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I've found that a LOT of times the most striking improvements to the artwork is through the tweaking of contrast on ingame items/models. Granted it's not a replacement for upping the resolution as a whole (especially since those of us who ran KR know how the models COULD look), but it IS a good start. I'll have to check and see if the Fire Beetle got a similar tweak. Many of the tweaks done since KR was unveiled seemed to wash out the detail the same way the dragon's wings were washed out.
Yup that's exactly what it is. When we made these assets, we made sure that they all has what's called a secular map - for those who don't know, that is a bitmap that makes places one a model shiny. Well, this works great under 2 conditions: 1) you keep your specular map under control, and 2) when you don't have massive areas of flat surface facing the camera, like the surfaces of the wings. Mesanna asked me to look into making the dragons look better, so I went in and fixed those things and re-rendered out the animations.
-Grimm
