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Black Steel Towers & Projectile

This bundle is marked as useful / simple. Simplicity is bliss, low effort and/or may contain minor bugs.
So, this is the first animated model I've made aside from the chicken leg item! Granted, I didn't do much work with the model. I will probably do more to it in the future. I somehow managed to make this in 3 hours yesterday.

Anyway, this is a "Black Steel" tower, using a similar theme to my Black Steel attachments. I will later create another "Infernal Machine" tower using the same texture, but I want to wait until I have more experience working with buildings before I do this because I'm going to want it to be quite different from this one; I would keep both as each would serve a different purpose.

Yes, I am aware that this could be made to a similar extent using custom textures, however most people who want custom towers aren't trying to replace the in-game ones, but rather add more towers to their map.

The build animation's particles were edited from the yellow smoke I'd originally used to yellow sparks by ILH

The portrait model is an arrow for the guard tower.

Keywords:
black, gold, steel, metal, tower, scout, guard, cannon, arcane, infernal, machine, cannon, inferno, watch, structure, building, human, demon, arrow, g
Contents

Black Steel Towers & Projectile (Model)

Black Steel Towers & Projectile (Model)

Reviews
15:18, 4th Jul 2015 MiniMage: Too simple.
The amount of gold on these is a little overwhelming. Atleast on the Guard Tower version. I like it, though.

When I built them, they were at a different angle, and the front part was only seen on the right half; the other side was the same as the base of the scout tower, unfortunately buildings are rotated in-game, so the right half is now the entire front that you see, making that part a bit overwhelming, as you stated. I plan to rotate it so that it appears at the same angle at which I'd constructed the model. I'm considering changing the arcane tower's glow from red to teamcolored or replacing it with fire (thoughts?). I also plan to improve the birth particles and completely rewrap the scaffolding in the birth and upgrade animations. That is for when I work on it again, though; I'm taking a break and will probably work on it tomorrow.
 
Level 3
Joined
Sep 15, 2011
Messages
56
By Elune. As if human towers weren't tough enough already with Improved Masonry, now they're covering them in armor plating!

First impression? These are outstanding. What jumped into my mind immediately was these being used for a High Elf faction, since they already wear all that gold armor with a phoenix/eagle motif. Towers like this work PERFECTLY with that, and are a damn welcome break from the usual stone look for High Elf guard towers in vanilla. I love the rifling on the cannon barrels; it almost looks as though the barrel is an aperture of modular construction, which could open up to admit larger guns. And the guard towers even have custom arrows? And those are gold, too? This is pretty damn crisp, man!

4.5/5 -- These are good, but like Direfury was mentioning above, the gold plating on the guard tower is a bit distracting. Definitely not a deal-breaker in my book, though.

As for the Arcane Tower... hmm. I dunno, the particle on top looks OK to me as it is. It's soft yet powerful without being distracting. I guess it would depend on what you wanted this tower to shoot? I... Oh, wait a second, why not try and use Blood Mage's 'sphere' ability to get little ioun stones or something floating around the tower? Make it shoot those at enemies! The magic orb on the top is the focus for that.
 
Oh wow, this looks pretty nice. :)

Thanks!

Wow these are cool! Great job, God Bless!

I'm glad you like them!

ah, it was very interesting watching you tinker with the darn wrap, finding out it was literally all over the place in some parts of these towers :b

but you did it very good, from what i can see.

Thanks! I should have started wrapping buildings a long time ago, it's fun and people really need more buildings. You are the first person who's ever seen me in the process of wrapping something! I showed some other people while I was working on it, too. I think I'll keep letting people watch in the future, it helps to motivate me to not waste time doing nothing, which I do a lot of when nobody's looking.

By Elune. As if human towers weren't tough enough already with Improved Masonry, now they're covering them in armor plating!

First impression? These are outstanding. What jumped into my mind immediately was these being used for a High Elf faction, since they already wear all that gold armor with a phoenix/eagle motif. Towers like this work PERFECTLY with that, and are a damn welcome break from the usual stone look for High Elf guard towers in vanilla. I love the rifling on the cannon barrels; it almost looks as though the barrel is an aperture of modular construction, which could open up to admit larger guns. And the guard towers even have custom arrows? And those are gold, too? This is pretty damn crisp, man!

I'm glad you like it! I think these would look a bit weird for high elves; maybe a faction of high elves that have their own unique building style. The black steel is the part that would make it look weird for them, I think.

4.5/5 -- These are good, but like Direfury was mentioning above, the gold plating on the guard tower is a bit distracting. Definitely not a deal-breaker in my book, though.

Yeah, when I made the towers, they weren't at that angle in the viewer; the game rotates them. You can change the default building angle, but when I get around to it I'll get these turned 90 degrees counterclockwise so that you see both sides of the tower; the gold on the front, and the black steel on the back, so that the gold is less overwhelming.

4As for the Arcane Tower... hmm. I dunno, the particle on top looks OK to me as it is. It's soft yet powerful without being distracting. I guess it would depend on what you wanted this tower to shoot? I... Oh, wait a second, why not try and use Blood Mage's 'sphere' ability to get little ioun stones or something floating around the tower? Make it shoot those at enemies! The magic orb on the top is the focus for that.

I don't want to make the arcane tower's orb too specific, because that would limit the utilization of this tower. I want people to be able to use it for a wide variety of magical purposes. A soft orb doesn't draw people's attention too much, so any projectile would work. With a fiery orb, it would be limited to fire magic; with an icy orb, it would be limited to ice magic; with the blood magic orbs, it wouldn't make sense when a spirit tower missile comes from it. You never know what projectiles people might want to come out of these towers in their maps. TD maps can get pretty crazy.
 
4As for the Arcane Tower... hmm. I dunno, the particle on top looks OK to me as it is. It's soft yet powerful without being distracting. I guess it would depend on what you wanted this tower to shoot? I... Oh, wait a second, why not try and use Blood Mage's 'sphere' ability to get little ioun stones or something floating around the tower? Make it shoot those at enemies! The magic orb on the top is the focus for that.
Setokaiva, bloodmage's sphere ability does that by using the sprite attachment points, which are rigged to bloodmage's skeleton (model-wise) so it would be a lill bit tedious to transfer those onto a tower.. then you'd have to deal with the rest of the bloodmage model, in your model :p
 

Deleted member 238589

D

Deleted member 238589

You could try different combinations with that Watch Tower, but the rest looks pretty good. Cannon tower is my favorite.
 
Why is this listed as a model when it should be a skin?

Because it's not a skin. A skin is a new 2-dimensional image with the same mapping as the original texture used for a model, intended to be imported in place of the original texture.

For this model, you would have to use multiple skins (because blizzard gave the human tower two versions of the exact same texture), and then you wouldn't even be able to use the human towers anymore; it's much more useful as a rewrapped model than a replaceable texture.

Oh, I see that Hive's 'chief' critic has made a model. So, what can I say? It's just default Alliance Tower model with Infernal Engine's texture. Texture mapping is quite horrible.

It's something like 2.5/5.

I'm by no means the "Chief" critic. Not a single one of my reviews has ever been used by a moderator, and I've never used one of those fancy review templates. I don't claim any amount of fame, and consider myself below the level of most modelers. I just give a lot of reviews to help people improve their resources. Any disdain you feel towards me is based on your own assumptions about me which are likely not true, and I'm sorry you feel that way.

If you have preconceived animosity towards me, you don't need to take that out on my resources. I don't disagree with your rating, though; I would rate most of my own models a 2/5 or 3/5. I'm still a complete noob at modelling; I start for a little while every year before I go back to mapping, and try to compensate for my severe lack of skill and experience with creativity and an observant eye. I wouldn't be surprised if you have more experience in modelling than I do; my total time spent modelling is probably only around 40 hours, which is what most people would spend on each model.

You say that the texture mapping is "quite horrible". This sounding much worse than just "bad", I would appreciate if you could point out some of the specific faults in the wrap so that I can improve it.

It would be more logical if all had the same body as scout tower, the watch tower sported something moderner than arrows and if they still did not have those flags on top.

Why should they have the same body? Because the previous tower did? These are intended to be a set of towers contained within the same model. It's not entirely inconceivable that the base of the tower could be covered with a sheet of armor during the upgrading process. I simply thought it pointless to have eight different base meshes with the same texture in one model; I wanted to give users as much variety as possible. A lot of people aren't going to be having these as upgrades of the same tower; aside from melee maps, this will mostly be used in Tower Defense maps, where they will probably be built separately.

I see how the flags might not fit. If more people feel that way, I'll remove them.

What do you mean by "moderner than arrows"? Do you mean like guns? These aren't supposed to be futuristic; they're simply built out of black and gold metal, which makes them more advanced than the regular human towers, but not impossible to be built with medieval technology. These are also not normal arrows, but rather the lengthier type launched from a ballista.

I kinda disagree.. but he still needs to wrap some bits, so they connect well..

I wish I could, unfortunately the gold and black parts of the texture head off in different directions, meaning that lining up one automatically causes the other to be out of allignment; I chose to line up the gold as this is easier to notice. Because the base of the tower is single polygons from the top to the bottom, I can't wrap the gold and steel parts separately. I would like to split the polygons, but I have never worked with animated models before and am worried about how that would affect animations.

You could try different combinations with that Watch Tower, but the rest looks pretty good. Cannon tower is my favorite.

Like I said with others who mentioned the same thing, I am aware that the gold dominates the color scheme of the tower; at the original rotation at which I'd made these, they were half black steel, and half the front cover which you currently see; unfortunately they are rotated to an angle in-game at which the other half is not visible. The next time I update this, they will either be rotated to be seen in-game at the angle I made them, or rewrapped so that their front covers are only covering part of the front.

I find this very useful, although the guard tower has some streching on the ends of the tower, but it is not a big deal. Looks decent.

Do you mean the top? I'll try to improve that.
 
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Idk, had to state cause the other 3 dont look that great to me.

Yes.

well, alternatively you can say its with the help of magic, etc.

I wanted these to be towers that were constructed by advanced mechanical means, but not with magic or modern technology. This is just a "Black Steel" variant of the guard tower. The Infernal Machine version which I will make in the future will be more demonic, and will feature guns and powerful cannons. But if I'm going to make something like that, I want it to look the way I imagine it and do what I imagine it doing; I'll need to know how to do more than what I can at the moment. So that model's going to wait until I think I'm good enough to really make it into what I want it to be.
 
well.. i can't say much than to start chopping up the model with mdlvis' 'detach as new geoset' button, until you get everything to fit right.. from there it probably should be relatively easy to re-merge and re-rig in mdlvis. but that too will require some serious fiddling and getting to know the tool, from you :b

Oh and.. Imagine what would be if i asked you to edit with that archaic 'vertex modifier' ? :p (unless you actually used it in earlier days like me)
 
well.. i can't say much than to start chopping up the model with mdlvis' 'detach as new geoset' button, until you get everything to fit right.. from there it probably should be relatively easy to re-merge and re-rig in mdlvis. but that too will require some serious fiddling and getting to know the tool, from you :b

Oh and.. Imagine what would be if i asked you to edit with that archaic 'vertex modifier' ? :p (unless you actually used it in earlier days like me)

That's actually what I always used. The time you watched me make this a couple of days ago was my first time using mdlvis to make a model.
 
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