[Solved] Salamander Lumber Gatherer

[Michael Peppers]

Hello there! This is a model edit that is probably time consuming but shouldn't be too difficult?

I would like to have a Draenei Salamander lumber gatherer, basically a unit with Lightning Lizard's animations (so a Lighning effect coming out of their mouth in their Attack animation) but with some baskets that can be empty (no lumber) or full (lumber). I feel a good base for this would be the Orc Kodo, I started a WIP myself and it is promising but it would take me a whole bunch of time to finalize myself so I'll attach it and a Mockup of some additions it would need.
The WIP also has some of the Kodo anims renamed to better suit what would be the finalized model, but some wood surfaces in there should be moved to a different geoset and material because they're currently purple, don't stand out enough and would look better with the standard Kodo texture. All of the animations starting with "old" can be freely scrapped.

Mockup:

If you're up for it let me know

 

[DREADMAN]

Hello there! This is a model edit that is probably time consuming but shouldn't be too difficult?

I would like to have a Draenei Salamander lumber gatherer, basically a unit with Lightning Lizard's animations (so a Lighning effect coming out of their mouth in their Attack animation) but with some baskets that can be empty (no lumber) or full (lumber). I feel a good base for this would be the Orc Kodo, I started a WIP myself and it is promising but it would take me a whole bunch of time to finalize myself so I'll attach it and a Mockup of some additions it would need.
The WIP also has some of the Kodo anims renamed to better suit what would be the finalized model, but some wood surfaces in there should be moved to a different geoset and material because they're currently purple, don't stand out enough and would look better with the standard Kodo texture. All of the animations starting with "old" can be freely scrapped.

Mockup:
View attachment 463703
If you're up for it let me know

Hmm...
do you need to add a stand work by removing the effect of lightning at the mouth?

 

[Michael Peppers]

I guess that would help as well? My idea at the moment would be to edit the Kodo's Spell Puke into the Lightning Lizard's Attack, they are the same animation but the Kodo pukes guts instead of shooting a lightning particle, then if they use "Stand Work" when gathering lumber I guess then yeah, the same animation without particles would work fine.

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

I thought I'd take a stab at this because I'm still a bit rusty.

I started with the Thunder Lizard as the base so the spines (and their glow) would be preserved, and the Kodo has some extra embellishments (dangling chains, the saddle) that looked tough to sand off with my tools. This is what I have so far:

If that feels like it fits the bill, I'll go ahead and futz all the animations and tidy everything up a bit.

It occurs to me that the Kodo is quite "big" for a worker, so I wonder if it's worth trying to scale the whole thing down except the lumber baskets? Make it a bit of a Salamander "pup"? Either that, or maybe we want to double up the baskets to emphasise that it's a heavy hauler? Depends on what feel you're going for.

 

[Michael Peppers]

Ah RDZ, my man, this is perfect! I just tested the model in-game and it ticks all the boxes so far.

It occurs to me that the Kodo is quite "big" for a worker, so I wonder if it's worth trying to scale the whole thing down except the lumber baskets? Make it a bit of a Salamander "pup"? Either that, or maybe we want to double up the baskets to emphasise that it's a heavy hauler? Depends on what feel you're going for.

I like its current size, I'm making this unit to be about as strong as other Salamanders of that size so that shouldn't be an issue imo. But I do feel like making it have bigger baskets/more lumber carried would look better.

If that feels like it fits the bill, I'll go ahead and futz all the animations and tidy everything up a bit.

Yes please

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

Rather than doubling up the baskets, I just made them a bit bigger and piled in some more logs, which seems to work nicely. Copied over all the Lumber versions of the animations and I think I've set up all the event tracks for footsteps and whatnot too, but let me know if anything's a bit off when you try it out for real.

Walk Fast had the legs clipping into the baskets quite badly, so I've erased that in favour of the more sedate Walk animation -- remember to set Run Speed in the Object Editor to 100 so it synchronises! All other animation values should be as the Thunder Lizard.

Enjoy!

 

[Michael Peppers]

Lovely job so far! I had to tweak things a bit because of Wc3's mysterious ways (When using a spell Stand Work's animation triggers twice but if it's named Spell Slam it only triggers once... what's up with that? )
The only thing I'd say isn't up to snuff are the Death animations, Death starts with no lumber but then it appears on Decay Flesh, also I think it would be best to have a set of Death + Decay Flesh for both lumber and no lumber states but I should be capable of adding those myself so I'll do just that.
Thanks again for fulfilling this request!

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

Oh, must have forgotten to fix the geosetanims for death and decay when I was futzing other stuff. (My custom anim transfer tool had a bug in it so I had to redo the duplications.) Stand Work repeats because it's not NonLooping -- I used the original Peon animations as a reference and they have Stand Work as a looping animation. I can flip it back to NonLooping though.

These are all easy fixes, I can do them when I get home tonight. Wouldn't do much for my reputation if I started delivering substandard merchandise.

 

[Michael Peppers]

I'm almost done with the fixes myself and I'm probably going to upload the finished model here if you don't do that first
The weird thing about that Stand Work issue is... the double animation happened even after I set that to NonLooping, I have no idea why, I only know renaming it to Spell Slam fixed it.

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

The weird thing about that Stand Work issue is... the double animation happened even after I set that to NonLooping, I have no idea why, I only know renaming it to Spell Slam fixed it.

Very strange! I've never done much (anything) with workers before so I'll bow to your experience on this one. If you can make it happy with Spell Slam rather than Stand Work... well, WC3 moves in mysterious ways.

 

[Michael Peppers]

Welp, after a bunch of tweaks and after adding the new animations without much issue I'm stuck, the "Decay Flesh Lumber" animation doesn't go into "Decay Bone" but it does this instead:

I tried a bunch of things to solve it but nothing worked, there must be clearly something I'm missing and it's probably a simple fix but I have no idea what's happening in there ngl.
EDIT: The game seems to be using "Decay Flesh Lumber" again instead of going into "Decay Bone" for some reason, even adding a "Decay Bone Lumber" doesn't stop that from happening.

I'm attaching the model with all the tweaks I did so far, the only thing missing would be fixing that animation.

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

To be fair, I'm not aware of any standard model that has special gold/lumber death animations. Maybe it's just straight-up bugged? I'll do some experiments of my own here and see what falls out.
(Also: I work against 1.26 so it's not impossible something was fine there and broke in future versions...)

 

[Michael Peppers]

Welp, for some reason @Villagerino decided to play with the model a bit, he fixed some wrap stuff, added depth to the baskets, touched up the Walk animation and helped me understand how RMS's animation editor works. I decided to scrap "Decay Flesh Lumber" because it's buggy as heck and managed to touch up the Death Lumber animation so the lumber falls off and it can cleanly transition to "Decay Flesh". It's not perfect but I feel it works well enough. I also added some extra bones and stuff to make some animations look better.

Attaching the completed model here, in case anybody snags it and uses it in their project please remember to credit both Rao Dao Zao and Villagerino for their work.

 

[HuanJuan]

Salamander Vizier

Salamander Viziers are salamander creeps that can be encountered in the Dungeon and Underground tilesets.

wowpedia.fandom.com

It seems it doesn't gonna need a new icon, because it's already in-game.

You guys did this fast, congratulation! I'm amazed about the speed here.

 

[Michael Peppers]

Yeah, it's meant to be used with that icon, although a custom one would be nice I suppose

You guys did this fast, congratulation! I'm amazed about the speed here.

Thankfully this community is full of skilled people who can't stop being helpful like this