I was collaborating with Cethiel from start to finish on this. We were talking about this very early.
Technically his dragon is 3D, because -- as we know, and which is no secret -- it can be rendered from various angles, such as completely top down. But -- from what he told me -- it's a 3D representation made with 2D animation software intended for creating 2D animations -- the 3D model is NOT a polygonal 3D model, or even any boundary representation such as NURBS that could be easily converted. As I understand it, it's composed of multiple deformed layers. As such it cannot be used in real-time 3D game engines, and it probably doesn't even have any interchangeable file format it could be exported to. Even if someone managed to create an exporter for it, the topology of the model would have to be manually corrected and so on... which would be as much work, if not more.
So to obtain this model, which is widey usable in 3D game engines, manual modelling from ground up had to be done.
More formats for convenience is nice, but game devs will probably have no trouble converting 2D animations into whatever format they require... uncompressed image sequence is the most general and sufficient format that can be further processed with ffmpeg, imagemagick etc., to suit the specific engine.
I also couldn't believe this wasn't "truly" 3D, especially after seeing the death animation iin which the dragon rotates completely 90 degrees towards the camera. But I've been told it's just a number of deformed layers. I don't know about any free SW that can easily and directly do this, but I think you could mimic this with Blender. For just "normal" 2D layered animation Blender or Synfig Studio are more than sufficient.
As @MedicineStorm says, ideally people won't be able to just take this and sell it without adding something extra, because here it is available for free. To be honest, in today's world people buy things blindly and this can happen -- I myself sell my own models that I post here and in other places completely for free under CC0, and people do buy them.
People sometimes try to limit commercial use in licenses (typical example: CC-BY-NC license), but this almost always means the work can no longer be considered free-as-in-freedom by definition. These works are rejected by the free culture community and cannot be hosted here, on Wikimedia Commons etc.
There are borderline-case licenses, such as the Open Font License, which limit commercial use to some degree (selling the file on its own), but in such a way that can very easily be bypassed (by attaching a dummy file), and so we still consider these works free, although this is very unfortunate, because this is just a "gotcha" restriction which essentially has no meaning (can be trivially bypassed) while causing a bit more trouble and confusion to the users of the work, showing a bit of distrust etc. I personally strongly discourage these licenses.
Now there is a type of license which is both free, and protects the work against shady abuse -- we call it copyleft, and they are available here at OGA (CC-BY-SA, GPL, ...). These licenses require that anyone redistributing your work has to keep it under that license, which states that the work can freely be shared. So a person can take your work and sell it, which is not prohibited, but at the same time they have to offer it for free. However, this then poses a barrier to any commercial use, and so some people are discouraged from reusing such works, and there is a camp of people who oppose copyleft because they say it's simply restrictive.
Finally, once you have published a work under CC0 (this one), you cannot take it back -- CC0 states in its text that you cannot do this. So you can consider a copyleft license for your next work... but if you ask me personally, I am from the people who encourage CC0. I personally publish everything as CC0 and only favorite things under CC0, because these works offer complete freedom to artists, without any asterisks, and I simply ignore anyne potential abusers (I haven't encountered any yet)... they damage their own karma :) Anyway, the choice is yours, and as long as it is a license granting all four essential freedoms, we welcome your contributions.
Nice collection! If you're looking for more, one alternative collection is my favorited posts -- I only favorit CC0 art here -- so feel free to check these out.
Beautiful! Thank you so much for this :-)
I was collaborating with Cethiel from start to finish on this. We were talking about this very early.
Technically his dragon is 3D, because -- as we know, and which is no secret -- it can be rendered from various angles, such as completely top down. But -- from what he told me -- it's a 3D representation made with 2D animation software intended for creating 2D animations -- the 3D model is NOT a polygonal 3D model, or even any boundary representation such as NURBS that could be easily converted. As I understand it, it's composed of multiple deformed layers. As such it cannot be used in real-time 3D game engines, and it probably doesn't even have any interchangeable file format it could be exported to. Even if someone managed to create an exporter for it, the topology of the model would have to be manually corrected and so on... which would be as much work, if not more.
So to obtain this model, which is widey usable in 3D game engines, manual modelling from ground up had to be done.
Thank you, this is what happens when someone freely shares their work :) Another collaboration with Cethiel may be going on right now, stay tuned.
More formats for convenience is nice, but game devs will probably have no trouble converting 2D animations into whatever format they require... uncompressed image sequence is the most general and sufficient format that can be further processed with ffmpeg, imagemagick etc., to suit the specific engine.
I also couldn't believe this wasn't "truly" 3D, especially after seeing the death animation iin which the dragon rotates completely 90 degrees towards the camera. But I've been told it's just a number of deformed layers. I don't know about any free SW that can easily and directly do this, but I think you could mimic this with Blender. For just "normal" 2D layered animation Blender or Synfig Studio are more than sufficient.
Oh, another awesome set of textures :) I'm thinking of updating my Minetest texture pack with these.
Thank you, favorited :) Very nice work.
As @MedicineStorm says, ideally people won't be able to just take this and sell it without adding something extra, because here it is available for free. To be honest, in today's world people buy things blindly and this can happen -- I myself sell my own models that I post here and in other places completely for free under CC0, and people do buy them.
People sometimes try to limit commercial use in licenses (typical example: CC-BY-NC license), but this almost always means the work can no longer be considered free-as-in-freedom by definition. These works are rejected by the free culture community and cannot be hosted here, on Wikimedia Commons etc.
There are borderline-case licenses, such as the Open Font License, which limit commercial use to some degree (selling the file on its own), but in such a way that can very easily be bypassed (by attaching a dummy file), and so we still consider these works free, although this is very unfortunate, because this is just a "gotcha" restriction which essentially has no meaning (can be trivially bypassed) while causing a bit more trouble and confusion to the users of the work, showing a bit of distrust etc. I personally strongly discourage these licenses.
Now there is a type of license which is both free, and protects the work against shady abuse -- we call it copyleft, and they are available here at OGA (CC-BY-SA, GPL, ...). These licenses require that anyone redistributing your work has to keep it under that license, which states that the work can freely be shared. So a person can take your work and sell it, which is not prohibited, but at the same time they have to offer it for free. However, this then poses a barrier to any commercial use, and so some people are discouraged from reusing such works, and there is a camp of people who oppose copyleft because they say it's simply restrictive.
Finally, once you have published a work under CC0 (this one), you cannot take it back -- CC0 states in its text that you cannot do this. So you can consider a copyleft license for your next work... but if you ask me personally, I am from the people who encourage CC0. I personally publish everything as CC0 and only favorite things under CC0, because these works offer complete freedom to artists, without any asterisks, and I simply ignore anyne potential abusers (I haven't encountered any yet)... they damage their own karma :) Anyway, the choice is yours, and as long as it is a license granting all four essential freedoms, we welcome your contributions.
I would favorite this if it didn't have a licensing problem -- please consider dropping the problematic condition as @MedicineStorm says.
Nice collection! If you're looking for more, one alternative collection is my favorited posts -- I only favorit CC0 art here -- so feel free to check these out.
*jaw drops to the floor*
Thank you for another great texture :) So many awesome hand-painted CC0 posts lately.
Here is another previews I made when testing this in Blender:
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