[Dota2] - Spirit Breaker - Elemental Lord's Battlegarb
Spirit Breaker is a manifestation of raw power that has chosen this realm as his dominion. He uses the visual language of the world he currently resides in to express his power and will.
You can see in his original armor that he takes the dress of warriors of this world to show himself as a warrior. The armor I am creating for him is to channel his force and determination, and show the purity of his existence.
You can see in his original armor that he takes the dress of warriors of this world to show himself as a warrior. The armor I am creating for him is to channel his force and determination, and show the purity of his existence.
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Possibly a major shift in the major colors of a hero is confusing in a game. If you have any insight about it, let me hear it.
Here is a link to the item on Steam Workshop:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=106412962
First of all, I am a big fan of imaginary worlds. Computer games are one avenue of interacting with such worlds that do not exist in reality. I have always had a creative itch, but didn't follow up on it much.
In the past, I had committed myself to RTS games and deep RPG games. I played the original Dota a lot around 2006. Unfortunately my dorm had terrible internet, so we could only play on LAN, and there were never enough for a full match. Playing public games later on was a terrible experience.
Initially I didn't think too much of Dota 2, when I first encountered it. I did not understand what it could bring to the table that other games had not already delievered on.
But the more I learned about the features of the game, the more grew my excitement. Making the title free to play for anyone with a steam account is a fantastic idea. It allows anyone with a computer and internet access to try the game. Furthermore, the community of players is very much part of the game design.
It took me one game of playing Dota 2 to understand how creative, deep and robust the gameplay is. It was an eye-opening experience. This is not like any other game.
Finally, the game allows anyone to create artwork for the game, and even generate revenue from it. This changes everything. A legion of artists is going to be able to turn their efforts into cash.
Taking all this together, the game is set up to fulfill all of its potential.
Once the game is released, it is going to explode onto the gaming scene and blow everything out of the water, much like World of Warcraft did for MMOs, or Command and Conquer for RTS games.
This might not be the perfect place to laude the game. There are plenty things to rant about. But I want to get this off my chest. And once the game is out, I can point to this short post and tell others that I have called it :-)
1. I read about the possibilty of creating items for Dota 2 on the Dota 2 blog.
2. The guide about how to create items mentioned a number of websites for 2D/3D artists. Polycount was the first in the list, so I went there. I liked the website, it seemed well organized and civil.
3. I found out about the contest on the Polycount website while searching for Dota 2 related articles.
4. Once I heard about the contest, I created an account, and started thinking about what I would want to do.
5. When it came to selecting a tool for creating items, I wasn't sure. I went with the Valve guides, which mentioned several tools. I missed Blender, an open source creation tool. But I wanted to create items and not think about the technology. So I went with the Valve suggestions. I checked out all the products they mentioned: 3ds max, Maya, and some other tools from smaller companies. However, during my research I heard that 3ds max and Maya are pretty much the industry standard, and they both had a trial version. Not all of the other tools have a free trial version.
I wasn't going to spend hundreds of dollars on software I don't know anything about. And I wanted to have the possibility of using the skills I train to make items for Dota 2 to be easily transferable to other projects. So I settled on an Autodesk product for that reason. They have a trial version available, which was a must.
From what I gathered, Maya is the more powerful product, but more difficult to learn. 3ds has some features that appeal more to game developers. I figured that I am a fast learner for these types of skills, and I did not want to be constrained. So Maya it was.
So I decided the first order of business would be to set up the workflow for texturing, modeling and publishing an item.
I installed Maya 2013 in the 64bit version on my computer which has a 64bit Windows Vista OS and worked through the tutorials. This turned out to be a mistake, since Valve plugins only work with the 32bit version, according to the Valve wiki. Furthermore, the Source SDK only has plugin files for up to version 2012. So if you can get your hands on a 2012 trial version, get that one instead of the 2013 one.
For image editing I use GIMP, since I cannot afford Photoshop at the moment, and I used up a trial earlier this year. GIMP is familiar to me, so I also don't want to learn a new GUI if I don't have to. GIMP has decent features for image manipulation, and I can use another program to draw.
After deciding on the Spirit Breaker as the hero I want to create an item set for, I downloaded his model from Valve's website. But when I opened the Maya model file that was part of the download, I got a bunch of errors, and no textures on the hero model. There were also a bunch of error messages in the script editor.
After some searching on the web and the Valve developer Wiki, I decided to download the Source SDK to get access to the Valve Maya plugins. It would turn out that this was unnecessary - I think. According to this post: http://dev.dota2.com/showthread.php?t=51036 (the one by Kakkoii), those error messages are about plugins and python scripts needed by Valve internally, and are not necessary to create items.
Then I figured out that I can open the fbx files that were also part of the download can be opened by Maya.
I can't export any models into the sdm file format yet, but I am going to follow this tutorial next learn how to set Maya up for that: http://www.northcapestudios.com/blog/?p=45
For a newbie like me, the two links above offered great help. The tutorial I just mentioned also taught me how to apply a texture to a model in Maya.
With the Spirit Breaker's original belt loaded and textured in Maya, I went about to submit my first item. I edited the color texture for the belt in GIMP, and swapped the color of the buttons on the belt with the color of the lines drawn on it. Then I took it all and submitted it using the Dota 2 client.
Much to my surprise, you can't submit the original models as items because their polygonal count is too high :-)
This was true for all but one item slot of the Spirit Breaker, the tail. So I went about to modify the tail, and put some runes on the leather bands wrapped around it.
The submission process itself proved to be pretty straightforward. The files passed processing, and I entered a title and description. After pressing okay, I got a status message "submitting file". It might have been worded slightly different, I don't remember now.
However, it didn't work. In the Dota 2 client, the view changed to a list of my items. Also, the Steam Overlay popped up, browsing to a website on the steam workshop, but only delievering an error message: "The item has been removed by the author."
This scared me a bit, because I did not get any error messages. So I was worried I might not be able to submit items. However, knowing how computers and their networks sometimes are, I just tried again with all the same input. Voil
Last night the submission worked after I submitted an item two times. Today I tried submitting the same item five times, with no success. Does anyone know what the reason is? I am not getting any error messages, besides the non-existing steam workshop page.
Looking at the belt of Spirit Breaker, it looks a lot like a roman soldiers dress. The leather straps and the chain mail underneath remind me of a gladiator. The hero is an elemental being that chooses his physical appearance as he pleases. So I figure he has seen roman soldiers at some point, or learned about their combat capabilities. He choose their attire as a representation of his own prowess. How he came to learn about it, I don't know. Maybe in the world of Dota, there is a warrior civilization looking similar to romans. Or he can travel all the worlds, and all the times. So he knows all that ever was anywhere, and therefore he also knows about roman soldiers.
From this idea, I thought about other civilizations of that time. I tried to find out about how the phoenicians (Karthago) dressed, and looked at chain mails from the middle ages. Spirit Breaker could wear spiky, darkly colored armor. A very raw and brutal look. However, spikes could easily blow my polycount budget. Also, one of my favourite shoulder pieces from World of Warcraft has spikes,and I want to avoid subconsciously copying a design.
Spirit Breaker is an elemental lord. The word "elemental" keeps popping into my head, and what you associate with it. I think of gems and other associated stones. Then I thought about obsidian, a word I like a lot. It's a dark-colored stone, which goes well with the color scheme of the hero's armor. Also, obsidian can develop a beige-brown color at chipped edges,another color which complements the color scheme well.
My idea is a piece of armor that Spirit Breaker took from a powerful entitiy he beat in battle. It's a suit of armor made of obsidian and other powerful materials, which he wears into battle.
To further the motif and story of the armor, I want Spirit Breaker to be visibly hurt. It took all his strength to wrestle with the original owner of the armor, and it shows. His right horn is broken, and the lef horn has spikes on it,from and armor he put on for that grandiose battle. As a side note, I am excited about the superficial assymmetry but really enhanced symmetry this would bring. The right horn extend upwards from his head, and complements his right hand, which holds up his weapon.
His tail should also look hurt. I don't exactly how. The most extreme version would be to simply cut off part of his tail. Another idea is to have him wear bandages on it. This could be against his lore, since it is unlikely that injuries manifest this way for his avatar. Maybe I also add a morning star type spike onto his tail, as a remainder of his former, more primitive battlesuit.
The bracers should also be obsidian.
Yesterday, I tried publishin it several times, and each time it failed on the last step with no error message (see previous post). Today, it worked, with no changes on my end.
So if you have trouble with your submissions, just try again later. It might not have anything to do with your item.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/19813842@N00/645842501
There are no textures on them, and the masks are not correctly set up. So they seem to be glowing. It is more an example of how elaborate they can be. Even with this extremely simple model, I am getting close to the polycount limit already. The detail is going to come from the textures.
Here are the original horns for reference:
The shoulder blades limit the available space for the horns. It is not possible to have the horns spiral backwards without shrinking the shoulder pads down significantly. My set is going to contain shoulders as it is. So I can either make small shoulder pads, or curve the horns forward.
Coming up with shapes for the horns is easy. So I might just put up a bunch into this thread and ask for votes :-)
When I use "Rigid Bind", the model is always bound to some reference point, causing the points to be out of position, and not moving together with the head.
When I use smooth bind, I can bind the horns to pretty much all bones just nicely. Unfortunately, I need to bind them to "head_0", so the horns stay in the right place when the head moves.
But when I bind the horns to that bone, this happens:
The movement of the horns is just as it needs to be. And with all other bones on the upper half of the body, or the entire skeleton, I get wrong movement for the horn geometry during movement. So I know it is the right bone.
Again, it is the only bone that excerts this behaviour. Does this mean I have to manually offset the position in Maya in order to have the right position in Dota? Any help would be appreciated.