Kobold Geomancer design ideas

[Bleeq]

Not the most interesting topic, sorry guys.

I've just started working on the Geomancer to give it a make-over and my main idea is to add some crystal parts and just give him a general texture touch-up. Don't quote me, but I got the idea somehow that kobolds were some of the first units they made, mainly because of the shoddy workmanship and the Sam Didier easter egg thing. So I've already noticed the weird structure and low-res texture... I'm almost regretting touching this thing lol.

atm I'm shaping the backpack into a sack, with large crystals sticking out of it. I also plan on probably adding some small crystals around his shovel with the 'Sphere' ability.
Originally I was going to make all the crystals team colour, but I think it would be difficult to make that look good in many of the given colours. Even the first four might be a stretch.
So I'm thinking make the crystals a standardised colour, but now I need a new bright team colour element.
I don't think there's enough TC on the standard model.

TL;DR does anyone have ideas for a good place to put TC on him? Any other ideas are also welcome too ;P

 

[Remixer]

You could team colour the crystals, no?

 

[Bleeq]

I mentioned that was my original intent in the OP. But I think it would be too overpowering, or look terrible with some of the team colours like black or dark green.
Plus I think a purple kobold, with cyan/aqua crystal elements would look really good as a colour scheme.


Side note, the model uses 3 different versions of the shovel weapon so different animations can move it independently.
Is this pretty standard, or something I should worry about? Is it possible to achieve the same effects without the duplication, but this just saves time and effort?

Edit: Might give the circling crystals around his shovel a miss because it moves so wildly. Might instead do it similar to Blood mage and have little ones circle above him, and be used as projectiles.

 

[tillinghast]

Side note, the model uses 3 different versions of the shovel weapon so different animations can move it independently.
Is this pretty standard, or something I should worry about? Is it possible to achieve the same effects without the duplication, but this just saves time and effort?

it's possible, look at two-headed ogre model, it only has one club but it flies out of his hand in the death animation and in order for it to look as good as it does it's moved and rotated every 33 milliseconds and it certainly does take time and effort to do that

Spoiler: more rambling

i did a similar thing once with this model, where i originally had one gun (A) attached to his hand and a dummy gun (B) unattached to anything, i kept them both at first, lined up the movement/rotation of B to A, and then deleted A
and in hindsight it was supremely retarded, i should've done it the other way around, should've kept gun A since in the death animation his real torso and arms get hidden anyway and i could've moved that gun "out of his hand" freely because of that
learn from my mistakes

 

[Bleeq]

I'd be really interested to know who the different artists were that worked on these. I noticed ogres have a very different style texture, and thought maybe that's just a one off. Then when I was stealing some stuff from the Tuskar I saw he had a different, more detailed style that looked a bit more like WoTLK period WOW. I was thinking maybe this artist joined during WOW/TFT development later. The orc TFT warlock (Gul'dan stand-in during NE campaign) is similar style.
Then later I saw the furbolg texture has loads of details that I never noticed in-game. And those all have grid-lines in the background, which seems more professional lol. Like they are a classically trained artist or something.

It's almost a shame their effort doesn't translate well to the tiny models and camera angle of WC3
So it wouldn't surprise me that artist went the extra yard in animating the ogre assuming they did the entire model.


P.S. before I even looked at the animations I was thinking why Razide's real arms and torso would vanish. My guess was pretty close.

 

[Remixer]

I would imagine that back when Warcraft 3 was developed not too much attention was paid to how the textures wrapped on the models from the RTS camera perspective. We can see the difference between models that were instructed to have more detail - ogre included. They are so classic creatures that are present throughout the Campaign and a lot of melee maps, so they are somewhat detailed, even though the model itself is simple.

You can compare them to for example Centaur. Centaur's whole front face consists of 7 vertices, while for ogre that amount is used for their nose only! Wild.

In regards to the spinning crystals around the shovel, I would not recommend it, since it might be hard to not make clip with other parts of the model, especially if he is swinging it around. What you could do is to make the "handle" of the shovel have a crystal in it / made from crystal that glowed for example.

For the team colours (if not the crystals) I would recommend the Warcraft 3 classics:
Shoulders (if suitable)
Weapon handle (coloured cloth-grip on the handle of the weapon / shovel)
Back / backpack (team coloured symbols on the fabric).
Feet / tail.

Also, if you are willing, you could include a lantern in the model (for example hanging from his backpack or from one of the shovels (if one is for example sticking out from the backpack with the crystals), and that could give you yet another detail where you could try something with team colors.

 

[tillinghast]

You can compare them to for example Centaur. Centaur's whole front face consists of 7 vertices, while for ogre that amount is used for their nose only! Wild.

i have a crackpot theory about centaur model
i think they accidentally overwrote the regular model with a War3_med.mpq model (medium quality model settings)
regular War3.mpq and War3_med.mpq centaur.mdx models are absolutely identical as far as i can see
but War3_low.mpq centaur.mdx is whopping 0.4 kbs lighter (same amount of animations but mesh is a bit simpler i think)
all you said about ogre models should also apply to centaur models because they are heavily featured in orc campaign (or maybe they did it on purpose because of that scene where dozens of centaurs are marching on a tauren settlement and it was too intense for old PCs)

 

[Bleeq]

<> ...What you could do is to make the "handle" of the shovel have a crystal in it / made from crystal that glowed for example.

For the team colours (if not the crystals) I would recommend the Warcraft 3 classics:
Shoulders (if suitable)
Weapon handle (coloured cloth-grip on the handle of the weapon / shovel)
Back / backpack (team coloured symbols on the fabric).
Feet / tail.

Also, if you are willing, you could include a lantern in the model (for example hanging from his backpack or from one of the shovels (if one is for example sticking out from the backpack with the crystals), and that could give you yet another detail where you could try something with team colors.

That's a nice idea about the shovel, especially the glow. It's a bit of a tough situation because kobolds are supposed to be very rough and ragged, but then he's a caster so you want to lean toward ornate wizard stuff. Maybe just replace the shovel end with a rough crystal that glows? It's a funny cute thing to have him wield a shovel though...

-My current plan for the TC is a big insignia or marking on the back, to cover that angle (and nice big surface area). Ideally I'd come up with a cool symbol.
-I'm 99% likely to make his entire hand gloved in 'ornate-ish' wizard gloves with TC to cover the front angle. This also emphasizes that he doesn't work with his hands, because he hauls rock with magic
-The standard model has a lot of little TC elements, but they don't add up to much when actually playing the game. It doesn't compare to those nice big TC bits on Human units like Rifleman, Sorc or Pally. I'm gonna replace most of those little bits.
-I'm gonna add some TC to his hat which won't do much on the field, but will make a difference on his portrait, when I get around to making that.

I'm still a nub; I think I've graduated from baby-steps to toddler-steps but I don't want to go too overboard with modeled elements (as opposed to textures) on this model. Maybe when I start creating stuff from literally nothing lol.

I've changed the backpack, added some crystals poking out, and animated those bits so they don't clip through each other too much, but my priority now is a total resculpt of the head, especially for the portrait. This is a bit higher level than I've done before so will probably take me a ridiculous amount of time to iron it out.

Especially as such a small model I don't want to add too many little bits and bobs to him, I know from when I reskinned the Sorceress I spent an absurd amount of time worrying about pixel perfection and then when I finally tested it in game I realised you couldn't see half the stuff I did.

You've given me an idea that I might try to fit a mining lantern onto the "deep delver" when I get to him. In addition to a candle, of course.

all you said about ogre models should also apply to centaur models because they are heavily featured in orc campaign (or maybe they did it on purpose because of that scene where dozens of centaurs are marching on a tauren settlement and it was too intense for old PCs)

I wouldn't be surprised if you were right about the Centaur spam and potato PCs, but like you say there are plenty of units that feature more than Ogres. And that doesn't explain the furbolgs. Seriously, take a look at the caster and lowbie texture, they have loads of details. Then compare it to the harpy textures..
You can see with the really old alpha tier stuff that they ddin't even plan on having proper faces. That's why you end up with dog shit like Potm, or you can see tiny little heads on the grunt texture before they decided to give them proper faces (I presume).The texture isn't mirrored and has both back and front lol.
Whereas Centaur has nipples on both his front and back .

 

[Bleeq]

Another little thing: might be caused by an oversight.
Gnoll's texture has his body drawn in profile, and it lines up extremely well with the T-pose base model. However, because the arm covers a big part of the torso, they just mapped the arm onto the torso, giving him a TC armband and also belt. Then they hide his paws at the back of his knees lol.

 

[Bleeq]

WIP of the Geomancer:

https://imgur.com/xBIY8Jj

https://imgur.com/NL35QQ2

https://imgur.com/82lhED4

I'm gonna start working on the portrait animation, but I'd really like people's opinion on colours and style etc. Nothing in the pics are final*.
Once the basics are all finished, mainly the portrait view, then I'll upload it for people to shred to pieces.

My feelings are the face is too high poly, my purples and base colours aren't 'vibrant' enough, too muted. And in general the face is a bit derpy. But then maybe it's good to have some variety in the faces, instead of them all looking like vicious animals ready to give you rabies.
Warcraft tends toward the edgy/cartoon though. Or in particular high influence from the style in super hero comics, but I've never been into comics or super heroes so that might be my excuse >_>.

*I'm pretty set on the major colours being Violet/Amber/Aqua, with the blue eyes. I've also started making the candle colours match the eyes, mainly because I thought it was nice to have some details reinforce each other plus I came up with some BS lore that Kobolds associate both their eyes and their candles with sight (and maybe the soul) so Kobolds with the means try to have candles of a matching colour. It's like a social convention.

 

[Bleeq]

There's a lot of learning going on, which is the nice way of saying very slow progress I stopped using MDLVis because it was doing odd things without my knowledge that seemed buggy and broke stuff (like creating multiple bone_null out of nowhere? And then attaching vertices to those, and not allowing me to dissociate them?).
So I've been using Retera's to animate, but it does have its flaws. I can't see how you animate linearly or with Bezier, it all comes out as Hermite, so even if you create 2 KFs with the same coords on them, you'll get parabolic/floaty movement between them instead of just holding the components in place.

Also moderate setback when I tried to make the portrait by just deleting a bunch of elements from the normal model. I resized and deleted some sequences but decided after animating ~one and a half sequences that there was just too much mess and baggage left over from the original. Bones referring to non-existent vertices and visa versa, sequences for bones that didn't exist anymore etc.
I had to do things the proper way, export the mesh and start from bones up all over again :/


Sorry to anyone if I'm spamming up the forum.

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EDIT I'm having a problem with the portrait lighting, and can't figure it out or find anything about it in the forums or anywhere so far.
Everything works fine EXCEPT that when I import the model into a custom map, and use it in game, the portrait isn't lit properly until I click on another model to, I assume, set the lighting.
It reminds me of when I had a portrait sequence without a camera, There was a default angle, but clicking on other models would change that camera angle. You could like keep fishing for different angles until you could actually see your model in the portrait..

The geoman's custom portrait works perfectly fine after you've viewed any other model's portrait, however.