Hasbeen's workshop

mbknielsen

Hey fellow item creators, after several years of lurking at Polycount I think it is my time to post some stuff that I have been working on outside work.
I've been wanting to try the workshop for some time and the last couple of weeks I finally got started. I decided to do something for the warlock, my personal all time favorite

Submitted items:

Warlock set: The Apothecary by Hasbeen


Cinder by Hasbeen


Apothecary's Eyestalk Staff by Hasbeen


Apothecary's Caged Eye by Hasbeen


Apothecary's Mask by Hasbeen


Apothecary's Pauldrons by Hasbeen


Apothecary's Remedies by Hasbeen


Apothecary's Surgery Tools by Hasbeen


Apothecary's Bracers by Hasbeen

mbknielsen

Unfortunately I didn't save my first progress images, but I have some wip from the later stages.

From the get go I should have considered the limitations of the dota hero shader, it is actually pretty powerful but trying to do layered materials was not the best idea. As you can see below, I started out with a more cylindrical shape for the glass jar which was a bad idea since I wanted to bake the highpoly eye inside the jar to get some nice masks to work with.


It just didn't give me the nice spherical shapes that I had hoped for so I changed the jar to fit the eye better. Here is the final highpoly and the vertex colored masks I baked to help me with the texturing later.


The next problem was getting the glass shading somewhat believable, my first attempts was quite milky.


To counter that I turned down the colormap quite a bit and changed the shading to metal, which I think worked quite well. To get some of layered effect that I was aiming for, I toned down the color of the eye and moved most of the intensity to the self illumination channel to reach the final version.


My next plan is a matching staff with the second demon eye mounted in a chain

Edit: fixed image links

mbknielsen

Ok, so I got started on the staff. Found out that the requirements for the warlock staff are pretty rough, 500tris for lod0 and 300 for lod1. So I decided to do a lowpoly mockup to keep my shapes within those limits.


Afterwards I have been replacing each element by highpoly versions. The chain and wraps are done just done in max, while the wood and eyestalk have been through mudbox

Hawt Koffee

the eye ball looks super gross, looks awesome!

mbknielsen

Thanks!
Btw I hope that I can figure out how to move the fire effect from the original staff into the iris

mbknielsen

So time for an update, since last time I have been baking and rigging the staff. The bake process gave me quite a headache since I usually bake in xnormal using the sbm format, but for some reason my object space normal maps came all out wrong which resulted in a long debugging process when trying to convert it through Handplane later. Long story short, I ended up baking the object space normalmap in max which worked perfectly

The rig also took quite some time to get right, on my first import the eye got rotated some 78degrees when skinned to the cloth bones on the staff.


I thought I wasn't allowed to change the bones at all, but after some debugging I figured out that I could counter rotate the cloth bone before the skinning, to fix this issue



Now on for some better texturing, crits are welcome

mbknielsen

A gif!

mbknielsen

This is how far I got today, the eye itself is still puzzling me.

TheAnkou

This eye remember me Warcraft II ogre mage spell

mbknielsen

Eye of Kilrogg

iRYO400

mbknielsen wrote: »

This is how far I got today, the eye itself is still puzzling me.

black eye looks better

mbknielsen

Thanks, I decided to go with the black one and work a bit on the marketing shot, the shading on the eye came out differently in that one as you can see here. I will try and mimic that on the ingame version, since I like that better.

mbknielsen

So I finally got it submitted, here is a final gif

Bernoully

Both eye-based Warlock items are really inspired designs, and it's nice to see the improvements. Make more!

mbknielsen

Thanks Bernoully, I think I will go back and revisit the pickled eye now that I learned a bit more about the process.

Dumdumbinny

eye swinging is great !
How you can you import that to dota? the swinging eye...

regular baked animation?

Just one thing, the bottom part of the thing he got on his right hand looks flat.

mbknielsen

The original staff has a couple of cloth strands that are skinned to 3 bones each, I aligned the model with the front line of bones and skinned the eyestalk to those. So it is actually physics driving the animation.

mbknielsen

So I finally after 9 months of work and new learnings shipped a full set for the warlock!

Warlock set: The Apothecary by Hasbeen