Grimwolf's Workshop

Zack Maxwell

Working on my first release. I have most of the concept and basemesh down, but it feels kinda like it may be lacking something. A little extra detail.
It's a Juggernaut sword though, so I don't have much detail to work with anyway, having such a low poly/res limit.
Any advice and critiques would be cool.

hamstocks

Hey man, that's a pretty sweet sword. The only thing I'm not sure about is how well it will fit with jug's color scheme, as he has some oranges and whatnot. But anyway, good luck with your workshop!

Zack Maxwell

Yeah, something I was considering was adding orange illumination to the edges of the blade to better match him. The blade itself will also be darker than I made it in the concept, in order to match his armor.

Zack Maxwell

Woo, finished the High Poly.


The Low Poly is sitting at 390 Tris. Think that might hurt the odds of getting it accepted?
I think for Juggernaut it's supposed to be 300 on the regular model and 400 on the preview model.

Zack Maxwell

Got the base texture. Still need to bake it down and finish it up in Photoshop. The contrast is weak, and the paint is particularly dull.
Still need to decide on a good way to get that orange on the blade as well.

hamstocks

Yea, it's lookin good man, I just still needs some orange. Your idea could work, also maybe you could make part of the blade orange, like in between the edges, or maybe the edges themselves. But yea, an orange glow like you said would also be cool. the sculpt turned out great man

Zack Maxwell

Spent the last week trying to fix some baking issues with Modo SE, and finally decided to just fix the textures by hand after baking.

Here's a shot of the textured low-poly.
The orange on the blade has no actual illumination yet.

Zack Maxwell

Okay, whoa...
I was nearly finished with the whole thing, but it actually WILL NOT let me submit the item to try it out, because apparently 300 polys is a HARD limit on the sword. You can hardly do anything at all with just 300.
I can see now why there's so few great Juggernaut weapons. It'll take some work to get around that.

[NB] Mohsen

can we see how your low poly looks like?

Zack Maxwell

Actually, I had a surprisingly easy time dropping the poly count low enough. I kept the original for LOD0, and the new one is LOD1 used in-game. The handle in particular had way more geometry than necessary in order to make it excessively round.
I just have to clean up a couple things on the maps to accommodate the new LOD1, then I'll be able to get some final shots.

Pipotchi

I think its worth looking at the valve art/colour guides to try and get more of a value gradient on your sword. a lot of it is occupied by solid grey which isn't particularly exciting to look at, also the way that the grey melds into the orange isn't too nice because light greys and orange don't match particularly well together. at the hilt the red and browns and greys all sort of merge together because they are of the same tone also- this isnt a bad thing because it is not supposed to catch the viewer's eye with the hilt, but then you should in contrast make the tip of the blade more vibrant

Zack Maxwell

Thanks for the advice. I had already attempted to fix some of those issues. In particular, it was much too desaturated. Here's what it looks like right now. Keep in mind though that Marmoset's DotA shader doesn't handle Specular properly;


Looks a lot crazier in-game with the Juggernaut's particle effects playing on it.
I'd pretty much be done I think, except that I made the rather significant mistake of not inverting the green channel on the normal before baking it, so I have to go back and fix that.
I may still need to lighten the metal a bit as well, and make the rings more vibrant.

[NB] Mohsen

This may be a nooby question, but what does inverting the green channel on the normal map do?

Zack Maxwell

Different games read normal maps differently depending on how they do things. Using Modo to bake the normal, if I don't invert the green channel then DotA won't read it properly and the angle of the shading will be wrong.

Also, I was mistaken about Marmoset rendering the specular wrong; it looks the same in-game, which I can see now that the normal is fixed.
I just seem to have a misunderstanding about exactly what Tint by Specular does. According to the guide it should be a simple mask to determine which areas use the diffuse color in the specular, such as for a bronze section so the highlights will also be bronze instead of white.
In practice, it seems to function in a manner similar to Specular Intensity, controlling how shiny areas are. Maybe the guide listed the channels in the wrong order...
http://media.steampowered.com/apps/dota2/workshop/Dota2ShaderMaskGuide.pdf

[NB] Mohsen

I dont really find that guide quite useful. Instead just look at the default weapon's masks and try to imitate that

Zack Maxwell

Yeah, I think I'll do that.
Here's an in-game shot for now;

I definitely need to brighten that red more.

[NB] Mohsen

Try to make the base of the weapon's colors and masks match the color and masks of the bracer

Zack Maxwell

Got the promo image for it. Now all I have to do is get some screenshots and a turntable GIF, and I'm done.

hamstocks

nice work, glad to see you finish the sword!

Zack Maxwell

Done!
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=279678924
Please remember to rate it up if you like it

-EDIT-
Had to re-submit it to get a better promo image, so old ratings were lost.

Zack Maxwell

I made it to page two of this weeks most popular!
It seems to be doing pretty well, I'm really happy

Anyway, today I've gotta start concepting out my next piece. I think I'll do something for Bounty Hunter.

-Edit-
Page one, holy crap, YES!

[NB] Mohsen

Wow, Congrats!

Zack Maxwell

Rough concept of the Bounty Hunter weapon set I'm working on. Took a hell of a long time to come up with a good idea.


I'm working on building a new computer right now, so I think I'll wait to finish that before I start actually modeling this out. I'll take this as a good opportunity to possibly continue fleshing out the concept, though I'm pretty happy with what I have.

hamstocks

that bh blade looks pretty rad! I know what you mean when you say its hard to come up with a good bh blade idea, but you nailed it I think. cant wait to see it modeled

Moffee

good concept idea!

MdK

Nice blade, I really like the shapes on that one.

Zack Maxwell

I got the computer built, but between finishing that last item and starting on this one, I've realized just how sorely I'm missing out on ZBrush for this (I used to have it, but sold my license a couple months back; worst decision ever, by the way).
So I ordered a new license, and it'll take about a week to reach me, then I'll start working on this new weapon in earnest.
After blowing $700 for ZBrush on top of the cost of this new computer, I'm seriously hoping I can get a weapon accepted into the game soon

At least no one can say I'm not dedicated to this.

Zack Maxwell

I'm working on the basemesh now in ZBrush. It's a little bit of a learning curve though, because I'd previously only really worked on organic stuff in ZBrush. It's already much better than just using purely Modo SE, though. The baking process in particular is going to be way better, since I can use outside programs and create a cage.
My new computer is also strong enough to actually run my copy of Substance Painter, so the texturing will be better as well.
I expect that this one will actually take a while to finish while I get used to the new pipeline. The end result is going to be a huge improvement over the last, though.