• 🏆 Texturing Contest #33 is OPEN! Contestants must re-texture a SD unit model found in-game (Warcraft 3 Classic), recreating the unit into a peaceful NPC version. 🔗Click here to enter!
  • It's time for the first HD Modeling Contest of 2024. Join the theme discussion for Hive's HD Modeling Contest #6! Click here to post your idea!

Snake Urn (and snake totem)

So, in line with the theme of sand trolls, I've made an urn ward with a snake. The model is multipurpose, it has standard (open) and alternate (closed) animations, as well as morph animations and both birth and birth alternate animations.

Basically, I imagined it as it having either a burrow kind of ability, where the snake is invisible until someone comes near, and emerges; or as a stone gargoyle ability, where the snake retreats to the urn to recover.


And it can always be used as a doodad.

Since I was going with it, I made a different snake totem, more in line of a Farraki totem.




Models are incredibly lightweight, even after having replaced orm, diffuse and normal. This could prove useful to others, so I'll post an image of my approach. Since .dds works with image sizes, I used the smallest power of 2 (in this case, 512x256) and put the main textures there. Then, I did the same thing with orms and normals, setting the images in a corner and lowering the opacity of the layer to make sure they are in the same position. Once they are, I reset the opacity and save the ORM/normal.
If I wanted to modify just a single image, It'd have weighed 5mb (it was a 2048x2048). Instead, the 3 of them only weigh 512kb. STONKS.

This is particularly relevant when recolouring a small geoset.


Update: Optimised the icons
Previews
Contents

Snake icon (Icon)

snake totem (Model)

snake totem portrait (Model)

Snake Urn (Model)

Snake Urn portrait (Model)

Reviews
Barorque
Approved. Honestly a genius use of the snake's animation with the urn. Quite useful for sand related maps as well as for what it is intended to be. Lightweight texture is a good thing too!
I liked it!
What a great idea, it will be very useful for different maps.
Interestingly, you just scaled it down the form alternated.


Yeah, in this case it's the same result as editing visibility but without room for error, asthe morph comes from a scaled down version as well. Sometimes it's necessary to edit the visibility, but thankfully this was not the case :ogre_haosis:
 
Top