Zbrush workflow. That is a big undertaking, but there are point select features, as you are able to make a small brush size and turn on point select, as well as a MOVE brush. Under the TRANSFORM panel there are a number of settings that are very helpful, which can be used in symmetrical fashions. Retop is not the best workflow under Zbrush. A lot of people try to pretend they can use Zspheres to make a simple mesh and then divide to the extreme. Then they create this exotic HIrez version on top of that, but then they have to go back to RETOP, which is time extensive and a pain. You are better off creating base meshes in MAYA/Max and then GOZ them back into Zbrush to add details and levels. The GOZ plugin is very helpful in getting your LVL 1 mesh back and forth between the two programs. Diffuse, deformation, and normal maps will go with the mesh when you GOZ. I have a mel script that examines all files in a scene and will transfer them from the default Zbrush folder to main ROOT folder for the given project.
P.S. Your courier really motivates me to finish my current workload, so I can join the fun.;)
So I finally decided to get back to working on some items after my Enchantress Helmet. Here's the base mesh I got blocked out before I start sculpting over it. No Textures Yet.
Question though, does anybody have any advice/guides on how to sculpt hair? I've never actually done it before and all the tutorials/guides I've found are on heavily realistic hair sculptures. I'm just going to figure I follow those guides but smooth the hair to be more subtle and less noisy to fit with the Dota Aesthetic?
@Eleryn - nice work! i think your brauty shot is a little too dark
if i may suggest, what i did for mine was taking a printscreen of the store windows and testing a lot of beuaty shots trying to get a good contrast with the site and the other submitions
@Gheromo really nice picture, it botther me a little how far she is to the right, i would line her with a line from the thirds rule, but im just been picky. Really nice work, i would love to have that bow =]
that the whey i do for now, back an forth using GOZ, but now im planning on add a lot of separated itens to be able to easly separate them in zbrush and them make the retopology based on the overall shape but in zbrush
i will take a try as this is a leraning process, and its not the same using a small brush and moving points, it doens have the guismo and other features. But maybe i can get used to it and be quicker in modeling
i will redo my question: can i check the polycount at zbrush and go back and forth during the retopology?
Should I copy all of the unpacked source files into their proper places in the dota 2 test directory? If I do this wont the client still just load the data from the VPK files as it appears to be doing now? This said, should I move all the VPK files to a backup dir so the client cannot find them and is forced to use the source files ive copied?
Thanks so much for your help on this Tvidotto .
wow, almost didnt see this because of the new page of the forum =]
its pretty much that, you just answered =]
you extract all the files of the vpk on the same folder on the dota 2 TEST (dont do that on the BETA)
but the engine will still be loading the vpk file, what you need to do is confuse it changing the name of the vpk or deleting it, if it dont find the vpk it will use the other files
i think vpk has a priority over the unpacked ones, one guy told me that on l4d was different and the vpk was with low priority, but in dota is the opposite, at least for now
and i like to help, everyone that i helped here on polycount helped me later in some way, i dont wait for anything in return but it always returns =]
@SinAmos - thanks for the kind words about the courier =]
Can someone take a second to help me out? sorry if this isn't the place place.
When I download the smd files from the DOTA site and import it (into Blender), how do I also import the UV wrap and textures? Or is there something I just need to click to display them?
Thank you. And I hope to post something here some day
I don't use blender, but in 3DS importing the SMD comes with the unwrap, so just create a new material with the texture, apply it and everything should be dandy!
Hey guys thanks for all the help so far, especially BrontoThunder got it mostly fixed. all that's wrong now is my masks which I can fix myself just need to flip the blade but no matter what I do it doesn't change it once I import the model, I delete the history and freeze the transformations before I export it, so how do I fix that?
I had a friend of mine help me get into Maya so that I could make this sword for Dragon Knight. I have a lot of experience with photoshop and digital painting as well as traditional artwork but absolutely no 3D experience. Luckily my friend helped me to get this far.
It's a little basic but I am pleased with the results. I'd like to be able to upload to the Steam Workshop but perusing the requirements highlights me how little I know. This is a really noob question but is there any kind of good source to learn about normal mapping, color mapping etc?
I finally figured out the texture size (256x256 i think ) that I need to make but i cant find anything on the tri count. I've tried looking at the decompiled models but I'm not sure I'm doing it right cause i can only find what i assume is the lod0 staff because it's over 1,300 tris and that just seems a little high to me.
Does anyone know of any tutorial or something that can help me out here ?
@Tvidotto, thanks Here is a screenshot from the side. I do actually feel it's a little to flat from this angle so i just might do something about that
I had a friend of mine help me get into Maya so that I could make this sword for Dragon Knight. I have a lot of experience with photoshop and digital painting as well as traditional artwork but absolutely no 3D experience. Luckily my friend helped me to get this far.
It's a little basic but I am pleased with the results. I'd like to be able to upload to the Steam Workshop but perusing the requirements highlights me how little I know. This is a really noob question but is there any kind of good source to learn about normal mapping, color mapping etc?
Thanks! And awesome work here guys!
Design looks great, model and texture look nice and clean. Although dragon knight isnt the first hero that comes to mind when I see the item and without having him there for scale it looks more suited as a dagger for riki.
wow, almost didnt see this because of the new page of the forum =]
its pretty much that, you just answered =]
you extract all the files of the vpk on the same folder on the dota 2 TEST (dont do that on the BETA)
but the engine will still be loading the vpk file, what you need to do is confuse it changing the name of the vpk or deleting it, if it dont find the vpk it will use the other files
i think vpk has a priority over the unpacked ones, one guy told me that on l4d was different and the vpk was with low priority, but in dota is the opposite, at least for now
and i like to help, everyone that i helped here on polycount helped me later in some way, i dont wait for anything in return but it always returns =]
@SinAmos - thanks for the kind words about the courier =]
Phew, well I got it all set up and loading the extracted files instead of VPKs, however it still wont load my item im testing with!
I'm loading the latest submission version of this item. I've replaced the _color _normal _mask1 _mask2 .vtx .vvd and .mdl files of his weapon (named "weapon"). I left the vmt unchanged, didnt see any need to replace it.
Dragon knight is loading up with no weapon in hand in portrait and in game. I've tried setting the .vtx to dx90 and dx80. I am out of ideas to try though, why on earth would the submitted files not be working in my test client?
I finally figured out the texture size (256x256 i think ) that I need to make but i cant find anything on the tri count. I've tried looking at the decompiled models but I'm not sure I'm doing it right cause i can only find what i assume is the lod0 staff because it's over 1,300 tris and that just seems a little high to me.
Does anyone know of any tutorial or something that can help me out here ?
@Tvidotto, thanks Here is a screenshot from the side. I do actually feel it's a little to flat from this angle so i just might do something about that
Are you trying to reduce the poly count of your staff? If you are it'd help if you upload it to p3d.in so we can show you where we'd eliminate edge loops, and redirect/terminate spans. Or post wireframes. I came in to your question part way so I may not understand your issue though :P.
Hey guys thanks for all the help so far, especially BrontoThunder got it mostly fixed. all that's wrong now is my masks which I can fix myself just need to flip the blade but no matter what I do it doesn't change it once I import the model, I delete the history and freeze the transformations before I export it, so how do I fix that?
Silly question but are you changing your destination file name in the importer? Otherwise it will tell you it imports all the new stuff and show you the old compiled files. Which would explain why your flip is not showing.
Are you trying to reduce the poly count of your staff? If you are it'd help if you upload it to p3d.in so we can show you where we'd eliminate edge loops, and redirect/terminate spans. Or post wireframes. I came in to your question part way so I may not understand your issue though :P.
I'm just a little unclear on how many tri's I can spend on lod0 and lod1. The workshop's spec page doesn't contain anything about witch doctor and looking at the staff from the decompiled model it's at 1,300 tri's which sounds like alot. So I was just looking for maybe some guideline or something to help me out
Some great work here since I last checked in :thumbup:
@ Gheromo - Great design, the texture work is ace and it fits her perfectly.
@ ElectroNugget - Good design, it's hard to judge scale as others have said. I would cut down on the baked in/painted on edge highlighting. It's a bit much and far too even imo.
@ zicoV - Yeah a 256x256 is a common size for these items, but it's also dependent on the hero the item is for. The same can be said for Tri-count. The way Valve is handling the assets in game is that they have a maximum amount of Tris (7k for LOD0) and texture size (1k x 512) that is able to used for the entirety of the hero (custom items included). I'd say using no more than whatever the default weapon/item uses is fine.
@ Eleryn - Looking solid. How does it handle while animated? Did you jiggle bone the hanging pieces at all or are you leaving it to Valve to set up some kind of cloth/rope system?
How does it handle while animated? Did you jiggle bone the hanging pieces at all or are you leaving it to Valve to set up some kind of cloth/rope system?
It animates almost entirely without clipping. There's a few little bits but it's mainly in places you can barely see! The cloth is rigged to existing jiggle bones she has there, so they all work
Zbrush is a great sculpting tool to play with details and overall form.
What I do is use Maya to make a low poly mesh roughly the shape I want, whats most important here is that your topology be even and as consistent as possible to make a smooth clay-like mesh as it is subdivided in Zbrush.
Load this low poly into Zbrush and subdivide a few times and start painting, subdivide as you notice you need to for the detail you're after.
At any time during this process you can toggle your models subdivision level, meaning you can finish your high poly model then toggle back down to the very base mesh; you will then see that Zbrush has actually moved all of the verts of your low poly to best accommodate your high poly mesh.
I export this low poly mesh as my new low poly, it is a much better match to your high poly than the one you started with out of Maya.
Hope this made sense to you .
Very helpful, will try to go with that workflow from now on, thanks for clearing it up for me.
Hi guys.
I saw really good job on this website, they decided to create an account to share with you my work for Tidehunter, before uploading to Worckshop. It's kind of aquatic explorer costume ... are the first items I create cosmetics for DOTA 2, of course I'm still working on them, missing some textures and I have much knowledge to create normal maps and so on ... then show you more progress thanks for your time .
Leave your suggestions and advice.
For those who asked to see DK with the sword I created:
@Mark.N, I see what you mean, I think I got a bit carried away too, was really enjoying the texture painting. Once I have figured out how to import it to the game I can see if it's too much with the lighting engines etc. already in place. If so, I will scale it back.
by the way guys, since I worked on a bow and was looking at the characters provided by Valce. I noticed that if you open maya file it has custom CGFX shaders assigned, one of them links to "U:\dota\tools\maya\shaders\CustomHeroMaya.cgfx" does anyone know if they are publicly available, or?
another question, does dota support vertex colors?
Hello, I have some problems importing a model into dota2, when I import the model (a weapon for phantom lancer) it is not attached to the hands, its in the air, it moves with the hands because its binded to spear1 bone, and do the animations and so on, but in the middle of no-where, and no in the hands of phantom lancer, What am I doing wrong?
Im using Max 2012, exporting as .fbx, selecting the geometry and the bone (spear1), the geometry has a skin modifier with spear1 attached.
Another problem is, the spear appear too small, it has the same height that the original one, but when i import it, it is so small, no matter how much I scale it, it always its the same size.
nope, tried that too, and its still over the hero floating there, at coordinates 0 0 0, positioning the item where the reference phantom lancer spear was didnt work too so, I dont know..
btw anyone already got paid from workshop ? one of my items was accepted in the begging of july and as I understand valve will pay me sometime until the end of august ? or there won't be any payments until Dota 2 gets out of Beta state/ released ?
BTW here's an update for Lone Druid set:
Really well done! Voted all items for this set. Try marmoset toolbag for the presentation renders to show off all items at once.
I'd love tO get a nice turntable render of the full set on morph, unfortunately he's got so many particle systems that need to be active in my opinion for him to look good.
The detail map on the set makes the particles reflect on the armor itself giving the appearance of water flowing in or under the ice crystals surface. I may rotoscope comp the pieces together well see.
I'd love tO get a nice turntable render of the full set on morph, unfortunately he's got so many particle systems that need to be active in my opinion for him to look good.
The detail map on the set makes the particles reflect on the armor itself giving the appearance of water flowing in or under the ice crystals surface. I may rotoscope comp the pieces together well see.
Just remake the particle systems in whatever you're using to render.
guys im kinda confused. Ive been doing a lot of reading for making items. They have emphasized that lod1 shouldn't go over 4k triangles. Yet, when I open the models inside maya and select the geos, most of them, if not all, go over their intended budget. For example right now I have Axe's model open. The tris count is 5.9k. Can anyone clear this up for me?
Hey guys, first post here. I've been working on a set for OD for the past week and before I start texturing, I have to ask; do I need to do anything special for a particle system? For example, I'm trying to add a glow effect similar to wisp, but I am unsure whether to just use the standard particle system given (using 3ds Max 2010).
Replies
Rate please if you like it.
Can I ask u, in what programme retopology more easy?
Question though, does anybody have any advice/guides on how to sculpt hair? I've never actually done it before and all the tutorials/guides I've found are on heavily realistic hair sculptures. I'm just going to figure I follow those guides but smooth the hair to be more subtle and less noisy to fit with the Dota Aesthetic?
if i may suggest, what i did for mine was taking a printscreen of the store windows and testing a lot of beuaty shots trying to get a good contrast with the site and the other submitions
@Gheromo really nice picture, it botther me a little how far she is to the right, i would line her with a line from the thirds rule, but im just been picky. Really nice work, i would love to have that bow =]
@SinAmon
that the whey i do for now, back an forth using GOZ, but now im planning on add a lot of separated itens to be able to easly separate them in zbrush and them make the retopology based on the overall shape but in zbrush
i will take a try as this is a leraning process, and its not the same using a small brush and moving points, it doens have the guismo and other features. But maybe i can get used to it and be quicker in modeling
i will redo my question: can i check the polycount at zbrush and go back and forth during the retopology?
wow, almost didnt see this because of the new page of the forum =]
its pretty much that, you just answered =]
you extract all the files of the vpk on the same folder on the dota 2 TEST (dont do that on the BETA)
but the engine will still be loading the vpk file, what you need to do is confuse it changing the name of the vpk or deleting it, if it dont find the vpk it will use the other files
i think vpk has a priority over the unpacked ones, one guy told me that on l4d was different and the vpk was with low priority, but in dota is the opposite, at least for now
and i like to help, everyone that i helped here on polycount helped me later in some way, i dont wait for anything in return but it always returns =]
@SinAmos - thanks for the kind words about the courier =]
Can someone take a second to help me out? sorry if this isn't the place place.
When I download the smd files from the DOTA site and import it (into Blender), how do I also import the UV wrap and textures? Or is there something I just need to click to display them?
Thank you. And I hope to post something here some day
I had a friend of mine help me get into Maya so that I could make this sword for Dragon Knight. I have a lot of experience with photoshop and digital painting as well as traditional artwork but absolutely no 3D experience. Luckily my friend helped me to get this far.
It's a little basic but I am pleased with the results. I'd like to be able to upload to the Steam Workshop but perusing the requirements highlights me how little I know. This is a really noob question but is there any kind of good source to learn about normal mapping, color mapping etc?
Thanks! And awesome work here guys!
@Tvidotto, I didnt want it right in the middle, I guess I pushed it way too much to the side. Means a lot
Rly nice :thumbup: It fits very good to the Hero !
I finally figured out the texture size (256x256 i think
Does anyone know of any tutorial or something that can help me out here ?
@Tvidotto, thanks
Design looks great, model and texture look nice and clean. Although dragon knight isnt the first hero that comes to mind when I see the item and without having him there for scale it looks more suited as a dagger for riki.
Phew, well I got it all set up and loading the extracted files instead of VPKs, however it still wont load my item im testing with!
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=88354131&searchtext=
I'm loading the latest submission version of this item. I've replaced the _color _normal _mask1 _mask2 .vtx .vvd and .mdl files of his weapon (named "weapon"). I left the vmt unchanged, didnt see any need to replace it.
Dragon knight is loading up with no weapon in hand in portrait and in game. I've tried setting the .vtx to dx90 and dx80. I am out of ideas to try though, why on earth would the submitted files not be working in my test client?
Are you trying to reduce the poly count of your staff? If you are it'd help if you upload it to p3d.in so we can show you where we'd eliminate edge loops, and redirect/terminate spans. Or post wireframes. I came in to your question part way so I may not understand your issue though :P.
Silly question but are you changing your destination file name in the importer? Otherwise it will tell you it imports all the new stuff and show you the old compiled files. Which would explain why your flip is not showing.
I'm just a little unclear on how many tri's I can spend on lod0 and lod1. The workshop's spec page doesn't contain anything about witch doctor and looking at the staff from the decompiled model it's at 1,300 tri's which sounds like alot. So I was just looking for maybe some guideline or something to help me out
@ Gheromo - Great design, the texture work is ace and it fits her perfectly.
@ ElectroNugget - Good design, it's hard to judge scale as others have said. I would cut down on the baked in/painted on edge highlighting. It's a bit much and far too even imo.
@ zicoV - Yeah a 256x256 is a common size for these items, but it's also dependent on the hero the item is for. The same can be said for Tri-count. The way Valve is handling the assets in game is that they have a maximum amount of Tris (7k for LOD0) and texture size (1k x 512) that is able to used for the entirety of the hero (custom items included). I'd say using no more than whatever the default weapon/item uses is fine.
@ Eleryn - Looking solid. How does it handle while animated? Did you jiggle bone the hanging pieces at all or are you leaving it to Valve to set up some kind of cloth/rope system?
really good work that created ...
It animates almost entirely without clipping. There's a few little bits but it's mainly in places you can barely see! The cloth is rigged to existing jiggle bones she has there, so they all work
For example, Omniknight it entirely part of one smd unlike the newer breakdowns such as with Windrunner.
I only made changes to his head (so essentially a head slot item) and none to the rest of his body or weapon.
Should I submit the model as a whole, or just delete everything else that is not part of the head (as Valve had organized the vertices with labels).
Thank you!
edit - just to be clear, it is not just a helmet for Omniknight, but significant changes to his head.
Very helpful, will try to go with that workflow from now on, thanks for clearing it up for me.
Vote it up if you like
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=89932261&searchtext=
Frost Shard Mutations Set
I saw really good job on this website, they decided to create an account to share with you my work for Tidehunter, before uploading to Worckshop. It's kind of aquatic explorer costume ... are the first items I create cosmetics for DOTA 2, of course I'm still working on them, missing some textures and I have much knowledge to create normal maps and so on ... then show you more progress thanks for your time .
Leave your suggestions and advice.
@Mark.N, I see what you mean, I think I got a bit carried away too, was really enjoying the texture painting.
Really well done! Voted all items for this set. Try marmoset toolbag for the presentation renders to show off all items at once.
another question, does dota support vertex colors?
Im using Max 2012, exporting as .fbx, selecting the geometry and the bone (spear1), the geometry has a skin modifier with spear1 attached.
Another problem is, the spear appear too small, it has the same height that the original one, but when i import it, it is so small, no matter how much I scale it, it always its the same size.
Im missing something?
Thank very much for the help guys!
cant find whats the problem
Thank you very much
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=90032608&searchtext=
what am i doing wrong?
BTW here's an update for Lone Druid set:
I'd love tO get a nice turntable render of the full set on morph, unfortunately he's got so many particle systems that need to be active in my opinion for him to look good.
The detail map on the set makes the particles reflect on the armor itself giving the appearance of water flowing in or under the ice crystals surface. I may rotoscope comp the pieces together well see.
Just remake the particle systems in whatever you're using to render.
I had this issue. Skin it to the root bone as well.
@crazyone End of August, if it got accepted in July.