Blotto & Stick - a new custom Courier by spacemonkey & MoP
polycounter lvl 18
Hello friends,
It's been a while! But this time spacemonkey and I have not been idle... we have just put the finishing touches onto a new Dota 2 custom Courier.
You can check out the Steam Workshop page for the backstory and voting here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=161982972
May we introduce... Blotto & Stick!
He is a drunken and greedy small keen who has come into possession of a magic stick that just about manages to keep him on the straight and narrow!
He has everything you'd want from a custom Courier, and more:
A video of most of the animation sets:
[ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFn91_Gs4zc&hd=1"]DOTA2 Courier - Blotto - A new custom Courier for Dota 2! - YouTube[/ame]
Some fun images:
And the concept art from spacemonkey that started it all:
Some vital statistics:
Anyway, take a look at the Workshop page and if you like it, please vote - we'd love to get another fun Courier into the game
Cheers,
-MoP
It's been a while! But this time spacemonkey and I have not been idle... we have just put the finishing touches onto a new Dota 2 custom Courier.
You can check out the Steam Workshop page for the backstory and voting here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=161982972
May we introduce... Blotto & Stick!
He is a drunken and greedy small keen who has come into possession of a magic stick that just about manages to keep him on the straight and narrow!
He has everything you'd want from a custom Courier, and more:
- 2 LOD levels
- Multiple animation variants including 2-3 idle and portrait loops
- Additive turn animations
- Jiggle bones for his bags
- Cloth bones for the tail coat
A video of most of the animation sets:
[ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFn91_Gs4zc&hd=1"]DOTA2 Courier - Blotto - A new custom Courier for Dota 2! - YouTube[/ame]Some fun images:
And the concept art from spacemonkey that started it all:
Some vital statistics:
- Concept art by spacemonkey
- Highpoly sculpt, lowpoly mesh, UVs and textures by spacemonkey
- Rigging and skinning by MoP
- Animations by spacemonkey and MoP
- Tools, scripts and in-game setup by MoP
Anyway, take a look at the Workshop page and if you like it, please vote - we'd love to get another fun Courier into the game
Cheers,
-MoP
Replies
Yeah, we could possibly make him a new hero, just find a voice actor and we're golden
However, what I'm most intrigued by is this: *jaw drops*
Could you explain what exactly your tools are doing? I mean, I get that almost all of Valve's files are just text files we could (potentially) write ourselves, but I'd love to hear more detail on all of this from you guys.
If you could give a detailed tutorial especially in the area of jiggle and cloth bones, I'd gladly, lovingly offer you guys up as a Service Provider on all my future items
well if you could get a full set or courier for testing in the game without the super exhausting workflow that it is right now that would be a real timesaver, i've seen people putting in custom mdls to play with against bots and such, so this would be a way better way to test your stuff before you do the final submission. also who knows maybe valve will see this and try to streamline the workflow further, because as of now it's a pretty annoying pipeline to for instance just load up pieces of a set to test them all together with the workshop editor.
Well, it's a fair point, and maybe you know an awesome workflow that I don't (if so, please share!) but I just found the whole import and compilation process to be very tedious and painful for iteration.
As Neox says, to have a simple, "one click" pipeline (which is what my tools essentially allow) straight out of 3dsmax, saves me a lot of effort - especially if I want to make more couriers.
Partly it was just a fun little side project too, I like to do a bit of maxscript on the side
And you're right, there are exporters for SMDs already (I use an existing one and just wrap the maxscript functionality) but it basically means I can set up the whole asset as a single data file in 3dsmax, have all my exports set up in the max scene so that they can be rapidly re-exported in a consistent manner, and then a button that just converts all TGAs to VTF, writes a VMT using settings from the UI, and writes a QC based on the chosen settings.
It then also compiles the QC and immediately overwrites the default Donkey courier model so I can just launch Dota 2 Test and check the model in-game without having to do anything else - it's all inside 3dsmax!
Maybe it's not saving that much time really but it was a fun project and we found it useful - especially since we have all our files under version control since we work remotely so we can ensure that both of us are working with exactly the same settings and workflow.
TL;DR: We think it saves us time, I'd love to be proven wrong though, I'd love to learn something!
Also thanks for all your kind replies guys, it looks like the people on the Workshop like it too
Not to mention that you're not allowed to use custom materials or cloth-sim, and D2 is not using jigglebones.
Your method sounds pretty good. Maybe I've wasted my effort... oh well, scripting is fun
I guess we'll see about the custom materials and cloth sim, our courier works without it but I'd like to think that we can get that in
I'm pretty sure the jigglebones are used in Dota 2 too, I thought that actually a lot of heroes use jigglebones (eg. fur on Ursa's back, skulls on Witch Doctor's staff, etc.).
They definitely work anyway.
http://www.dota2.com/store/itemdetails/10297
I guess I'll have to play with it today and see if the cloth, custom shader and jiggle bones made it in
However they have edited the material a little bit (turned off my diffusewarp - it wasn't adding much difference anyway, so fair enough). Weirdly, they also tweaked the specular scale and exponent values, not sure why since we think it looks weirdly shiny now, but whatever... :P
Someone from work spotted this today... http://www.dota2.com/international/home/atevent/
Cool!