Jonty Roodnick, on 14 October 2015 - 10:13 AM, said:
Im glad you guys brought this up, apologies I didn't get to your questions. Several different artists/contractors painted patterns over the course of mechwarriors lifetime, each bringing their own styles. This created inconsistency in both pattern shape and quality. To counteract this I developed a tool for creating some of the more abstract patterns mathematically. With this new tool, patterns like vagabond, woodland and will retain the same style and proportionality with mathematical precision without ever repeating a shape (retaining variation). Some of my least favorite paint jobs are the old vagabonds, and intend to go back and bring them up to our current standards. Newer mechs like the blackknight have this treatment on them check it out.
But... I like the old vagabond patterns. The old vagabond on the Catapult mechs is one of my favorite patterns. Besides the Shadowcat I think the quality of the new vagabond patterns has declindes and they are to inhomogene. On some extremeties or areas of the mechs there are to big blotches of one color which does not break the mechs silhoutte. And on some extremeties or areas the blotches are to small and/or thin so they do not break the mechs silhoutte either. Onsome mechs it is hard to tell apart the new Vagabond and new TigerStripe patterns.
I also like the old 3 color Woodland patterns more than the new 4 color Woodland patterns where it is very anoying to have to toy around with that 4th color that can not really be chosen but instead does depend on one of the three colors. The new Woodland patterns besides this 4th color do also suffer from the same symptoms like Vagabond does. There are inhomogenities of the blotches so some areas are whole covered in only one color, while others have to thin/small blotches and both does not fullfill a camos job of breaking a vehicles silhoutte.
Pure randomness in generating those patterns may cause those problems as military camo patterns have a fix regularity. For example looking at the three color NATO pattern you can see that the black areas are continuous across the whole vehicle from top over the sides to the ground and filled with green areas inbetween. Like dark gaps in foliage or bushes. In these green areas there are smaller brown areas (adjecent to the black areas), which sometimes connect one black stripe to the other but never break them! Like soil/earth in between the foliage and gap pattern.
So maybe when calculating those camo patterns it should go some kind like this:
Paint whole mech green.
Create black areas from top to bottom of mech (kind of throwing a very bulky spidernet or octopus on top of the mech)
Then fill some percentage of the green areas between the black areas (spidernet/octopusfeet) with brown blotches which may connect from one to another arm of the black areas but never breaking them.
I really think the idea of automating pattern generation is a great idea which hopefully does lift some work of your shoulders. But when generating patterns there needs to be a certain regularity and laws because camo patterns are not purely random.
And pretty please can we have both woodland patterns once the automation does work? I loved the old woodland pattern as I really like the 3 color NATO camo and miss it on the new mechs.
Also I do miss the old Vagabond which was some kind of wavy fishnet pattern outlined in a second color on a third color base. Maybe we can have both kinds of Vagabond to?
And as three is a charm... I would love to get the old polygone camo pattern like on the initially released Wave I Invasion mechs back on all mechs. The evenly coverage of the mechs with all three colors in area and shapesize was perfect there! And got worse with the new mechs, when looking a the Raven mech it has become a completely different pattern and also on the Shadow Cat it more looks like painting jagged stripes of two colors on a third color background.
This has become a long post and I do not want to sound nagy but try to offer some constructive Ideas and that you understand the military paint job fans in the MWO community. We are crazy about those real life military patterns that have been around for more than half a century with all it's little details and as you have the power to offer those in MWO you are my heroes! It is so great to get some insight on your jobs, challenges and the tools you use to create the mechs. Thank you for that and I hope this kind of close relation to the community proceeds.
Edited by Ryoken, 16 October 2015 - 04:51 AM.
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