How the hell did I miss this? Really hope to see it finished and up to par with the concept. Especially like the clean feeling you have going on. Everything seems so spot on.
Very Interesting thread. So many things to aware of before I jumped in 3d. Thank you. Phantom Lancer is one of my favourites and I like your interpretation. Eagerly waiting for progress!
hey thanks for the feedback Bwample! You gave me some ideas.
I really like your thoughts on the left shoulder (his right). I wouldn't have to do double sided either, which would save a couple polys or let me have more fidelity on that side. Not sure how I feel about the center gem but it's spawning some ideas for sure.. and I do have a gem on the shoulder skull, so it could totally work, might just shrink the size. Simplifying the necklace to one claw was on my list of ways to save tri's so I'm glad you pointed that out as it gives me more confidence in that decision.
Did a first pass weapon diffuse. Didn't touch any of the masking maps yet, it looks way too shiny and the fresnel is crazy in some areas.
I'm having a lot of trouble iterating. Every time I try to update my textures in the tool it ignores my updats. I even went so far as to scribble black over my texture, cancel out, and submit again and I didn't see it. Is there a specific way to guarantee your changes go in?
edit: even completely leaving the DOTA2 program, hue shifting my weapon purple, and redoing the import process and it doesn't see anything new ;(
There has to be something I'm missing.. I saved the textures and fbx both fresh in a new directory, excited dota, booted, imported... same. Doh.
I created an account just to be able to post on this thread. I am a Dota player and I absolutely love your design. Keep up the good work- I will 100% buy this if it comes out.
Also, I thought that you could use a little player perspective too. Phantom lancer's attack animations ingame have a pretty wide arc, and it makes the weapon very conspicuous, especially the blade part of the spear. Now I don't know if this is even something you have to consider for your submission or something Valve tinkers with after they approve models for the game, but the blade of your spear feels just slightly too big to me. Other than that it looks really perfect.
And lastly about the design, someone posted an alternate shoulder above, and although it looks awesome too, I have to say I agree with your original design more, the style of the plume fits this hero a little better. The alternate design would suit a mage character more- mages like Rubick and Invoker have this type of shoulder armor. Since Phantom lancer is an assasin/fighter character and it starts out with those asymmetrical shoulders, so I'm leaning towards your design.
I think you could even make the plume branch out and trail a little longer but I really like your design as it is.
@Managor - Thanks! It'll get there. I'm really, really itching to start texturing the rest, I just don't have much free time lately ;(
@cerberusd - Thanks dude, it really means a lot. You're right about the blade. As much we all love over sized weapons, it clips through the ground in game, so I'm going to try to scale it back a tad if it doesn't hurt the feel. I don't know if other character's weapons do the same in regards to clipping.
As for the shoulder piece, I'm most likely going to try both and see a) what looks better in game b) what's more cost efficient and c) what people's preference is. It wont be hard to prototype out so we can take a look at them both in game. Thanks a ton for your support and feedback, I appreciate it!
@agentfx - I tried that too.. No dice. When I hit 'import' it even only takes 2-3 seconds, as opposed to 10-20 seconds like it used to. I see the full list of 'imported' things, but it's clearly not catching. Maybe it will decide to work again after I try importing one of the other pieces.
@EVIL - thanks man! I will do my best to do the concept justice.
I also separated my textures into their own folder, not sure if that helps but there are only 4 files in each folder for each item. I can help you trouble shoot it if you want on gchat.
Thank you for the reply -
I think that trying out both would be the best solution as well. I can't wait to see the ingame pics.
In regards to clipping there was a weapon for a hero called bounty hunter that was released with the latest batch of cosmetics, and it was clipping the ground initially but got fixed by being resized in a patch a week or two later. My sense is that clipping shouldn't be too big of an issue, with the game being in beta and all.
@ agentfx - thanks dude, I tried a bunch of stuff then gave up, but the next day it just started working again once I tried importing new objects lol. If I get hung up again I will gladly accept any assistance you are willing to give . I think I'm most worried about rigging heh. Is there a way to do it by selection in maya instead of just 'painting' it. That's the only tool I know in maya so far in regards to rigging, but I'd rather manually select verts and assign values since it's so low poly.
@cerberusd - good to know! Thanks for the info. the resize will come next time I have a weapon update.
I've been continuing my snails pace in the free time I have at home, yesterday blocking out most of the legs texture, tonight doing the arm guard sculpt. Originally I was going to have the crystal things separate but it just costs too many triangles to do it that way . I think though from game cam this will work fine:
Thanks again guys. I can't wait for this weekend to make much more substantial progress... then trying to decide who to do next. I'm thinking perhaps Queen of Pain, but not sure. I want to give one of the lesser popular characters some love.
Next time the importing stops working, try removing the imported files from the dota game folder, I do that every time I've imported something and have not had any issues so far.
I really like your spear, the colors are great and work very well with Phantom Lancer, looking forward to seeing some color on the bracer aswell, keep it up.
Good progress so far!
I had a big troubles trying to put lance into game correctly. Looks like you didn't have such issues. I'm wondering maybe it's because you are using Maya?
@Pierate: Good call! I did a search to try to find the files imported but nothing came up so I figured they were stored on the server side. I'll have to manually look for them next time. @StolenPants: Yup! @Kraken: Thanks man. It could be, It seems to come in pretty close for me.
Didn't get anywhere near as much time to work this weekend as I had hoped.
Also was trying to get by with a bunch of shortcuts but man has it come around to bite me in the ass. if I have time to do a second character I'm doing it a better way... and less feathers and horns, those poly-whores! Gonna be fun cutting down the shoulders... will do a test run first to see if it's worth simplifying the design more or if I can get away with it as is.
Anyway, small update, but some progress on the diffuse:
The feathers on his back are still very placeholder as are the textures on them. Most textures have just had a base color thrown down with exception of the belt which has had more time.
I'm not really sure how much you should worry about the weapon being oversized. I mean I guess if it's clipping then yeah that needs to be fixed, but if you take a look at the Honors of the Golden Mane set that Steam is currently selling, the blade on it is MUCH bigger than your design. Maybe shorten the haft a bit if anything, but I don't think the blade itself is too big. Keep up the good work!
Yeah Draggy, I've seen the weapon you're referring to, good point. My plan currently is to downsize the blade by 10-15% and then shorten the shaft by just a tad, hopefully those two combined can minimize the clipping. I don't want it to feel small though you know? I like how it feels. Thanks for the feedback!
Tiny update on the arms, had to change the design a tad because it was not taking into the account of what if the player bought one piece, but not another, and on PL his shoulder piece actually includes the arm band, and the way we had it designed before would clip. Now if you swap the arms it will just add another band above the standard one instead of clipping. I would have put the band into the Shoulder slot but I'm already struggling to get that under budget as is.
Rigging this thing is what nightmares are made of. I'm sure the wrist issue is just something weird happening, but this shoulderpiece is going to kill me. There also just isn't enough budget to fit the shoulder feathers, so I had to cut them . The rest of this will prove enough of a challenge as it is lol. Texturing is coming along, but I couldn't ignore the looming import and rig process so I wanted to try some quick tests tonight.
here's some fails. Not sure how I'm going to get away with minimal clipping on the shoulder, it'll take some playing around with but I don't think I can outright avoid clipping with those feathers there. arg!
Looks like a few people are having issues with Phantom Lancers rig being unaligned. I had a PM from someone who had the same issue with Queen of Pain, ended up being a combination of 3dsmax and using the supplied .fbx files.
Might save you some time and hastle if you are using 3dsmax? to extract the .smd's from the client and give them a bash?
@Naso - thanks! no worries, I haven't touched the horns yet really.
@Lennyagony - I'm using maya. I'll try redownloading the file and rigging from that, maybe I busted mine up somehow. If it keeps up I'm definitely gonna tinker around. Thanks for the suggestion!
another micro update, didn't have much time last night but I worked on the shoulder texture a tad more, and thought I'd show the current full armor set.
I'm going away this weekend so I won't have tons of time to put into it unfortunately but it's getting close. Need to polish the texture more, do the masks, then downrez the shoulders/belt and rig.
looking great. Only thing I'd say is remember the gradient top to bottom. I'd darken down the belt and the blue highlight I'd knock down even further.
edit oh and lighten the shoulder a bit. I think thats the best part and you might want to draw the eye up there a bit more.
I agree with agentfx, it will help create better visual interest.
This set is looking awesome BTW! It looks like a set that valve would create themselves. It's the best of the Phantom Lancer sets in my opinion. Great work, I can't wait to see it all in game.
Good call agentfx! Working that in. @Gareth - Thanks man! I really appreciate your kind words.
Alright so I wanted to get an update in since it's been a while. I hoped to do a second set but I've been crunching so I haven't had time to work on this let alone a second set. .
The nightmare part of this particular set is over, I think. I had to unfortunately sacrifice some of the design in order to (barely!) fit within the triangle budget. I think it's still pretty cool though. I'd love to find 3 more tri's to cut so I can add more curvature to the horns back in, but honestly from the in-game distance I doubt anyone will notice.
Here's the breakdown of the two sets that gave me trouble, especially the shoulders. I'll be adding faux-back faces to the shoulder feathers for the lod0 so they show when you rotate the character around, and I'm still working on the textures of the belt feathers, will unify the metal colors since the shoulder ones are more yellow, and I'm probably going to turn the shoulder swirl metal piece into a greentooth for a pc shoutout. It's funny how our designs naturally gravitate towards these types of shapes, in reference to Kraken's design (his set is looking great by the way, make sure to check it out if you like Phantom Lancer!).
Outside of that it's just painting the rest of the normals, masks, and rigging it up. Excited to finally get close to finishing, even if I am afraid of how it will look rigged aha.
between crunch time and pc issues I haven't had much time at all for this and am super gracious that they were able to extend the time so I can sort the rest of my issues out. I took some screen shots:
what they currently look like in game:
current issues I'm having:
The arm piece and weapon work fine now, I had to actually re-import the body .fbx to get these things to show up in the right place, which was by far the biggest issue I had getting started.
As you can see in the second image, I'm having a doosey of a time getting this rigged in a way that works with him. In image 1, you see the back strap. I THINK I can finesse this out, but trying a weight gradient so far hasn't worked well, same with the clipping on his necklace. Might just need to pull the geo out more? not sure yet.
in image 2, I'm having a lot of trouble with the feathers. There's gonna be a lot of clipping.. should I size them down? They might be too small then.. right now I have them bound to the bicep so they don't shoot straight through. Problem is, when he does any other animation, the feathers will go with the arm. Argh!
Image 3, same issue as 1, the necklace is going through him, and the strap is a bit wonky. just finessing, I'm sure.
image 4 and 5 are my biggest issues. The belt just will not look correct. I've tried a bunch of stuff and it just looks like ass, it will collapse so far into him that you can't see the second layer of his belt. Is it just a lack of geo thing, or the design itself? Right now I'm kind of at a loss of what to do here.. the only real thing I can think of is to add more geo where the fold is maybe. I can afford it on the high poly but not on the low. The way everything collapses around his joints though is a real pickle.
If anyone has any advice or insight on how to improve/fix these things I'd love to hear.
Outside of my current rigging woes, I just need to finish the texture on the belt and futz with the masks some more.
Thanks again everyone! Here's hoping I can solve the rigging stuff without too much hassle.
@beetrootChan - thanks a lot man! I'm glad you like it.
got some time today finally, and found a way to fix it for the most part, at least on the lod0:
I removed the additional loop that I had thought was going to help in the leather belt thingy, and instead added a loop/some cuts to the part under it, near the bottom verts of the aforementioned leather part. What was happening before (and it could be due to shoddy rigging) was it had been collapsing to the center edges as seen in pictures above.
now that this is mostly resolved for me I'm going to finish the belt texture, masks, and finish this baby up. What have people been doing for presentation? Just lit max/maya renders?
Looking good! Personally, I like it when its rendered with a good front and back view, along with individual items against a greyed out body/base. Anuxinamoon's entrys are a good example. I rendered my first in Maya, trying to mimic what I saw in game. Just make it look sweet:)
Tonight was me trying to figure out how the hell to light and do stuff correctly in maya. I'm still not there but I learned a lot tonight, including that I've been handling my rigging wrong... there's a reason I've had to re rig it like 50 times - I keep deleting ALL history instead of just non deformer history. When I was taught maya I was told to delete all history fairly often to keep my scene clean. Not in this case lol, learned the hard way.
Tomorrow or whenever I get more time I'm going to do another full pass on the rigging from scratch, then try to figure out how to get lighting the way I want it, with shadows. I don't want to need to bring it into max, but maya is being a jerk. I can't seem to figure out how to get it looking right. A lot of times I just can't even get shadows to work. What do people usually render in for maya? high quality rendering? Viewport 2.0? And are any of you taking screens straight from the viewport?
enough talking and babbling, here's the pose I'm probably going to go with, along with a test lighting scenario minus shadows (can't figure out how to make the damn things work in the scene I have).
This set is really beautiful, nice models and beautiful colors all around. All the heroes and items in the game follow one rule though; color degradation (darkness) from head to toe, this is explained in the art guide i think. You might want to check it out before finalizing your submission.
hey man, for sure. It's there but I guess not apparent enough. Especially on the bottom of the spear and the feathers on the belt, I'll have to lower the contrast even more and darken it 15% or so. I didn't want to take it too extreme but if it's not reading then it needs more. Thanks for the heads up!
@Pina, JacqueChoi, and Gareth_Thomas -
Thanks a ton guys. I'm just pushing through some tech issues and then it should be in. I want to get this done ASAP lol.
Right now my issue is that Phantom Lancer's imported pose is different than his rigged pose... and for some reason after I rigged the shoulder and arms, the LOD1 versions that were still unrigged are now out of position.
My question is - is there any way to save a skeleton pose and load it onto another skeleton? I want to take the freshly loaded PL skeleton pose and apply it to the one that I had checked 'Assume Preferred Angle' on.
UPDATE!
While I would still like to know if there's a way to copy/paste a skeleton pose, I did find a way around my issue. The only important joint that was off was one of the spines, so I rotated it to 'fit' my other objects as close as possible, copied weights from the LOD0's, then reset the pose and they all moved into place together. Whew. I hope that's the last I have to deal with that haha!
I got the rig as close as I could, there's still some issues but hopefully it gets additional loving from valve if they deem it worthy, since I hear they usually touch up stuff themselves before letting anything through.
Can you not just import both skeletons into the same scene and match SRT of the incorrect on to that of the correct one. There aren't that many bones. Just do it manually.
@Gareth - I'm afraid I don't know what an SRT is . I think I did what you're saying basically though. I wound up just twisting the spine until the pieces matched up, then rigged the other two items. It worked!
@Agentfx - thanks man! lots of technical roadblocks and lots of crunch at work but I'm almost there!
@GxD11 - Thanks dude! I definitely wanted some bold colors and I'm glad you like them.
I spent tonight fiddling with trying to get them in the Dota2 test client. After a few failed attempts I got it right thanks to tips from the guys in the Workshop thread. I need to move some verts because the necklace is clipping, as well as import the latest textures (belt is outdated in this one and I haven't made the new changes yet) and update some chest belt weighting.
pics!
my big issue is the shoulderpiece right now. It clips pretty heavily into the arm since it's 100% weighted to the L Clavicle... I want it to be more flexible but if I weight it to the nearest part of the arm(bicep) it changes in position DRASTICALLY. (it wants to move right a bunch, I don't understand why because I haven't even moved the bone itself). If anyone has any ideas of what I might be doing wrong I'd really appreciate it. I'll try to get an image up in a minute.
Sorry I shouldn't have abbreviated. SRT stands for Scale Rotate Translate/Transform. It doesn't really matter as long as you got it to come right in the end As for the shoulder piece, I think I had a similar problem with Skeleton King. I think they bind their shoulder pieces to the clavicle so that they can get secondary animation on it so that it doesn't look like it's part of the arm, rather that it's sitting on top. What I did was give about 98% of the weights to the upper arm and then 2% to the clavicle. I hope this helps. Good Luck!
@Gareth - ahh, that makes more sense. I've bound the shoulder more to the arm and it absolutely helps some of the issues I was having, while unfortunately causing a bunch more (most notably the horns clip right through his head.), I've settled on a mix, and while the skull does stretch now, from game view it shouldnt be anything terrible.. we'll see haha. I don't know what else I can do at this point.
Anywho, I've decided to import it to max to use the hero shader, here's where it's at. some more small tweaks to make but nothing massive, then i'll be taking presentation shots. Finally! It's like I picked the most difficult piece to make, in regards to the shoulderpiece having both huge feathers AND horns. Yikes. learned my lesson there! If this works out I'd love to continue making more items for Dota2, especially after this big learning experience!
Replies
just some thoughts.
I really like your thoughts on the left shoulder (his right). I wouldn't have to do double sided either, which would save a couple polys or let me have more fidelity on that side. Not sure how I feel about the center gem but it's spawning some ideas for sure.. and I do have a gem on the shoulder skull, so it could totally work, might just shrink the size. Simplifying the necklace to one claw was on my list of ways to save tri's so I'm glad you pointed that out as it gives me more confidence in that decision.
Great suggestions. Thanks for your feedback.
I'm having a lot of trouble iterating. Every time I try to update my textures in the tool it ignores my updats. I even went so far as to scribble black over my texture, cancel out, and submit again and I didn't see it. Is there a specific way to guarantee your changes go in?
edit: even completely leaving the DOTA2 program, hue shifting my weapon purple, and redoing the import process and it doesn't see anything new ;(
There has to be something I'm missing.. I saved the textures and fbx both fresh in a new directory, excited dota, booted, imported... same. Doh.
Also, I thought that you could use a little player perspective too. Phantom lancer's attack animations ingame have a pretty wide arc, and it makes the weapon very conspicuous, especially the blade part of the spear. Now I don't know if this is even something you have to consider for your submission or something Valve tinkers with after they approve models for the game, but the blade of your spear feels just slightly too big to me. Other than that it looks really perfect.
And lastly about the design, someone posted an alternate shoulder above, and although it looks awesome too, I have to say I agree with your original design more, the style of the plume fits this hero a little better. The alternate design would suit a mage character more- mages like Rubick and Invoker have this type of shoulder armor. Since Phantom lancer is an assasin/fighter character and it starts out with those asymmetrical shoulders, so I'm leaning towards your design.
I think you could even make the plume branch out and trail a little longer but I really like your design as it is.
@cerberusd - Thanks dude, it really means a lot. You're right about the blade. As much we all love over sized weapons, it clips through the ground in game, so I'm going to try to scale it back a tad if it doesn't hurt the feel. I don't know if other character's weapons do the same in regards to clipping.
As for the shoulder piece, I'm most likely going to try both and see a) what looks better in game b) what's more cost efficient and c) what people's preference is. It wont be hard to prototype out so we can take a look at them both in game. Thanks a ton for your support and feedback, I appreciate it!
@agentfx - I tried that too..
@EVIL - thanks man! I will do my best to do the concept justice.
I think that trying out both would be the best solution as well. I can't wait to see the ingame pics.
In regards to clipping there was a weapon for a hero called bounty hunter that was released with the latest batch of cosmetics, and it was clipping the ground initially but got fixed by being resized in a patch a week or two later. My sense is that clipping shouldn't be too big of an issue, with the game being in beta and all.
@cerberusd - good to know! Thanks for the info. the resize will come next time I have a weapon update.
I've been continuing my snails pace in the free time I have at home, yesterday blocking out most of the legs texture, tonight doing the arm guard sculpt. Originally I was going to have the crystal things separate but it just costs too many triangles to do it that way
Thanks again guys. I can't wait for this weekend to make much more substantial progress... then trying to decide who to do next. I'm thinking perhaps Queen of Pain, but not sure. I want to give one of the lesser popular characters some love.
I really like your spear, the colors are great and work very well with Phantom Lancer, looking forward to seeing some color on the bracer aswell, keep it up.
I had a big troubles trying to put lance into game correctly. Looks like you didn't have such issues. I'm wondering maybe it's because you are using Maya?
@StolenPants: Yup!
@Kraken: Thanks man. It could be, It seems to come in pretty close for me.
Didn't get anywhere near as much time to work this weekend as I had hoped.
Also was trying to get by with a bunch of shortcuts but man has it come around to bite me in the ass. if I have time to do a second character I'm doing it a better way... and less feathers and horns, those poly-whores! Gonna be fun cutting down the shoulders... will do a test run first to see if it's worth simplifying the design more or if I can get away with it as is.
Anyway, small update, but some progress on the diffuse:
The feathers on his back are still very placeholder as are the textures on them. Most textures have just had a base color thrown down with exception of the belt which has had more time.
Thanks guys!
Tiny update on the arms, had to change the design a tad because it was not taking into the account of what if the player bought one piece, but not another, and on PL his shoulder piece actually includes the arm band, and the way we had it designed before would clip. Now if you swap the arms it will just add another band above the standard one instead of clipping. I would have put the band into the Shoulder slot but I'm already struggling to get that under budget as is.
Thanks again everyone for stopping by.
@HntrLuc - eventually!
Rigging this thing is what nightmares are made of. I'm sure the wrist issue is just something weird happening, but this shoulderpiece is going to kill me. There also just isn't enough budget to fit the shoulder feathers, so I had to cut them
here's some fails. Not sure how I'm going to get away with minimal clipping on the shoulder, it'll take some playing around with but I don't think I can outright avoid clipping with those feathers there. arg!
Might save you some time and hastle if you are using 3dsmax? to extract the .smd's from the client and give them a bash?
@Lennyagony - I'm using maya. I'll try redownloading the file and rigging from that, maybe I busted mine up somehow. If it keeps up I'm definitely gonna tinker around. Thanks for the suggestion!
I'm going away this weekend so I won't have tons of time to put into it unfortunately but it's getting close. Need to polish the texture more, do the masks, then downrez the shoulders/belt and rig.
Thanks for looking.
edit oh and lighten the shoulder a bit. I think thats the best part and you might want to draw the eye up there a bit more.
This set is looking awesome BTW! It looks like a set that valve would create themselves. It's the best of the Phantom Lancer sets in my opinion. Great work, I can't wait to see it all in game.
@Gareth - Thanks man! I really appreciate your kind words.
Alright so I wanted to get an update in since it's been a while. I hoped to do a second set but I've been crunching so I haven't had time to work on this let alone a second set.
The nightmare part of this particular set is over, I think. I had to unfortunately sacrifice some of the design in order to (barely!) fit within the triangle budget. I think it's still pretty cool though. I'd love to find 3 more tri's to cut so I can add more curvature to the horns back in, but honestly from the in-game distance I doubt anyone will notice.
Here's the breakdown of the two sets that gave me trouble, especially the shoulders. I'll be adding faux-back faces to the shoulder feathers for the lod0 so they show when you rotate the character around, and I'm still working on the textures of the belt feathers, will unify the metal colors since the shoulder ones are more yellow, and I'm probably going to turn the shoulder swirl metal piece into a greentooth for a pc shoutout. It's funny how our designs naturally gravitate towards these types of shapes, in reference to Kraken's design (his set is looking great by the way, make sure to check it out if you like Phantom Lancer!).
Outside of that it's just painting the rest of the normals, masks, and rigging it up. Excited to finally get close to finishing, even if I am afraid of how it will look rigged aha.
between crunch time and pc issues I haven't had much time at all for this and am super gracious that they were able to extend the time so I can sort the rest of my issues out. I took some screen shots:
what they currently look like in game:
current issues I'm having:
The arm piece and weapon work fine now, I had to actually re-import the body .fbx to get these things to show up in the right place, which was by far the biggest issue I had getting started.
As you can see in the second image, I'm having a doosey of a time getting this rigged in a way that works with him. In image 1, you see the back strap. I THINK I can finesse this out, but trying a weight gradient so far hasn't worked well, same with the clipping on his necklace. Might just need to pull the geo out more? not sure yet.
in image 2, I'm having a lot of trouble with the feathers. There's gonna be a lot of clipping.. should I size them down? They might be too small then.. right now I have them bound to the bicep so they don't shoot straight through. Problem is, when he does any other animation, the feathers will go with the arm. Argh!
Image 3, same issue as 1, the necklace is going through him, and the strap is a bit wonky. just finessing, I'm sure.
image 4 and 5 are my biggest issues. The belt just will not look correct. I've tried a bunch of stuff and it just looks like ass, it will collapse so far into him that you can't see the second layer of his belt. Is it just a lack of geo thing, or the design itself? Right now I'm kind of at a loss of what to do here.. the only real thing I can think of is to add more geo where the fold is maybe. I can afford it on the high poly but not on the low. The way everything collapses around his joints though is a real pickle.
If anyone has any advice or insight on how to improve/fix these things I'd love to hear.
Outside of my current rigging woes, I just need to finish the texture on the belt and futz with the masks some more.
Thanks again everyone! Here's hoping I can solve the rigging stuff without too much hassle.
super smooth and classy textures
got some time today finally, and found a way to fix it for the most part, at least on the lod0:
I removed the additional loop that I had thought was going to help in the leather belt thingy, and instead added a loop/some cuts to the part under it, near the bottom verts of the aforementioned leather part. What was happening before (and it could be due to shoddy rigging) was it had been collapsing to the center edges as seen in pictures above.
now that this is mostly resolved for me I'm going to finish the belt texture, masks, and finish this baby up. What have people been doing for presentation? Just lit max/maya renders?
Tonight was me trying to figure out how the hell to light and do stuff correctly in maya. I'm still not there but I learned a lot tonight, including that I've been handling my rigging wrong... there's a reason I've had to re rig it like 50 times - I keep deleting ALL history instead of just non deformer history. When I was taught maya I was told to delete all history fairly often to keep my scene clean. Not in this case lol, learned the hard way.
Tomorrow or whenever I get more time I'm going to do another full pass on the rigging from scratch, then try to figure out how to get lighting the way I want it, with shadows. I don't want to need to bring it into max, but maya is being a jerk. I can't seem to figure out how to get it looking right. A lot of times I just can't even get shadows to work. What do people usually render in for maya? high quality rendering? Viewport 2.0? And are any of you taking screens straight from the viewport?
enough talking and babbling, here's the pose I'm probably going to go with, along with a test lighting scenario minus shadows (can't figure out how to make the damn things work in the scene I have).
Thanks again guys!
Good luck.
Thanks a ton guys. I'm just pushing through some tech issues and then it should be in. I want to get this done ASAP lol.
Right now my issue is that Phantom Lancer's imported pose is different than his rigged pose... and for some reason after I rigged the shoulder and arms, the LOD1 versions that were still unrigged are now out of position.
My question is - is there any way to save a skeleton pose and load it onto another skeleton? I want to take the freshly loaded PL skeleton pose and apply it to the one that I had checked 'Assume Preferred Angle' on.
UPDATE!
While I would still like to know if there's a way to copy/paste a skeleton pose, I did find a way around my issue. The only important joint that was off was one of the spines, so I rotated it to 'fit' my other objects as close as possible, copied weights from the LOD0's, then reset the pose and they all moved into place together. Whew. I hope that's the last I have to deal with that haha!
I got the rig as close as I could, there's still some issues but hopefully it gets additional loving from valve if they deem it worthy, since I hear they usually touch up stuff themselves before letting anything through.
@Agentfx - thanks man! lots of technical roadblocks and lots of crunch at work but I'm almost there!
@GxD11 - Thanks dude! I definitely wanted some bold colors and I'm glad you like them.
I spent tonight fiddling with trying to get them in the Dota2 test client. After a few failed attempts I got it right thanks to tips from the guys in the Workshop thread. I need to move some verts because the necklace is clipping, as well as import the latest textures (belt is outdated in this one and I haven't made the new changes yet) and update some chest belt weighting.
pics!
my big issue is the shoulderpiece right now. It clips pretty heavily into the arm since it's 100% weighted to the L Clavicle... I want it to be more flexible but if I weight it to the nearest part of the arm(bicep) it changes in position DRASTICALLY. (it wants to move right a bunch, I don't understand why because I haven't even moved the bone itself). If anyone has any ideas of what I might be doing wrong I'd really appreciate it. I'll try to get an image up in a minute.
Thanks again everyone! Home stretch!
Anywho, I've decided to import it to max to use the hero shader, here's where it's at. some more small tweaks to make but nothing massive, then i'll be taking presentation shots. Finally! It's like I picked the most difficult piece to make, in regards to the shoulderpiece having both huge feathers AND horns. Yikes. learned my lesson there! If this works out I'd love to continue making more items for Dota2, especially after this big learning experience!
Workshop page: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=111394046