[Dota2] - Witch Doctor - Black Crow's Spirit
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Steam Workshop
Post-Mortem
Original Post
Just a few thumbnails so far, trying out different ideas.
Steam Workshop
Post-Mortem
Original Post
Just a few thumbnails so far, trying out different ideas.
Replies
Decided I didn't like the disparate stuff - it felt too disconnected. I also felt the name and some of the items were edging to far towards Native American lore, which strays from the more voodoo tilt the Witch Doctor has.
I've followed on with the large crow mask as I'm a fan of the shape of it. I've continued the idea, being that the entire outfit is crafted from the remains of one giant, legendary bird and it's rare egg.
To wear this suit, one would have to pass the trial of killing a stormcrow by seeking out the egg of a stormcrow and stealing it, in order to anger it into emerging from it's nest. Then the crow must be killed without harm coming to the egg itself, which used as a source of power for the Witch Doctor's magic.
Not too happy with the egg/bag at the moment. There's cooler stuff that could be done with it - pretty much placeholder.
Tried MultiRes sculpting in modo but it doesn't quite cut it for larger pieces like the mask (the feathers are currently instanced MultiRes sculpts, which works ok).
Not sure whether to make the feathers larger on the cloak... he's got no alpha so I'm going to have to rely on a good normal map bake on a basic mesh silhouette...
If you are going to rely on a normal map for the back, you will definitely have to make the feathers bigger or something. I don't think details that size are going to translate well on a 128 x 256 map.
As an alternative, maybe you could make a little cluster of feathers mapped using the full texture space to keep the detail, then you can place and repeat the clusters to form the whole back. It may work well since feathers overlap each other naturally.
Yeah, I'll probably have to scale them up a bit. I'd like to have a gradient running down the entirety of his cloak, which means that clusters of feathers may not be an option. But if the resolution doesn't hold up it may well have to go that way and perhaps have multiple clusters to fake the gradient and hope the LOD mesh can hold up the silhouette.
Lots of trial and error ahead!
Displaying a little odd here as it's not synced for modo.
If it is a mask.
250's gonna be interesting LOD0 for sure, cried a little bit inside cramming that into 500 tris :P
marc31: Eeeh, probably, but I like the big beady eyes. I think they're an important crow-y feature :P
Really need to get a wiggle on to finish up the rest of this set for the deadline
Test normals bake and flat colours at the moment, need to properly pack the UVs.
Spent a fair bit of time trying to import the mask to the game (also built the in-game LOD1 for it), but it's not picking up the skinning info correctly. Dunno why... there's not exactly any debug info, either.
Secondly; exporting is super simple and usually I've found that any problems you're having are because you're over-thinking it (at least it was in my case).
How to export the best!
- New scene
- Import finished item (transforms frozen, history deleted and in the position you want it)
- Create reference -> Original Maya scene
- Duplicate root bone
- Remove reference
- Bind model to bones and weight it appropriately
- Select model and bones, export selection as FBX
If your material isn't showing up in-game sometimes you need to apply a Phong-E with your textures applied to it.
Hope this helps!
Might have to resort to 3DSMax and hope that the vertex normals hold up in transition.
Not done much with the feet yet, mostly focusing on the feathers. I'm not 100% on having a design on the back, but it felt too plain without something there. I had tried various things to break it up like trying to make some of the feathers stand out or patterns/layers of painted/coloured feathers, but they ended up either breaking the shape of the cloak too much or they stood out too much to make it feel like a whole.
I need to work up a collar or hem, to help with the transition at the top edge (currently just cuts out, which isn't that nice looking).
The "tail" will be continued down with a belt piece to complete the suit.
(Top row = fullbright, bottom row = normal mapped)
But in his animations, the Witch Doctor is far more stooped than his base pose, so half the feathers intersect with his shoulder.
And due to a slight reading error on my part, the LOD1 for the back item is 300 tris, not 200. So I've got an extra 100 tris to play with there...
The witchdoctor animations can be quite difficult to plan around, I have found his attack_alt animation clips with a lot of shoulder meshes I played around with.
Really nice work though!
Having seen it in game, loads of stuff that I toned back in the source res textures gets totally wiped out at game res. Going to go back in and ramp it up some, try and get some more definition out of the feathers by varying their colours more, etc. I'd like to get a bit of that deep pink/purple that his default bag's made out of in there.
As for animation/clipping... eh. So long as it looks good 90% of the time, I'm not going to sweat it too much. Valve's games have a fair bit of clipping/shearing and such in a few places but you never notice because the animation itself looks good and it's over in a few frames. That and skinning is one of the things I'm worst at :P
I'll return to all of the textures at the end in a big pass, but for now I have to at least get one extra thing made to qualify for entry. Hopefully I'll get an entire set going but free time is tight.
So I spent my lunch time roughing in the base mesh for the bag and large arm feathers. Not sold on the straps that hold the feathers on - they're just there to see how it'd look.
Not much to report, just showing there's still a pulse. Only got a couple of hours to work on it this weekend.
Low poly's done and bakes are, well, baked (feathers aren't yet). Still got 10 tris to play with, gonna save them for deformation's sake though, I imagine the strap's going to clip a fair bit and the polys will be welcome when that happens.
Colour's mostly block-in stuff - need to play with them a little.
5 days left to get the belt and the staff made! Was hoping to get a ward done, too, but that may have to be dropped.
Anyone know if we're allowed to submit stuff after the competition for the same set?
It's mostly done, I just need to affix them up to the belt and sculpt his pouch (probably just MultiRes it - not worth ZBrushing).
The feathers are re-used from the arms and cloak so they're MultiRes sculpted in modo - they're just showing at subdiv 1 at the moment which is why they're all smooth.
Yeah, the cloak irks me. I like it's jaggy silhouette but it's also very low poly everywhere but the silhouette. Might have to swap some tris around and maybe some UV shuffling to get more res on the back...
Also tweaked the cloak a little. Baked out new AO, slightly reshuffled the UVs to get a few more pixels in and munged a few polys around to help the silhouette around the back a touch.
Had a go at replicating the Dota2 shader in Unity to give more accurate screen grabs but wasn't very close, so will have to stick with default spec/gloss for the time being outside of the game
Having to keep the main part of it - between his hand point and where the branch stub is on the original - close to the same size/shape as the original staff as some of his animations have his hand slide down it (death anim, for example).
I've worked up LOD0 of the staff, baked it and started on the diffuse.
I've also re-UVed the cloak entirely so the resolution in-game isn't offensively low res and fixed up a lot of weighting issues on my other accessories.
Need to fix up the positioning of the mask feathers, which means ripping out the anims from .gcf files and decompiling the model, bit of a pain which I'll tackle at the weekend.
Probably tweak some of the levels of spec/gloss once I see it in-game... and it'll be done
Congrats
beaver_knight: Here's the cloak low poly. 400 tris was a killer (300 for LOD1!)...
Lotto: Yeah, I didn't realise quite how big the top of it was until I pulled back up the original staff beside it. I'm hoping it's wiry enough that it won't look ridiculous in-game, but it might need scaling down a touch.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=111277490
I like that he looks dangerous. I would use it to shop other players who will own them
Don't forget to add link to WIP thread in you items description on workshop!
Good luck!!!
Well done!