Introduction: Battleground owes its very existence in large part to David Lloyd.  David was the first fantasy artist I found on www.renderosity.com and his fantastic battle scenes featuring knights and skeletons convinced us that we could get the art we needed from CGI artists.  This was particularly important because live artists made it clear we couldn't get scaled overhead shots with identical angle, lighting, backgrounds, etc., from them!

David did all of the art for the Men of Hawkshold as well as all of the skeleton units for the Undead army, and his battle scenes were prominently featured in our early advertisements and banners.  Perhaps as important (from a launch perspective) as the quality of David's art was the speed with which he delivered it; our soft-launch at the GAMA Trade Show featured only Davd's art.  As noted, David did about a faction and a half of our initial three; no other artist came close, and since then only Richard Kitner, Jr. (aka Forevernyt) has ever delivered an entire faction on his own.

Since our initial launch, David produced several units in the Elves of Ravenwood and did all the art for our Terrain Pack.  I'm certain we'll see more of his work in future Battleground expansions.  David has also supported Battleground as a fan, creating buildings, boats and token sheets as free downloads.  You can see more of his work at his website as well as at his page on Renderosity.

Enjoy this story on how one of our original monsters came to unlife.

- Chad Ellis

The Art of Battleground - Skeletal Troll.

Or

You want a WHAT???  Hmmm... 

by David Lloyd

As you may or may not know, the artwork that you see gracing the cards and posters for BGFW has been created in the main by using digital 3d models that are then positioned within a fully digital environment and rendered into a final image that can be printed.

The 3d figures, characters, and critters that inhabit the BGFW world are customised and modified versions of stock 3D digital models that are available at several online stores. The amount of modifying that is needed to convert one of the base figures into the characters that you see on the final product can vary widely depending on the complexity of the figure and upon its uniqueness.

The skeletal troll was one of the more interesting customisation jobs that I've done for BGFW.

As there were no 3d model troll skeletons in existence I decided that I'd try and make the skeleton out of a heavily modified human skeleton 3d model. When looking for the human skeleton model, I chose to use a fairly high resolution human skeleton - higher resolution - more polygons - makes it easy to modify and yet retain a smoothish shape in the final model. That one has about 36500 polygons in it.

As you can see, there's a fair bit of difference between the troll model that Richard¹ used for the trolls in the Orc army and the human skeleton model, both in shape/proportions and overall size.

Now, onto the customization process. The first step was to thin down the troll figure to see where the bones stuck out from it, in effect removing as much of the fat and muscle as possible from the model.

After roughly scaling the human figure up to the same height as the thinned troll we then go to work on reshaping the skeleton to fit the troll - luckily there are numerous 3d programs available that make this next part a bit easier than it might sound.

Essentially, this is done by moving the polygons that make up the model in various directions to create new shapes out of them. Most of the modifying involved in this project was done to lengthen or shorten or thicken various parts of the limbs and torso (the arms were lengthened, the legs were shortened and thickened, a fair amount of curvature was added to the spine....). A few fingers were also removed and a couple of extra vertebrae were added into the neck region of the skeleton to get it more troll like. For this project, the feet were pretty much left as they were as they would be hidden by the grass in the final picture.

The objective throughout this process was to make a skeleton that could reasonably "fit inside" the thinned down troll model.

Finally the head was modified. This involved firstly both flattening the skull in a vertical direction and then elongating it in a fore-aft direction. The bottom jaw was also extended and made broader, the canine teeth enlarged and the bone structure about the nose and eyes were reshaped to more closely resemble that of the fleshed troll.

After retexturing, you can see the final version of the troll skeleton here ->

Once the modelling was completed, then the trolls were armed and posed into their warlike poses and inserted into the standard "grass" scene that was used for all of the cards' top down views.

This was then rendered (converting the 3d data to a 2d full colour image) from a pre determined point of view above the figures to create the final image. Small amounts of digital painting were then done on the render to get it to the final image that appears in the game.

¹ Richard Kitner, Jr.