Heroes that need LOD0 item poly budget improvements
polycounter lvl 14
Hey guys,
Trying to get feedback on anyone who has been working with some of the older models that have not so fun item budgets for their slots. Or heroes that you think could have slot improvements. Hell even suggest new slot breakdowns for heroes that don't have them yet.
Pretty much the new heroes that get reworked/new breakdowns have very substantial item budgets, where the older models are lacking. With the new LOD0 views in game (bigger loadout, in game item/hero showcase camera view) I believe any slot that has under 200 tris should be boosted.
But there are also some heroes that have large footprint items with some tight budgets. If you have any, please suggest them!
For example Morphlings misc slot has more triangles than his shoulder or back slots.
Trying to get feedback on anyone who has been working with some of the older models that have not so fun item budgets for their slots. Or heroes that you think could have slot improvements. Hell even suggest new slot breakdowns for heroes that don't have them yet.
Pretty much the new heroes that get reworked/new breakdowns have very substantial item budgets, where the older models are lacking. With the new LOD0 views in game (bigger loadout, in game item/hero showcase camera view) I believe any slot that has under 200 tris should be boosted.
But there are also some heroes that have large footprint items with some tight budgets. If you have any, please suggest them!
For example Morphlings misc slot has more triangles than his shoulder or back slots.
Replies
I am curious. Why is it always you who initiates these kind of threads? Does Valve communicate with you directly?
PUDGE
Arms
- LoD0 Triangle Limit: 200
- LoD1 Triangle Limit: 150
Shoulders- LoD0 Triangle Limit: 800 (Valves 1135)
- LoD1 Triangle Limit: 400
Were both low considering their area coverage, and the Shoulder/arm was considerable lower then the default Valve model. The lod1 for the Shoulders slot was a total pain to make. A 50% reduction to 400 poly's for a whole arm meant a lot of silhouette had to be compromised. Would loved to see 1200 lod0, 800 lod1.-Toasty
Well, I know that they actually react to direct communication. A good example was batrider's bat. One of the lods was too tight and an artist I know contacted them directly about it. Later in a patch, the lod limit was increased.
Did you try to contact them in such fashion?
If it's ok, I'll bring up whatever I can think of not only LoD0.
1. Tiny:
Weapon
LoD0 Triangle Limit: 1200
LoD1 Triangle Limit: 800
Texture Size: 256H x 256W
Tiny is huge, his weapon is huge too. his weapon is 4 times bigger than a hero like dark seer, 256 by 256 doesn't do justice imo.(the weird point is that the weapons that are in game are all 500 by 500 (haven't checked this new lava one though))
2. Templar Assassin
This hero just has a very bad slot management. The hair is on head slot and mask on shoulder! They should rework this hero. it's really limiting the creativity.
3. Death Prophet
Misc (dress scraps)
LoD0 Triangle Limit: 150
LoD1 Triangle Limit: 150
Texture Size: 64H x 256W
Ghost (Ultimate)
LoD0 Triangle Limit: 600
LoD1 Triangle Limit: 450
Texture Size: 256H x 256W
I know when u press 'R' a bunch of ghosts come and run around, but still it's really limiting.
4. Brood Mother
Head
LoD0 Triangle Limit: 250
LoD1 Triangle Limit: 150
Texture Size: 128H x 256W
Also there is an issue with bones of her back slot. I think it happened due to the remodel and that perhaps one of the bone structures in workshop files, workshop importer or in-game model is different from the other 2.
5. Doom
Tail
LoD0 Triangle Limit: 150
LoD1 Triangle Limit: 150
Texture Size: 128H x 256W
6. Faceless Void
Body - Head
LoD0 Triangle Limit: 700
LoD1 Triangle Limit: 400
Texture Size: 256H x 256W
I hope they will fix this with the remodel.
7. Huskar
Huskar needs more love in general. All the slots have meh amount of triangles and the last huskar set that got in was before half of us were born.
8. Juggernaut
Weapon
LoD0 Triangle Limit: 400
LoD1 Triangle Limit: 300
Texture Size: 128H x 256W
9. Invoker
half of the slots have the same LoD0 and LoD1.
10. Witch Doctor
Head
LoD0 Triangle Limit: 500
LoD1 Triangle Limit: 250
Texture Size: 128H x 256W
very little for both and resulting with either limited results or low quality result. there is almost no way to make a good looking asymmetric mask for him which I think fits his character very well. I'd make it 1000-600-256*256
Also Shoulders, Back and Belt can receive improvements for LoD1.
11. Warlock
LoD1s are very disturbing. every thing is maximum 300(except ulit and off hand) while he actually has a large model.
12. Slark
True he is very small but I think he can have better budgets.
13. Morphling
Very little triangles in general.
14. Tidehunter
Texture spaces can be improved. 128*256 just hurts.
15. Windranger
Back
LoD0 Triangle Limit: 350
LoD1 Triangle Limit: 250
Texture Size: 256H x 256W
Weapon
LoD0 Triangle Limit: 450
LoD1 Triangle Limit: 350
Texture Size: 128H x 256W
Weapon Offhand
LoD0 Triangle Limit: 350
LoD1 Triangle Limit: 250
Texture Size: 128H x 256W
It seems to be enough for most of the cases but results in repetitive designs. nothing much out of the box or extra ordinary.
16. Skywrath Mage
This hero is big and has wings and is flying so it's closer to the camera. I think it deserves more triangles in general.
Also the belt is very limited.
Belt
LoD0 Triangle Limit: 300
LoD1 Triangle Limit: 200
Texture Size: 128H x 256W
17. Riki
I know he is invisible but more triangles plz
18. Pudge
I'd double up everything, also the hook has the same LoD1 and LoD0.
19. Shadow Shaman
He is small and he is a humble shaman, right, but still his character matches with a lot of different ideas but these budgets make things hard and sometimes impossible.
Also it would be nice if the skin effect of the serpent wards could be controlled with mask1. It's almost useless to texture the wards
20. Lycan
Lycan is the most badass hero of the game. the budgets are sufficient but there's a lot of potential for "aggressive" expansion.
21. Magnus
From my undrestanding, Misc stands for "miscellaneous" which means it is something that can go anywhere. So I don't think a horn could be a misc. I would change the name of this current misc to horn and either add an actual misc or not
Some general points that I can think of for now:
1.for some heroes like the ones that have cape or belt(like skywrath), a 2 sided material can be really helpful.
2.some cosmetics for some heroes are barely visible in game, like almost all of CK or Abadon's or Dark seer's items. I don't know what the solution is or is it even a problem or not
It's a long post and there is probably a world of typos and grammatical failures, I apologize in advance
Bad example here is Terrorblade with 1000/600 limit for his armor that is basicly 3parts combined and has a limit smaller than Ench hair.
Opisite would be to look at Lich neck with 1250/900 that is way to much.
Exactly! Last night I was forcing myself to use more triangles for Venomancers shoulder
LoD0 Triangle Limit: 1905
LoD1 Triangle Limit: 1360
Texture Size: 256H x 512W
I hope that the new engine will raise most if not all the budgets across the board. If a lot of the budgets were up just 25-50 tris it could make a huge difference. And if most textures went up too, infinite detail time!
- LoD0 Triangle Limit: 200
- LoD1 Triangle Limit: 150
For the love of sproink, give her some clothes to warm her shoulders up!Either a) make the neck a different slot altogether or b) merge head and neck into one slot and have the back and shoulder separate. Her design revolves so much about her upper chest/neck/head area and having 3 'interlocking' slots means that sets are really restricted in how they work technically and artistically.
Legs
LoD0 Triangle Limit: 800
LoD1 Triangle Limit: 400
Texture Size: 256H x 512W
All of this for leggings and a skirt.
Also there are is no slot for arms.
Elder Titan's belt is clearly a separate mesh but it is not broken apart from his base model. Please giff ET belt slot.
I'd like to see Earthshaker's Totem be separated from the holding device on his back which in turn would increase the budget for both items. Weapon -> into separate weapon and back slots.
Undying is broken down, why is he not in the Workshop!?
I would also say the jumps from LOD0 -> LOD1 for Witchdoctor are pretty harsh considering the asymmetry of his model.
1. I think valve should just even out all of the budgets or at least have a starting point for them. For example having the mount/summons lod0 start from ~2000 Tris and 512x512 texture size. I mean I doubt that anything will even change for the average player considering that NP's summons already have 2400 tris for LoD0 and 512x512 texture size and the guy can spawn quite a few of those at a time. Would it actually hurt having the rest of the mounts/summons a lod0 starting from 2000 and a 512x512 texture.
2. Another suggestion would be having at least 1 "BIG" item slot for each hero (some already do but some others are really lacking). Some examples would be:
Venomancer Shoulders:
LoD0 Triangle Limit: 1905
LoD1 Triangle Limit: 1360
Texture Size: 256H x 512W
Spectre's Shoulders:
LoD0 Triangle Limit: 2000
LoD1 Triangle Limit: 1250
Texture Size: 256H x 512W
Naga Siren's Head:
LoD0 Triangle Limit: 1200
LoD1 Triangle Limit: 850
Texture Size: 256H x 512W
While there are heroes with the biggest poly count of 500 and textures of 256x256.
3. And lastly I think it would be best if Valve could give us the freedom of "building our own item slots". By that i mean giving us the freedom of combining 2 item slots into something like the earthshaker weapon (totem + totem holder)
Pros of this:
- We could "borrow" budgets from another slot so instead of having 2 crappy 200 tris items you could build something decent out of 400
- Concepts could be a lot more unique, since one can combine back+armor and the other armor+head and build his idea around that (Like the tentacle arm someone made for tide taking the bracer and offhand weapon slots)
- The store might look less like a circus ( http://i.imgur.com/nM4iLPs.jpg )
- Valve seems to direct their attention towards bundles rather than solo items so this would fit into the scenario pretty well
Other mentions about this:
- Limiting it to just 1 "fusion" per set would be a good idea for start
- I doubt that they will even consider this since they'll need to rework the importer
Back
LoD0 Triangle Limit: 1000
LoD1 Triangle Limit: 400
Texture Size: 256H x 256W
I would rather see limits put to same levels for certaon characters acordinh to their size and amount of parts.
I second that brewmaster weapon!
LoD0 Triangle Limit: 450
LoD1 Triangle Limit: 350
Texture Size: 256H x 256W
Sure that it seems nice, but the chains already take a bunch of tris.
I noticed recently that tides back slot is arbitrarily a 128X256 texture budget. Seems odd that the piece that presents the most real estate gets half the texture res as his head. (Theres nothing there by default)
I'm not sure you really understood what I meant. Could u possibly list some of those problems?
That would make this whole issue easier to fix.
I think any hero with more than 4 slots (mounts and abilities excluded) has too many. It becomes a pain to submit so many slots and is overly specific, limits creativity. Mirana is an example of that. When I made a Mirana set I wanted to add more stuff to her torso as well as having shoulder pads so I had to make use of the quiver to put in a breastplate. I feel like doing crazy things like that makes my set less viable but I don't want to compromise for the arbitrary requirements.
Queen of Pain's budgets are super heavily weighted toward the head and the hair. It leaves very little room to add anything interesting to her body unless you piggyback it on the 400tri shoulder slot. That should be opened up a bit more.
TA was generally quite nice to work on only having 3 slots but the mask being separate from the head was a bad way to break it up, as has already been mentioned. It makes sense why they did it that way based on the base model but it doesn't work well when making new items for her.
Earth Spirit's entire arms below the deltoid are part of the arms slot. It's weird that they want everyone to recreate his basic arms with each set. That's a breakup that should probably change.
Those are a few that leap to mind for me. Heroes that have only 3-4 slots are the most enjoyable to work on for sure.
yeah i think his shoulder pads + backpack could be condensed into one slot as well. the way his straps work right now means you're kinda limited if you don't want to intersect with the default and custom sets.
his default set is basically the only one that doesn't have some sort of vest / scarf thingamajig.
What I mean its already hard to take all available parts into consideration and prepare item that will not intersect without items already in game. With more complications that could be almost impossible.
On paper its fine. We merge forearms and shoulders slots and make some cool design for whole arms. However other sets could merge bracers with weapon or shoulders with back part. That would create to many conflicts between parts in my opinion.
As for some examples please have a look at those parts:
http://dota2.gamepedia.com/Deep_Warden%27s_Darkray_Cape
http://dota2.gamepedia.com/Bound_Shark_Flippers
People who made 2nd item didn't check that first set available for Slark had right shoulder integrated in back slot. Dazzle, Tide those heroes also have many conflicting items.
If we should go in that direction I would rather see parts that would be marked as full set. Parts that would be present in game as single item but would cover all parts of given hero giving us total freedom
Still, a remark regarding odd hero breakdowns : it might sound strange, but I tend to think that this is one of the unique things that makes Dota set creation so fun ! For instance the Earth forearm slot came out of nowhere, but everybody making sets for him found ways to creatively work with the limitation. I feel like it is a big part of what makes the look of Dota2 heroes and custom sets so unique visually, especially compared to run-off-the-mill MMO customization slots.
An example can be Dazzle polycount for the arm slot, that is based on only one sleeve in the original model. If an artist wanna do something on both arms is gonna have to work some magic.
Also of all the heroes i've checked, i think Elder Titan is the one that needs a consistent boost more than others, even for the simple reason that he's pretty huge, so he could use some polygonal details more than other heroes.
Arms
LoD0 Triangle Limit: 1075
LoD1 Triangle Limit: 670
Texture Size: 128H x 256W
Specifically:
Head slot LoD1 Triangle Limit: 250
He has 2 heads to cover!!!
Not a surprise he has only 1 set out.
The head is like one 10th of the wing but has double of texture size. OK we can say that head is seen in portrait and needs a good texture space but wing's texture space is just too low!(128*256) then the tail has again double of wing...
Also has there ever been an implemented update over existing items? I know valve has done it couple of times (mostly dude to positioning and animations) but I wonder if artist have ever been able to do that. It would be nice to know if valve likes the idea of allowing artists to increase the quality of their old itms.
All the textures are combined and loaded from a single sheet, that is why the texture limitations are what they are. to uprez one texture you must uprez them all
Texture size on the head is just fine. I just want it to have a bigger tri budget...