Creating Art and mods

Overview

This wiki page has been created to give you detailed information on how to create art for PlaneShift, this goes through the assets needed, the tools and the techniques. Please remember this is a collaborative effort, so EDIT this page if you think you have good information to share!!

Assets Needed

Here is a list of assets you may decide to create and contribute to PlaneShift:

• Screenshots used as advertizing or press material
• Sketches and concept art
• Fan made videos
• Textures for existing models
• New 3d items (geometry, UVs, textures) used as props
• Full areas (for example a new cave level)
• Monster or character model (geometry, UV, textures)
• Monsters or character rigging (skeleton/bones setup)
• Monsters or characters animation
• Rendered scenes used as advertizing or press material (example youtube channel)

For each of the items above there are different tools and techniques to use, which we are documented here below.

Screenshots

Taking screenshots of the game seems a simple task, but it's actually very useful. We use screenshots in our "pic of the day", in articles, contact with press and on our web sites. If you want to provide nice screenshots, please do so! You can post your screenshots here.

Important Notes:

• To take screenshots disable text labels (from the game option menu)
• be sure to use high resolution settings and shader quality in pslaunch options.
• Screenshots from 1024x768 or more are good.
• To save a screenshot you can use the in game command : /screenshot (the image is saved in the %appdata% dir)
• To save a screenshot without the UI use: /screenshot nogui
• If you want to save to high quality no compression PNG use: /screenshot lossless

Sketches and concept art

We definitely need to enrich our world with more buildings, tools, cloths, items, etc... all of them need to be race based. The idea is that each race has a special/unique style and looking at a building you should be able to tell which race created it.

Important Notes:

• Be sure to play the game first and get a feeling of the current art
• Be sure to read the Races page on main site. There are sketches of their architecture already
• Items, tools, faces, clothes, special characters, weapons, etc.. all are good and useful to us

Fan made videos

We may use fan made videos to spread the word about the game, and what it looks like in game. You should record the videos using an external program, and then edit the video as you wish. There are already a number of fan made videos on youtube, and having more is surely a benefit for advertizing PS. Also if you think your video is great, you can submit it to us to be posted in the Official PlaneShift YouTube channel.

Textures for existing models

PlaneShift always under development, so any improvement to existing textures is very welcome. The easiest way to redo/improve a texture is to go to your PlaneShift folder, navigate into the "art" directory and open the zip called materials.zip. This file contains all textures of the game. PlaneShift uses DDS format in the released binaries. DDS format is pretty popular amongst game developers, and you can find tools to view them on the web, example here. It's important to note that DDS is a lossy format, so you always work with PNG as source.

You can read this article for making textures.

Rendered scenes

Mainly for press, articles and advertizing we need trailers, rendered scenes and videos. Those can be made of existing models or new models. If you are interested in creating such kind of rendered scenes, it's bests if you first contact us, as you will probably need access to the existing models.