Tale of the Skadu



Throughout Rashemen, storytelling has been the backbone of tradition. Tales varying from the soul eater to the man that lost touch with the spirits. Each tale tells a story and teaches a moral to all that would listen. Through Krahz'gorr, you can hear many of these kinds of stories, but one in particular is that of the Skadu. The Skadu, or quite literally the creature of shadow, is a mythological creature that is said to emerge from the sins of the world and swallow it into a world of complete darkness for all eternity until. There are many variations to this, especially in different cultures. There are arcane scholars who claim a creature from the sky will fall to the earth and feed off the life energy of the world (this creature was featured on Wizards a few years back), while others would refuse to believe in apocalyptic theory.

Whatever the case may be for you, you'll find several Red Wizards looking for this creature to harness its powers and bring the nations around them to ruin. Is the creature real and/or as powerful as it is made out to be? Or is it simply another tale?

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On another note, according to the poll currently, more of you would like to see more on creating skies and understanding the settings more than the rest. Which is a little bit surprising I should say. As far as that goes, I want to give those of you looking forward to it a warning in advance as to what to expect. Learning the settings for bloom and the perfect sky varies from personal taste and the type of colors you're working with. With that said, there isn't really one setting that works with every theme, so a little creativity and ingenuity might be involved. What I'll end up doing is providing scenarios and hopefully a thinking process that'll help guide you to the settings you're looking for.

I won't be doing Ayrin's bloom settings, because frankly, they cause more work than most of you want to get into. Ayrin had to create his own textures, paint the whole thing grey (which I sometimes do anyways) and even modify the SpeedTrees.

If you guys have any specific type of skies you want me to work with, speak now or forever hold you peace.

7 comments:

  Anonymous

April 21, 2008 at 12:37 AM

I'll hold my peace since I'm not a builder. But nifty screenie up there :) love the light effect.

Go Josh! Finals soon? :o

Liso

  Wyrin

April 21, 2008 at 2:58 AM

I voted for the sky and bloom - as it's somethign that is quite tricky and I'm not sure i can ever really get into it beyond just changing the default - setting up a whole day/night cycle seems really tough

Are you going to go into custom skydomes too?

  Josh

April 21, 2008 at 6:51 AM

I've got all my paper due this week and my finals all along the next week.. Media Player with a Power Point Presentation is due this Friday, so I'm dreading that monstrosity.

Skydomes are for the artistic folks who are pretty rad in Photoshop. Basically just an image located in a certain directory.

This is just a theory, but theoretically you can animate these images to make the clouds move, change color at certain times of the day and some other things. But I'm not sure.

  Ayrin

April 21, 2008 at 10:02 AM

I´ve just found a good tutorial about custom skydomes:
http://nwn2.wikia.com/wiki/Custom_skydome_Tutorial

I´ve did a quick test and it looks like it´s real hard to get the dome mapping right.

  dgraf

April 23, 2008 at 10:47 AM

As always - "beautifious"

dgraf

  Enric

April 24, 2008 at 6:22 AM

For a creature custom modeler, VFX tutorial would be fantastic. No doubt! ;)

I respect the poll, but i think we need know more about VFX editor

RegaRDsss

  Josh

April 24, 2008 at 11:48 AM

The sky tutorial probably wont take all that long whenever I can find the time to do it. It's mostly just a load of examples and tips.

The VFX tutorial will take a little longer, and it might be helpful if I could get Ayrin or somebody to assist with the creation of something for each part of the editor.