Long time no see, a little texturing fun I had

[Kyrbi0]

Glory has arived! Big thanks to Tauer for setting me on the right path when it comes to getting these blasted animations working, but here we go! Obviously not finished yet, only 3 idles and a run animation made yet, but's a step towards something!

Awexome, man! Really excited to see you solved your problems with exporting. Looking forward to in-game glorious master race. xD

I've been considering them a little too detailed for being normal units myself, I just can't seem to help myself, my eventual plan is to make something all around pandaren, new UI, new units, Voice overs, completely new doodad sets and ground textures, all that goood stuff.

so if I don't screw up horribly I should be able to get it all to work nicely with eachother.
I'd in the end be super happy to develop an entire campaign around it all.

Well that's a grand master plan, if I do say so. I won't depress you with the statistics; I'll just say that "taking baby steps" is important in a thing like this. : P Since you are planning on releasing things, that means that even if you don't finish, it won't be for naught. : )

For the polycount, if it helps, take a look at, say, the Footman/Grunt or Raider/Knight. RoC Heroes should be the max (polies), with RoC units being the minimum. Just my $0.02

As for the blade servant I was thinking perhaps he would fill a more heavy duty melee position like the human knights. *shrug*

When it comes to actual gameplay, sadly there my skills end! Building techtrees and planning out abilities and all that stuff sadly isn't my cup of tea!

*reads last line*
*spits out cup of herbal tea*
*cracks a smile*
*cracks knuckles*

Funny you should say that... Because building techtrees & planning out abilities & stuff is precisely my cup of tea, to the exclusion of pretty much all other skills (esp. modeling)! So you and I might be able to help each other. : )

Specifically, I've had a Pandaren faction (partially) planned out for some time now... And like everything else I do, it was done ignoring filthy WoW lore (for the most part; MoP is actually pretty useful) & instead uses mostly Wc3 lore as a foundation.

Starting from "in-game" stuff, we basically only have

• Pandaren Brewmaster hero (Breath of Fire, Drunken Haze, Drunken Brawler, Storm,Earth,and Fire)

Though if you remember his ultimate, in a way we have 3 more 'units':

• Storm (wizard; has Dispel Magic, Cyclone, Wind Walk, Resistant Skin)
• Earth (tank; has Pulverize, Taunt, Spell Immunity, Resistant Skin)
• Fire (warrior; has Permanent Immolation, Resistant Skin)

So that helps. Moving on, we should also consider Blizzard's famous April Fools joke; a faux racial write-up for the Pandaren (gold mine)! In it we find:

• Shodo Pan (martial hero; combines wardancer & geomancer)
• Geomancer (wizard unit: earth elementalism stuff)
• Wardancer (warrior unit: blade/war stuff)
• Pikeman (warrior unit: melee (pike) & ranged (spear)

So that's even better. Now to just sorta brainstorm a bunch of random Oriental/Asian concepts that we would Expect to see:

• CHARACTERS
• samurai
• sumo
• ninja
• fireworks
• monk
• transcendent
• shogun
• 
  
• CREATURES
• dragon (chinese)
• turtles (kappa)
• fox (fire/ninetails)
• kirin/qirin/qilin/etc
• yokai
• oni
• 
  
• BUILDINGS (Names)
• dojo
• pagoda
• monastery
• shrine
• temple
• (bamboo)
• Great Wall

(Note: Not all of those need to happen; 'brainstorm', remember? But these are cool & memorable concepts that could turn into powerful model design & character design (& Warcraft is all about character))

~~~

So yeah! That's just a sampling; I have loads more but I'm realizing just how big this is (& somewhat off-topic); if you'd rather discuss more elsewhere, let me know. : )

 

[Traggey]

Naw man discuss away! This is interesting stuff to me! If I were to do this I would also go ahead and just completely ignore WoW lore, I've never been much of a fan of it.

I would completely throw away the old pandaren units though, either that, or I'll make a new model for the brewmaster at some point, because that dude is fugly.

But yeah man I'd be super down to plan some of this stuff out, gives me a little bit more direction in my work which always helps!

 

[Tauer]

Said it before, but dat texturing!

You really nail the Blizzard style. Amazing.

Animations look great as well, fits in Warcraft 3 perfectly. Keep it up!

 

[Traggey]

Thanks a billion mate!

 

[Traggey]

I am once again running into some seriously bizzare animation problems, which is causing this to take so long, I've made sure to remove zero weights but NeoDex is still reporting unbalanced weights for some reason, and upon exporting some verts go sideways, instead of up/down.

If anyone has any clue what might be going on here please do let me know, I'm tearing my hair out over this.

And not only do they move in the wrong direction, some joints don't seem animated at all, such as the lips.

 

[Kyrbi0]

Geez man, no fun. Wish I could help. :<

 

[Tauer]

Hmm... Not sure man :/
I seem to remember a somewhat similar problem I ran into once. The problem was that I moved bones that were attached to another bone, actually in a portrait model like this one. Like, I had a cheek bone that was attached to the head bone, and if I moved the cheek bone it would result in some weird deformations like that. I fixed it by only rotating bones attached to other bones, never using the move tool.
I have idea why some of the bones don't move at all, that's really strange.

Also, holy fuck that portrait looks hi-def! Amazing work!

 

[Traggey]

Ah that makes sense, I am doing just that. I have the cheek bones set to bone mode off and not using rotations for them, same with the lips. I do the same thing for the eyelids and they work fine for some reason.

Any way to use floating bones properly with NeoDex? I've tried this method which is obviously causing issues, aswell as the standard link constraint, however NeoDex does not seem to want to export anything with link constraints at all.

Surely it has to be possible, in order to do things like having characters sheathe swords and that good stuff.
And thanks man! Means alot, it's a 256 texture, not sure if that's too much for a portrait model, but it could probs be downsized to a 128 without loosing too much detail.

 

[Tauer]

It seems like something that should be possible alright. But I'm afraid I never figured it out myself :/

I think Neodex only supports orientation constraints and look-at constraints, unfortunately.

If you do figure it out, I'd love to know how to do it as well. Makes animating portraits much easier.

 

[Traggey]

Cheers, the hunt shall continue then!

 

[Tauer]

You might want to try using 2016 instead of 2014. It's unlikely to make a difference with this particular problem, but when I tried to export Lothar using 2014 the animations were totally screwed up for some reason (I even tried exporting one of my earlier models again using 2014, also messed up animations), using 2016 to export fixed these issues. It seems like Neodex plays a lot more nicely with 2016 for some reason.

 

[Traggey]

Oh, neato. If one could aford a license I'd totally go with that instead, damned Autodesk..

 

[Tauer]

You cant get the student license?

 

[Traggey]

Oh I used those up YEAARS ago!

 

[Tauer]

You can't just renew it? I did that when mine expired this year.
Alternatively create a new account? I mean, they're not really strict about it in any way. I just chose my university when renewing my account, but there's really no way for them to confirm whether what I wrote was true or not. Honestly I don't think they really care.

 

[Traggey]

True that, might aswell give it a try then! Hope it does better, been having so many issues with NeoDex that it's kind of putting me off, makes it hard to bounce between WC3 modding in the small hours.

 

[Tauer]

I feel you man, I've had my share of exporting nightmares. Was worse a few years ago when I used 2011 (I think) though. I got errors with pretty much every model. Lately it's been better though. 2016 is probably the smoothest exporting experience I've had so far.

All in all Neodex is still amazing though. None of my models would've been possible without the easy workflow it allows for in Max.

 

[Traggey]

Oh absolutely, it's a nifty piece of software.
Speaking of animation, do you happen to have any documentation or alike concerning the transition between stand ready and attack animations? I'm having some great issues getting the two to blend together nicely.

 

[Tauer]

I just use the same start-end keys for all attack animations and the stand ready animation. Basically just make a default attack pose as attack ready, if you understand my meaning. Try looking at some of the animations for the regular Blizz models.
Don't know if this is what you meant by the transition. Do you have a video or gif showing what the issue is?

Also, if you're looking for documentation for WC3 modeling in general you should check out the Warcraft III Art Tools Documentation, if you haven't already. Neodex works a lot like Blizzards original 3ds Max 5 plugin, so you can learn a lot from reading the documentation.

 

[Traggey]

Yeah this is what I have been doing, however for what-ever unexplainable reason I'm getting horrible transitions from where the attack animation fades into the stand ready animation, it appears as if for the first 5-10 frames of returning to the stand ready, the stand ready animation is repeated.

Since moving over to TCB controllers I am also experiencing a brainkilling problem of something I call a stealth curve, when animating and just doing my thing, sometimes a curve is added that I can not manipulate, usually this curve results in my charater turning slightly or even sinking into the ground, and for whatever reason the curves can not be manipulated in the curve editor, I asume this is one of the drawbacks of the TCB controllers?


This problem is currently breaking every single one of my animations.

 

[Tauer]

Yeah, that particular problem can usually be fixed by copying all keyframes to the frame just before your starting frame. So you basically have two keyframes next to each other with the same data. I think Neodex actually has a script to do this automatically, but I usually just do it manually. It's kinda become second nature for me.

The stand ready issue seems weird though. No idea what would be causing that are you sure your animations are correctly set up in the note track?

 

[Traggey]

Double, tripple and quadruple checked.

And cheers, been using that ''fix'' myself, seems like a problematic workaround but it'll do!

 

[Moy]

You should upload that Silencer skin you know. It looks epic and deserves a spotlight.

 

[Heinvers]

Hey there Traggey,

What have you been up to lately? Anything worth showing?

 

[Traggey]

Hey! Well other than the contest entry not too much, I am currently in the middle of searching for a job so I've got alot of stuff on my mind!

Due to some issues with Neodex I am also going to have to create the animations for the mistweaver from scratch again, aswell as revising the rig somewhat. I'm hoping to get him done soon but it's a little soul crushing!


And YES! I actually should upload the silencer skin, I'll do that right away.


So I've smacked the texture into the game, but having some issues per usual, due to how the teamcolour is tied to specific parts of the geometry on the spellstealer the teamcolours from my skin won't show up where I want them, so some areas remain grey, not really sure what to do about this.

 

[Kyrbi0]

Man, you are just not having any luck, models or textures. :< Hope you can get your awexomeness resolved!

 

[PROXY]

Just upload it altogether with a link to a simple edit of the spellbreaker with tc added to said parts

 

[Traggey]

So I recently poked in to have a look at the hero contest! Got excited to do something similar so I made a speedmodel today, about 5 hours of work, based on a character that I call ''Bloodlord'' from a sidescrolling metroidvania game I'm currently developing.

 

[Heinvers]

Damn Traggey, this looks delicious <3

Quite the character with smooth contrast and good take on an undead-like warrior. Although, I do think that the hair highlights could be toned a bit and the rusty boots could be more transitory in the color palette.

 

[Traggey]

Thanks Heinvers! Yes I agree with you fully, the boots and hair still need a fair bit of work, as do some other parts. I'll deffo fix that, thanks for the feedback!

 

[Archian]

Nipples & buttocks!

Again, really smooth texturing style. Keep it up Trag!

 

[Traggey]

Thanks Archian! ALL the nipples and buttockes! When I was designing this guy for the platformer game it was about 4 AM and I was giggling like a school girl when I decided to give him the cowboy butt pants.

Did some touchups on the texture, much happier with him now.

 

[Kyrbi0]

Thanks Archian! ALL the nipples and buttockes! When I was designing this guy for the platformer game it was about 4 AM in the morning and I was giggling like a school girl when I decided to give him the cowboy butt pants.

Did some touchups on the texture, much happier with him now.

View attachment 246937

...

Holy cow you are fast.

I was about to laugh when you said something about the Hero Contest, but... DAAAANG.

If you haven't seen already, there's actually a Contestant who is missing an Artist, and I personally think you'd be a great fit for his ability set he posted (with some slight modifications).

Now it ends today @ 'midnight' (technically "Monday, August 29th 2016 @ 11:59:59pm GMT"), but if you recall GMT, it's time-zone dependent. So it might be different for you, based on what GMT +/- you are (for me, it's actually over earlier; "8pm" tonight. *sigh*). But honestly, you look to have a pretty complete model; throw an in-game animation set on there & perhaps you still have a chance!

 

[Traggey]

I've never applied premade animations before, but I'll give it a shot!

 

[Kyrbi0]

Well, feel free to scratch animate, but I don't know what your GMT allows. : ) When's your deadline?

 

[Traggey]

It's six in the evening over here now, so I don't think I'd have the time. But always worth a shot. Could make some basic animations atleast.

 

[Kyrbi0]

It doesn't matter so much what time it is; it's your GMT. "Your" deadline might be tomorrow @ 8am (if you are in the Philippines like Hayate). What's your GMT?

Also don't forget to post an artistic WIP in the main Contest thread.

 

[Traggey]

Oh, right! Well I'd be GMT + 2

 

[Kyrbi0]

Well good luck! Add 2 to the "midnight" deadline, so you have until "2am" tonight (technically 1:59:59am of Tuesday), as far as I can tell.

 

[Traggey]

Thaaat's going to be real tight, I don't think I'll participate out of pure respect for my heart rate.

 

[Kyrbi0]

Lol. Well, like I said scratch animating might be a little crazy. I've only just begun learning this stuff, but wholesale importing another animation set (Retera's MatrixEater can do it easily, so I've been told) might be easier.

Either way, good model. : )

 

[Traggey]

So I actually have him about 80 % scratch animated by now and he's functioning rather well in engine. Only problem is some strange skinning occouring where his chest attaches to his arm, that is only in-engine and does not actually appear that way in max, even though I have removed zero weights it is somehow exporting non-balanced weights.

 

[Heinvers]

Hey there. That looks scrumptious! Especially the whole outfit.

Dicky comment: replace the blade with a revolver, add a cowboy hat, a sheriff badge and we've got wild west mayhem. :]

 

[Traggey]

Maaaaaan now I want to give him a big gun too, screw you!

Lucky enough for me there's no space on the UV's for that, so it's not happening. HAHA!

 

[Kyrbi0]

There's always another UV. Or a leather-wrapped gun. Oooooor ingame textures!

 

[Misha]

maan, this looks like a treasure trove of stuff ^^

also, i had no idea you animate oO

 

[Traggey]

Thanks man, I do a bit of everything! Modeling, animating, texturing, level design, voice acting.. You name it! I've probably dabbled with it.

 

[Traggey]

Got inspired by Tauers latest work and began working on this baby.

 

[Mr.Goblin]

I APPROVE FOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOR REAL. thrall is the best

edit = is that your model?

 

[Tauer]

HOOOLY SHIIT, YES! All of the yes!!

Please tell me you're gonna release this!