Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-25330335-20160522015658

Alright, I'm sure you are sick of me posting highlighted threads of seemingly little importance here, that are usually cryptic, and hard to read, etc. However, this is an important matter. Now, this is probably a premature thread, but there is a major need for discussion. This is a hard concept (some of it), that I mostly don't understand, I am sure that there are those of you that do more than I. Many of you have heard the mutterings (and seen some of the images, no doubt) of doing block renderings for the wiki for the block pages. Now, this presents a few challenges, some of which can be overcome, some that cannot be. We would like three-dimentional images of blocks for the block pages, we know that. You may have seen the Rohan Brick page, where the image in question (the one in the infobox) is disproportionate. This is because that is simply an image taken in-game and then cropped and then had the background removed. Now, you have probably seen the Minecraft wiki (and the Blue Mountains Crafting Table page crafting grid icons) where the blocks have been rendered (in the case of the Minecraft wiki) with blender or photoshop, or taken as icons using the minecraft rendering engine (in the case of the icons on the CT page, I did those myself). There are a few roadblocks in the way here, which I will list out:


 * Proper Isometric Renders are very time consuming to produce (Prespective renders are slightly easier to make (can be done in GIMP, so it's free), but they don't look quite as nice, see below)
 * There are so dang many blocks added by the LOTR mod, it would take a good month to do them all with five guys rendering a few blocks a day each. It doesn't actually take that long to render one, but all the prep work and settings, it does take probably 5-10 minutes to do a good perspective render in gimp
 * The angles all need to be exactly the same, especially if the page covers a few blocks and needs to be in gif format, it would look stupid if they were moving around slightly
 * We need to figure out how to make decent quality images that fit in infoboxes. The current CSS on the wiki scales the images so that they fit inside the infoboxes without a margin. I believe (I'm not sure, but I think) that the infoboxes are different widths in pixels depending on the size and resolution of your screen. We need a way to make high quality images for any device. The 16 pixel icons have already been fixed, though that is still being carried out.

In the first bullet, I talked about an isometric render verses a perspective render. The minecraft wiki uses isometric renders because they look quite nice, but Minecraft itself uses a perspective render, in order to make the world look more realistic. Let me show you examples. The isometric render has completely vertical edges, though it appears that it it wider at the base than the top. The perspective render is slightly wider at the top, and appears that way. The lighting factors can be played with.



Which of these styles do you like better, not counting the lighting? There are a few other options. There are ways to write programs that will build isometric renders of blocks for us, but that is not completely straightforward. It might also be possible to write a javascript renderer that could use a source file on the wiki (16px 2d icon) and then build the render directly on the page with the required zoom level. However, Sinth has told me that it would be fairly difficult to do this, so it might take some time. Thoughts? Thanks for reading and putting up with me, here is a poll, but please discuss, it does help to improve the wiki.

 SamwiseFilmore (Admin) (Fill My Mailbox)

Which Should we use? Isometric Perspective JavaScript  