Pfrost's Dota2 Workshop

Pfrost

hey guys! I've finally taken the plunge and jumped into making some Dota 2 items! I'm really loving the game too (tried to just research it for this purpose but it ended up sucking me in). I wanted to use the Chinese New Year event as my excuse to jump in with a timelimit and heres my WIP for my first piece!

a Faceless Void Ball Mace. Would love some feedback. I still haven't put this in engine yet. I guess I'll see how it goes! Colour is definitely subject to change. I'm currently at 704 Tris for LOD0 and still optimizing LOD1 but nearly at 400.

Update: I'm switching back to my other account, DanJohnCox. I wanted to have a different account name for my Dota art but I'm much happier keeping it all within one name. Sorry for any confusion.

Jalcober

Looks great! I would make the handle thicker or the top smaller thought it looks too top heavy as it is.

Xajai

I agree! the sculpt looks good, but i agree with Jalcober, the handle looks a bit thick and a bit too long, maybe a bit shorter and thicker will do the trick, also be sure to check the animations once you put it in the engine to make sure the volume of the mace doesn't clip too much.

Pfrost

Great points guys. Made some of those changes. I figured it was a bit too big. Adjusted the colours to match him. Now, I tried importing into dota but the texture wouldn't show up. Now when I try it crashes. Apparently thats just a bug right now? But I tried using the dota test client and my material is totally messed up. This is the same no matter what I change my masks to. On top of that, the weapon resolution seems even worse than it should. I'm doing 256x256 and it looks manageable in max but looks almost half that in dota client. I'm super confused and any help would be great. I'm thinking of trying the model viewer, but I've been using fbx's since I have max 2014 so I'm hoping to avoid jumping through those hoops just yet.





Also! more feedback would be awesome I'm realizing now too that I could have overlapped some geo, just not using symmetry. So it's possible for me to get that resolution up a little bit. and I'm hoping to get SOME of ther materials qualities similar to the Mattock of Distortion which is a gorgeous weapon imo. http://dota-trade.com/mattock-of-distortion-item that is of course, once I get this working.

Shock

i would reorganise it like that:



it would end up with ALOT higher resolution

Xajai

For the looks of it you didnt overlap any uvs! your textures seem to be tileable so you might want to try that. Your texture has too much detail for a 256, also, you can upload 1024s to the client, and Dota will scale them, try that too!

Pfrost

I'll have to totally remodel the low, but ya that would work a lot better. Totally dumb of me to not realize sooner! I had blinders on clearly. But why is there the significant difference in resolution from max to dota when I had the sizes the same anyways? i tried importing a 1024 instead now too and that didnt help either. Quite confused. does this normally happen?

Xajai

I dont think you need to remodel the whole thing, judging by the uvs, you could just select a whole column and do a radial duplicate, if the textures match :x

heboltz3

Can we see some wires of the piece?

If you decide to remodele, For spherical things it's always worth it to start from a smoothed cube push and pull, this will make your UV's love you very much.

Pfrost

Here's the wires. Fixing the model isn't a big deal tho. I'm more concerned about my import and the materials. But here's the wireframe for the lod0 if you have any suggestions. I'm realizing just how much better Shocks suggestions is than my initial idea. Feel so silly for not noticing it sooner. That's be worth a lot!

Pfrost

Fixed the lowpoly to get that unwrap working. Now I just have to rebake all the textures from my initial lowpoly. Pretty significant difference!
Thanks for the idea Shock! Now hopefully valve will fix the importer material bug so I can figure out if I'm doing something wrong with materials or if it's on their end :S either way, better texture resolution!

Shock

ur welcome, btw if u do the same what i did with the upper part as well with the handle, u get even more space for a better quality

Pfrost

Trying to submit but it still crashes for me. Using the test importer works but again, no materials no matter what I do. Everything else works though. I'm very confused. Anyways, not much else I can do it seems until they patch the importer. Anyone else able to import?
Here's some marketing images and a shot of the mace at 256 res. In test dota i looks half that res again all the time. So I dunno what's going on but its much better now anyways.




Hopefully I can get this in in time!! I STILL dont know how my material maps will look in game :S

Zipfinator

It looks like your texture settings aren't on high and that's why it's low in game.

Pfrost

...... I'm going to smash my face on the keyboard. Thanks Zip! I'm the dumbest! Turned all my settings back up and THERE WE GO

Pfrost

So here he is with working materials! Looks like before I had render setting set to medium and texture was medium too for some reason (i always keep things high). On top of that, apparently setting my mask2 colour spec channel to black gave my textures spec colour which made it impossible to see spec. Confused. Anyways. Now I just need the real importer to work and I can submit!



any material suggestions? I can't seem to get the spec on the gem surface as shiny as i'd like. Are there settings I can change when submitting or is it just map value?

Shock

texture settings! VERY IMPORTANT

Pfrost

It's up!



http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=216738641

Would love to get your guys thoughts on the final images too. As well as the piece itself. Looking forward to building more!

danjohncox

People kept saying it looked like a lollipop. So i tried adjusting it to fix the issue. Seems either it looks like a baby rattle or a lollipop no matter what I do. So I'm kind stuck but hopefully this helped. New icon too.

Shock

i like ur lollipop and also i like the thumb

danjohncox

Thinking of a new shadow demon set. sketching it out now. Lemme know what you think!

[IMG][/img]