I just wanted to do a recap/retro of some of the issues I had, in case anyone else who's reading decides to make one. I'm probably going to say a lot of obvious things, but they sure as hell slipped past me for one reason or the other.
Starting the process:
I originally picked Phantom Lancer because I thought he looked like a fun character, he was cool to play, and I didn't see any other entries at the time so I wanted to give players who enjoyed this character an armor option. I felt like making him a bit more bold by using a color outside of his original palette, and we decided a red/red purple would be really striking against his blue/brown traditional colors.
For a theme, we wanted something more tribal, so we used reference of African tribes, Native Americans, and even some Aztec and Mayan influences. Eventually we narrowed down to what we wound up picking, which was primarily leather, bone, and feather. They are very primal ingredients for a character design and Phantom Lancer himself is very animalistic. I felt we could play into what his heritage might have been. Plus it's quite different from his default set, and speaking as a player I personally like options that offer substantially different moods.
Modeling:
Modeling this set was pretty straightforward. This is actually where I diverged from a bunch of the other entries. I only decided to sculpt a small few pieces of the set, since I didn't think things like the belt, feathers, or chest strap (most of it, really) would need to be sculpted. Looking back, even if they were fairly simple I wish I did anyway if only to get the more rounded look through the normals. I don't feel having a hard edge on the top of the belt really hurt the in-game look any, but it's a different method and workflow from the standard characters. The big issue with modeling was the feathers. I did not look beforehand if Phantom Lancer could support alpha masking. This is one of our big design slip ups. I think it came out well and reads okay but it's not ideal, and it cost a LOT.
Another big issue with the modeling was that in the original concept we shot WAY further than we could afford. Phantom Lancer has one of the more restrictive budgets due to his duplication abilities. We had a lot more pieces to him (the shoulder feathers, more bracelets, etc) that I would have loved to included but could not afford.
The last 'big' issue modeling that also slipped my mind when we were designing the character was the horns on the shoulder. I don't know if we didn't consider potential clipping through the head, or didn't think the arms would tilt back so far, since with certain rigging conditions it can clip pretty heavily. I found a balance point, but overall it's not ideal and it led to a lot of headaches. Also, curvy horns are VERY POLY HEAVY. D'oh. Horns + Feathers = triangle budget gone.
Texturing:
This set was mostly hand painted. I'm fine with that because I like doing it and enjoyed the practice, but a lot of the Dota and community sets rely more on the sculpt and assorted bakes, of which I didn't really have many, so I resorted to doing it all via diffuse. For all the normals I didn't bake, I painted in what I wanted using my diffuse map as a guide. Outside of not having bakes for all my details this was the most straightforward and fun part of making the character.
You can see my textures at the bottom of this post if you're interested.
On Rigging/File Issues:
This was by far the biggest hurdle for me. I must have rigged this damn thing over 50 times.
I've rigged and made simple rigs (biped and with bones) in max before, but I've never used Maya's tools. After google and some small tips from online friends I learned about Binding the skin (selecting the bones, then the mesh, and going to Skin> Bind Skin> Smooth Bind), and the Paint Skin Weights Tool (Skin > Edit Smooth Skin>) in Maya, and went at it.. except it was really fumbly and hard to deal with, especially for really low poly things where verts are obscured by other meshes, so there was a lot of hiding/unhiding that had to happen. Eventually I learned about the Component Editor (Window> General Editors> Component Editor) and was able to simply select verts and assign them specific values, which helped tremendously for most of the set.
Unfortunately the rig I had imported for Phantom Lancer was off. It was in a different pose. I had learned during the last week that I had to SHIFT + Right click the rig and choose assume bind pose to snap it back to normal. Before then, I got around this by importing the FBX instead of the .ma to get the correct posing. This had caused my items to import offset, and made rigging difficult. This was one of the more frustrating issues because I wasn't sure what was happening, and why the pose was off. A lot of moving the mesh around, exporting, and re-rigging happened.
One more issue people including myself were running into was right at the end, when uploading files. In the 'name' field during the initial upload if you try to name your item and have a space in the name it will error out. So make sure when uploading your Radical Pauldrons of Tombslaying, use something simple and without spaces because this is behind the scenes, otherwise it'll kick it back to you with an error. Save the sweet name for the next page with your public description.
Well that's all I got for today, thanks for listening. I hope this helps someone in any way.
Here are the textures for anyone interested. (If this is a no-no please send me a PM and I can remove them. I figure it should be OK though.)
If anyone has any other questions feel free to ask. Thanks again everyone, I had a lot of fun!
Dropbox doesn't seem to be working tonight for whatever reason. I can't see anyone's images if they're using the website. Hopefully it starts working again soon. I've uploaded it to my personal site for the time being. Thanks for the heads up!
Replies
All he's missing are his Heirloom Pantaloons xD
I like how it shows primeval nature of this character while staying well done armor at the same time
I just wanted to do a recap/retro of some of the issues I had, in case anyone else who's reading decides to make one. I'm probably going to say a lot of obvious things, but they sure as hell slipped past me for one reason or the other.
Starting the process:
I originally picked Phantom Lancer because I thought he looked like a fun character, he was cool to play, and I didn't see any other entries at the time so I wanted to give players who enjoyed this character an armor option. I felt like making him a bit more bold by using a color outside of his original palette, and we decided a red/red purple would be really striking against his blue/brown traditional colors.
For a theme, we wanted something more tribal, so we used reference of African tribes, Native Americans, and even some Aztec and Mayan influences. Eventually we narrowed down to what we wound up picking, which was primarily leather, bone, and feather. They are very primal ingredients for a character design and Phantom Lancer himself is very animalistic. I felt we could play into what his heritage might have been. Plus it's quite different from his default set, and speaking as a player I personally like options that offer substantially different moods.
Modeling:
Modeling this set was pretty straightforward. This is actually where I diverged from a bunch of the other entries. I only decided to sculpt a small few pieces of the set, since I didn't think things like the belt, feathers, or chest strap (most of it, really) would need to be sculpted. Looking back, even if they were fairly simple I wish I did anyway if only to get the more rounded look through the normals. I don't feel having a hard edge on the top of the belt really hurt the in-game look any, but it's a different method and workflow from the standard characters. The big issue with modeling was the feathers. I did not look beforehand if Phantom Lancer could support alpha masking. This is one of our big design slip ups. I think it came out well and reads okay but it's not ideal, and it cost a LOT.
Another big issue with the modeling was that in the original concept we shot WAY further than we could afford. Phantom Lancer has one of the more restrictive budgets due to his duplication abilities. We had a lot more pieces to him (the shoulder feathers, more bracelets, etc) that I would have loved to included but could not afford.
The last 'big' issue modeling that also slipped my mind when we were designing the character was the horns on the shoulder. I don't know if we didn't consider potential clipping through the head, or didn't think the arms would tilt back so far, since with certain rigging conditions it can clip pretty heavily. I found a balance point, but overall it's not ideal and it led to a lot of headaches. Also, curvy horns are VERY POLY HEAVY. D'oh. Horns + Feathers = triangle budget gone.
Texturing:
This set was mostly hand painted. I'm fine with that because I like doing it and enjoyed the practice, but a lot of the Dota and community sets rely more on the sculpt and assorted bakes, of which I didn't really have many, so I resorted to doing it all via diffuse. For all the normals I didn't bake, I painted in what I wanted using my diffuse map as a guide. Outside of not having bakes for all my details this was the most straightforward and fun part of making the character.
You can see my textures at the bottom of this post if you're interested.
On Rigging/File Issues:
This was by far the biggest hurdle for me. I must have rigged this damn thing over 50 times.
I've rigged and made simple rigs (biped and with bones) in max before, but I've never used Maya's tools. After google and some small tips from online friends I learned about Binding the skin (selecting the bones, then the mesh, and going to Skin> Bind Skin> Smooth Bind), and the Paint Skin Weights Tool (Skin > Edit Smooth Skin>) in Maya, and went at it.. except it was really fumbly and hard to deal with, especially for really low poly things where verts are obscured by other meshes, so there was a lot of hiding/unhiding that had to happen. Eventually I learned about the Component Editor (Window> General Editors> Component Editor) and was able to simply select verts and assign them specific values, which helped tremendously for most of the set.
Unfortunately the rig I had imported for Phantom Lancer was off. It was in a different pose. I had learned during the last week that I had to SHIFT + Right click the rig and choose assume bind pose to snap it back to normal. Before then, I got around this by importing the FBX instead of the .ma to get the correct posing. This had caused my items to import offset, and made rigging difficult. This was one of the more frustrating issues because I wasn't sure what was happening, and why the pose was off. A lot of moving the mesh around, exporting, and re-rigging happened.
One more issue people including myself were running into was right at the end, when uploading files. In the 'name' field during the initial upload if you try to name your item and have a space in the name it will error out. So make sure when uploading your Radical Pauldrons of Tombslaying, use something simple and without spaces because this is behind the scenes, otherwise it'll kick it back to you with an error. Save the sweet name for the next page with your public description.
Well that's all I got for today, thanks for listening. I hope this helps someone in any way.
Here are the textures for anyone interested. (If this is a no-no please send me a PM and I can remove them. I figure it should be OK though.)
If anyone has any other questions feel free to ask. Thanks again everyone, I had a lot of fun!
EDIT: Shows up now. Thanks for sharing!
All the picks have been fantastic so far. Can't wait to play using them.