VG REMIX - World of Warcraft
polycounter lvl 9
I'll be doing a diorama of WORLD OF WARCRAFT. It'll depict one of my favorite moments in the game.
Here's what I have so far:
[FONT="][SKETCHFAB]6c24b3c399474801b4a4a2150a3a1f0c[/SKETCHFAB][/FONT]
It's an egg! There will be many of these in the scene.
[SKETCHFAB]8c41a2d631124a62bdfc00246139c96f[/SKETCHFAB]
It's DEATHWING. He's still a WIP.
Here's what I have so far:
[FONT="][SKETCHFAB]6c24b3c399474801b4a4a2150a3a1f0c[/SKETCHFAB][/FONT]
It's an egg! There will be many of these in the scene.
[SKETCHFAB]8c41a2d631124a62bdfc00246139c96f[/SKETCHFAB]
It's DEATHWING. He's still a WIP.
Replies
This is Deathwing.
Deathwing is very big.
Deathwing is... well, BIG. Blizzard used three 512 textures for his dragon form.
Low poly DW is going to be my first character model. I hadn't a clue where to start at first. Sub-500 tris and a 128px texture!? Crazy!
Eventually, I compiled the textures that Blizzard used into the above image and started looking at the textures. There's some tiny scales. There are bigger banded scales. There are big scales with lava cracks in them. There are the armor plates and the horns.
There's a lot of repeating texture types, is what I'm getting at. So the first thing I did was start blocking out which textures are similar enough to each other.
When I got close to covering everything, I felt confident that this is something I can do. I'm pretty sure I can squeeze everything down into a single 128px texture.
Baby steps, y'know?
Let's get modeling!
It's the start of a dragon. Everything's a bit box-y, but it's looking good, I thought. Except I was at 512 tris, and I didn't even have wings or a complete head. Huh...
I fixed the legs by rotating some verts. It did a lot to break up the box look. I had also trimmed out the talons so that instead of being 5+ tris each, they were only 3 tris. With the talons trimmed down, I started focusing on the silhouette and removing excess tris and moving verts around. I made a lot of savings this way.
I worked the rest of the body down to 424 tris. Once I added the wings, DW was sitting at 584 tris. Yeesh! And I still didn't even have a head to show for it... Oh well!
I thought I had documented the head/face, but I'm not seeing any screenshots. For the horns, I had the same problem as with the legs. They were boxy and looked bad, so I twisted some verts and they looked better. Also, the horns kind of sucked to model because from the front they curve kind of upwards. From the side, they go back and then twist up and then bend back again. The vert twisting actually helped a lot here because it made the horns' curvy silhouette possible. Happy accident!
Now, Deathwing sits at 660 tris and sports a cruddy texture. The wings (the red/leathery webbing part) are 20 tris instead of 34. The tail spike is 3 tris instead of having volume. There are a few places left I can optimize and maybe bring it below 650. I don't think I'd be able to bring this below 600, though.
[SKETCHFAB]8c41a2d631124a62bdfc00246139c96f[/SKETCHFAB]
And here's a viewport shot of ol' Deathy from inside Blender, because Sketchfab isn't liking that opacity map.
Except Blender doesn't like opacity maps either. (See the teeth on the jaw.)
Tomorrow: tinkering with the UV mapping to try and increase texel density on the back plates, and then doing a proper paint job on the texture in Photoshop.