before we get started, because i will happily ask some questions and make some suggestions, but what would you say the relation of this thread to jay's costume request thread is, do you guys still check that one or would this be a more productive place to make a suggestion? thanks in advance.

oh and to get the ball rolling, one question on many people's minds is if we will ever get proper bushy tails for a fox or werewolf type player. a suggestion has been that even without going crazy with the hair, it might be really hard to render well, co's bushy tail does have a decidedly cartoonish look, versus the more "realistic reptilian and finned tails, so this may support that bushy tails are just hard to make in an artistically consistent manner, so whats the word my man?
infeasible?
didnt know there was a demand?
soon (tm)?
or smile knowingly?

next question, back options, we have some, with wings and capes, but one thing a lot of us woudl like are backpacks, even moreso if we could wear chest emblems on our back, similar to how a karate gi or biker jacked has them. are things like backpacks, inactive rocket packs and nonmoving tech wingie things a considered possibility?
is it still a rigging issue with adjustable sized characters?
soon(tm)
or smile knowingly?

also, can we get some fish fins, i have some mer-themed guys and id just really like some real fins, not those triangular things.. again i ask for the word.
no, you freak!
soon(tm)?
or smile nervously while calling the police?

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

Feel free to answer only some or none of the following:

-Alternate animations. We've got them for Super Strength and Martial Arts. Are there plans to use this option soon for other sets?...like, in the issue after GR?

-Can you tell us *anything* about the 'stance emotes'? Like, when we get them, how do you activate them? Something? Anything?

-Monster/Beast parts. I'm jealous of the Demon summoning pets. Would love to get their feet option and skull-head option for normal characters...actually, I'd like *any* good monster/beast costume pieces outside of the 1 decent-looking werewolf head, the dragon head and the feline/feral/reptile face option. Anyway, can you tell us any development going on in this department? Maybe even adding more options (like beast heads + hat/hood)?

Okay well here's a few items I'd absolutely love to see:

Given Ultra mode we seem to have only a few sets that are REALLY reflective (like metallic, obv) can we get more sets that are reflective. Also is it possible to get animated aspects to costumes so, for example, if we had a neon glow the glow would pulse or fade? You know, just a few things to add interest and spark and keep it all looking good!

I personally LOVE all of the unique maps that are in the game. Especially I love the villain side one (I think) where a Demon has been through the map and you are following him throughout and the lifts are wrecked and his burning footprints are on the floor. All these little details really do give me a kick, so I'd love to see much more unique maps and also perhaps some more different tilesets that we've never seen before. Old SG Bases was an interesting new one but what about a new setting... another country with a famous landmark or something that we've just not seen. Even something Arctic-inspired would be cool. Or Space!

All these new sounds and crackling paper bags as the pedestrians walk by are absolutely amazing and really add for more depth. Is it possible to just keep on expanding this and even stuff we take for granted like if you're at the top of the map to see a plane go by or hear a distant plane? I don't know it might not work or be in-keeping but however you do it, keep the immersion going as much as possible!

Looking into UI and stuff like that all I'd really want to see is more loading screens (which you've said you're already doing) and to sort out some of the new stuff that i17 took away. For example, when you right click on a critter now the only option you get is 'Follow' whereas before you got 'Follow' and 'Info'. Little QoL changes like that.

I'd love to see powers casting light in a given situation. For example if I'm in a dark hallway I would love to see a power (e.g. fireball?) light up the hallway as its cast. I'm not even sure if this is technically possible with an older game engine like the one we have, but I thought I'd throw it in there.

Last but not least I for one think that mittens and the older character models are becoming quite dated. I know this would take an insane amount of time to do, but updating these character models would go a long way to complimenting Ultra Mode.

I'll keep posting as and when I think of more but I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on that!

Are you able to tell us anything about the artwork you will be putting into CoH2 or is this a CoH2 idea thread?


EDIT: One thing I've been meaning to say for a while that would give the players much more flexibility within the character creator is more colours to apply to the costume pieces. Or is there some bizarre technical limitation that would stop you from letting us do this?

Would it ever be possible to have a more "segmented" body for characters? Not like a millipede, but just as in each arm/leg being a seperate piece (or two pieces for upper/lower)?

Could you make powers that don't involve holding something in your hands keep whatever you're holding (where it won't cause clipping/just look weird)?

And speaking of held objects, could we ever get weapons showing on the character when not being held?

Well, given that my mysterious benefactor decided to drop another sample image in my mailbox of a character that I don't even have, I thought I'd bring that discussion here:

I would like to request the addition of a more muscular, more ripped skin texture set for the female model, including upper and lower body, hands and feet. David has expressed some reluctance to go that route, citing legitimate concerns that it might not look good, which seems to have irked some unnamed person who's been flooding my e-mail with sample screenshots of my characters with more muscular textures like these:





I do not know who this person is or how he makes these probably illegal screenshots, but you his point, as I understand it, is that even reusing the current game's textures, we can create looks that, while they may not be everyone's idea of aesthetic beauty, still do work sufficiently well to pass off for intentional. He didn't explain the mechanics to me, but I believe what we are looking at is female models using the male skin textures with the male muscle definition. And I'd say they're not half bad, considering that's not what these textures are intended to be used for.

I believe my mysterious benefactor has a point, however - if the game right as it is now is capable of producing images like these with ZERO additional artwork (or so he tells me), then I'm sure that the awesome, cool, gifted people that are David, Jay, BABs and the rest of the art team, can do so much better and make this both work to the same effect and look SO MUCH BETTER!

As I've always suggested it, I'd like to see a selection of base skin textures for the female model featuring at least two options - Smooth and Muscular, just the same way men can choose between these options. Now, I know from my own personal observations of how the game handles "With Skin" items that ONLY HUMAN SKIN will really apply without massive system re-writes, so I'm restricting my request to just two skin options - Smooth and Muscular human skin. That all. Nothing more.

*additional note, skip if you don't care*
See, one of the things I've always always complained about concerning muscular female characters is that their waists and their arms are far too skinny for a truly stout fighter. The solution I used to suggest to this was to just extend the sliders to make them thicker, but David shot that out of the sky with a AAA cannon. And I agree - it's isn't needed. As my anonymous benefactor has shown me with his pics, making the female body texture more muscular makes the actual frame of the female look a LOT thicker than it actually is. Just look at those pictures and tell me - don't those girls look bigger than anything we can make in-game? Because they do to me, and my benefactor insists their models have not been altered, only their textures.

I say we don't need a "huge female" model, we don't need new meshes, we don't need larger arms or different physiques. JUST a more muscular texture for females, created by our awesome artists, would put a stop to practically all the requests for bigger females. And you can take that to the bank!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

War banners are on my mind. Being able to use the chest symbols on them would be an excellent plus.



So how about it? Can we have these as back items?

The next big thing after power customization (and Going Rogue I suppose) should be a revamp of the costume generator.

I think that many more costumes should get the "upgrade" that some of them got in the Marriage package. "Heart", "Angel" and "Excess" got bump-mapped and high-def versions that looked like actual clothes instead of painted-on patterns. Those were very nice additions to the generator. I would like to see more things like that: clothes with actual depth. A bikini that doesn't look like paint, for example.

It would also be nice if we could get more assymetrical costumes. I understand that there might be some technical difficulties in getting patterns that aren't simply mirrored on either side (although some of the "mask" patterns are assymetrical - "50-50" being the most obvious one), but there are other things that can be made assymetrical, things we've already seen examples of. Examples follow below:

Shoulder pads: "Gladiator" is assymetrical. We could have more pads like that one. There are pads like the giant skulls (not as useful as a more generic shoulderpad would be, fyi) that only covers one shoulder. Etc. Shoulder pets only cover one shoulder. I think all the pads should come in three versions: right, left and both. That would really add options.

Chest details: One of the chains and one of the barbed wire wraps are assymetrical. More things like that would be great.

Robot arms: We have robot arm 1, 2 and 3 as torso options right now. One of them has a solid robot arm replacing one of the arms. Would it be possible to add more arm options to that part, like for example "tentacle", or "normal arm" (with optional covering, like bare skin, short sleeve, long sleeve, etc)? If we could have a normal-looking arm there instead of a robot arm we would be able to make our own assymetrical costumes by coloring it differently, or leaving it bare.

Skins: It would be nice to have skin patterns that actually belonged to the skin of the character instead of the costume piece. This is probably completely impossible but it would really be cool if things like tattoos, tiger stripes, rocky skin, scales, etc could be selected where you select skin color, and then have those things "shine through" wherever skin showed on the other costume pieces.

Invisible weapons: Some of us have noticed that a few powersets would work just as well without the weapons usually associated with them. Like Claws and Dual Pistols, for example. If we could select "invisible" claws we could have another punching set for Scrappers - some of those claw attacks look just like punches. With invisible pistols we could shoot things directly from our hands, and with a few new gloves featuring prominent gun barrels this would really look cool. Especially if the gloves had animated gatling guns that popped out when we used our powers, similar to how Combat Auras work now...

Speaking of which: can we have more kinds of funky auras? More Combat auras, and auras that activate when we use travel powers like for example jet blasts that shoot out from under our feet when we use flight or jump, without having to use the special Rocket Boot costume pieces? The rocket boots are cool but they don't always fit the rest of a costume. Having the jet blast as an aura that only showed up during flight would solve that. Heck, make the special auras into recipes just like the rocket boots.

"My request is to add another option to the Robotic arms sections called "Tanker" or "Bare Arms". Although we do have a great Tanker option under the tights, and it received a nice upgrade a few issues back, it doesn't allow any additional patterns to be applied.
By making the bare arms an option like the Cyborg arms it would allow for patterns to be used like this...





Most of my costumes use the Tanker pattern... and this would open a lot of doors for more customization for me."

My only request from afore-mentioned costume thread. Is this a technically feasible thing to do?

Troll horns!

'Nuff said

I'm very glad to see this thread! Thanks for giving us some of your time, David.

I'm just going to ask for something I've been dying to see since I began playing 4 years ago, and on the surface it seems a simple task but of course I don't know, I hope at least that it's not too difficult:

Shiny shorts! More specifically, some new items based on the Bottoms with Skin options for females and identical to them, except the 'clothing' part of them is shiny to match Tights Sleek.

Even more specifically, the following parts would be my priority:

• All three short shorts (the plain, the one with a slit up the side, and the one with a vent).
• The panty/bikini bottoms.
• The Athletic shorts.

I can actually answer a few of those questions:

Quote:

Originally Posted by FredrikSvanberg I think that many more costumes should get the "upgrade" that some of them got in the Marriage package. "Heart", "Angel" and "Excess" got bump-mapped and high-def versions that looked like actual clothes instead of painted-on patterns. Those were very nice additions to the generator. I would like to see more things like that: clothes with actual depth. A bikini that doesn't look like paint, for example.

While the "Plus" costume piece options have much higher quality, they trade quality for customizability. The old options are patterns over bare skin, which means that you could theoretically alter the underlying skin texture, accommodating my suggestion above. "Plus" items are actually all one texture, which means that you basically can't touch the skin without recompiling the whole image, outfit included. So if I wanted, for instance, "Angelic Plus With Muscles" that would have to be a brand new, entirely separate texture, whereas if I wanted "Angelic With Muscles," this is doable RIGHT NOW. In fact, one of the pictures my mysterious benefactor dumped on me was just that, but he asked me not to share it.

In other words, currently the engine can swap base textures without affecting the pattern painted on them, which allows a collection of patterns to apply to a collection of textures without bloating the texture count sky high. 10 patters over 10 textures right now requires just 20 items - 10 patterns and 10 textures. 10 patterns and 10 textures with the "Plus" treatment would require 100 items - every combination of every texture with every pattern. And that's more than even just five times the work.

Of course, if I'm talking out of my ***, then I would humbly accept a browbeating from David or BABs or Jay and apologise profusely. I promise.

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Shoulder pads: "Gladiator" is assymetrical. We could have more pads like that one. There are pads like the giant skulls (not as useful as a more generic shoulderpad would be, fyi) that only covers one shoulder. Etc. Shoulder pets only cover one shoulder. I think all the pads should come in three versions: right, left and both. That would really add options.

Actually, I want to sort of turn your argument on itself - I like the Gladiator shoulders, but is it possible to get a symmetrical pairs of both pieces? I mean, one pair that's just two of the big shoulders, one on either side? And, of course, a pair of two of the smaller pieces, one on either shoulder. That would actually ROCK! But again, I actually agree with you. More asymmetrical shoulders would be a big help.

You know what just occurred to me? How about controlling our shoulders separately for each side? That way, we don't need to bother the developers to make combinations of this piece and that piece, but we can just mix and match whatever we want. One Medieval shoulder and one Gladiator shoulder? Why not? It'd look cool. One Tech Vegeta style shoulder and one bare shoulder? It'd look odd, but why not? A skull on one shoulder and a spiked rugby pad on the other? Sign me up!

This sort of walks into the area of technical limitations, though. BABs has already explained that there are only so many slots you can put things in, and most of them are already used up. I assume there's only one "shoulders" slot to put things on. But, hey, it's a good suggestion to lay down there and something that's probably worth looking into, at least.

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Robot arms: We have robot arm 1, 2 and 3 as torso options right now. One of them has a solid robot arm replacing one of the arms. Would it be possible to add more arm options to that part, like for example "tentacle", or "normal arm" (with optional covering, like bare skin, short sleeve, long sleeve, etc)? If we could have a normal-looking arm there instead of a robot arm we would be able to make our own assymetrical costumes by coloring it differently, or leaving it bare.

I agree completely. It has always bugged me that our robotic arms are restricted to being JUST robotic, instead of anything inhuman. Maybe not tentacles per se, as tentacles don't have elbows, but why not a bony zombie upper arm, a hulking mutant monster arm, a wooden arm, a skeletal arm, an "ethereal" arm that doesn't have geometry but rather just an aura... There is much more to do with upper arms than JUST technology, much in the same way that there is more to do with lower arm gloves than just technology, as our current selection of gloves would suggest.

In fact, let us keep the human shape of our upper arm and texture it separate from the body. That way, I can have a bare chest and a "red right arm" that's bio-organic from the shoulder down. I don't really mind keeping the disc at the shoulder, too.

In fact, next time you're in the Hollows, have a look at Foreshadow. Look closely and you'll notice that he's actually using the Robotic Arms torso, only his upper arms are actually human and more brawny than a model of his size and physique should have. That right there shows you what the technology can currently do, but just doesn't.

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Skins: It would be nice to have skin patterns that actually belonged to the skin of the character instead of the costume piece. This is probably completely impossible but it would really be cool if things like tattoos, tiger stripes, rocky skin, scales, etc could be selected where you select skin color, and then have those things "shine through" wherever skin showed on the other costume pieces.

This brings us back to the first problem I mentioned - if you want to put anything over the skin in the form of "paint-on clothes," the skin needs to be smooth and lack details. That way, you can get a reasonable illusion that the pattern is actually very tight, very stretchy spandex that just happens to suck into every crevice on your ripped bod. Once you start adding details with colour to them, however, such as with most armour pieces, you lose that illusion completely. On a bare chest, you can get the illusion that the patterns which shine through are just contour lines. On an armour plate, it looks like transparent cellophane that shows not just shape but actually show the underlying patterns. In fact, pick a male bare chest (with nipples) and try to use paint-on clothes on it. It doesn't work, because the nipples ruin the illusion. They make the "clothes" feel transparent.

Tattoos used with the current technology would have much the same problem. Suppose you had a girl with a large tribal tattoo running from the base of her neck all the way down to her pelvis. Putting an "athletic" top in the form of Tops With Skin over that tattoo would actually show the tattoo right through the top. And that's IF the tattoo were written into the skin texture the same way Tsoo and Yakuza tattoos are. That, in itself, creates the need for a massive number of redundant textures.

The problem, as I see it, is that the game can only apply one single-colour pattern to any one texture. You can't have two patterns on the same texture, because I don't believe the engine has any good way to overlap them, and the UI probably couldn't display them. Furthermore, even if you could, your tattoos would be uni-coloured.

The only real solution to this is to use the current technology for Female Shirts, which are actually not patterns at all, but are rather additional geometry laid about half an inch above the surface of the skin. On the one hand, this is good, since you can have whatever you want underneath and the shirt will still cover it with its own texture. You could potentially have a naked female torso under those shirts (you can't, but you could) and no-one will ever know because the shirt would obscure it. The problem with shirts (aside from men not having any) is that they are very BAD at mimicking skintight clothing like the kind of tights heroes are famous for.

I don't know what solution there could be to this problem, but it's not actually something the art team should be expected to handle. This is an engine functionality that should be down to engine programmers to supply the art team with that functionality, with which they can then make more costume pieces.

Yeah, I've spent some time thinking about these things

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

1. Mr. Nak.... can I call you Mr. Nak? Cause that's an awesome name.
2. So, as "Art Lead", are you in charge of Sexy Jay?
3. When can I finally have my International "No" symbol for a chest detail? It's been a glaring omission that I asked for years ago:

One thing I would like to see is adding horns as an option to monsterous heads. Or at least adding a head that resembles a cow/bull, complete with horns. I'm trying to create a good looking minataur, and the humanoid faces look completely off.