There's is a lot of talk here without any relevant information. Name calling almost, disagreements and statements clearly made by those who don't know what issues Reforged madders face.
The talk about people being upset or not wanting to improve might be true, I don't mind my early stuff being substandard, actually it helped me to make much better footmen and knights for the project.
It was probably dressed at SD geomerge makers, since there are
NO comments on what to improve or anything at all for almost
ANY HD model there is, except the first few all were refused.
The thing of outright removing geomerges by substandardising them was already discussed in a thread I opened.
It might have been easy to do in the past and could result in almost spamming the site with low effort edits, but for HD ones there pretty much is no other way than to geomerge edit.
For those who have no experience with Reforged models (which is everyone except like ~10 guys), I'd like to demonstrate the issue.
This subject is a fully custom model made by my colleague
@ShadiHD
- Left side is the sword ingame, with corrupted normal maps (3D look, roughness etc.), appearing almost entirely
flat, if it was not for the working ORM that gives it a shine at least.
- Right side is how the sword is supposed to look like with working normal map.
I'd like to say that is it very frustrating for artists to make the custom models knowing they will look broken. My assumption is that not many people will spend time doing so until the issue is fixed by Blizzard.
Regardless this all being done for a project Shadi still makes them, and we have spent weeks if not more to experiment and figure out how to not only make the normals look at least flat (instead of beyond fucked like they did at start), but also made sure we know now to edit existing model's texures.
We'd like to share the knowledge here again with everyone (normal map edits of exiting models/textures):
All of this combined is why we focus mainly on making models from existing assets, and now resorting only is most ¨dire¨ cases to make a fully custom model.
A few examples of added custom ornaments that do appear 3D because they're are edits on an existing model:
Back to the issue. Undoubtedly there are even HD geomerges that clearly took not more than an hour to make: No custom textures were even edited, looks pretty much like it did before, too simple, or even bad.
But both for Reforged and SD there are geomerges that look better than some approved custom models. Protecting custom artists from those who work with edits by hiding geomerges is silly, and simply doesn't exist for any other game modding community that I know of.
I have yet to meet a single custom modeller who disagrees (yes I asked).
So for me a substandard category is not a bad thing overall, even the name of it is fine, as long as good, liked and useful geomerges make it... it's really not that hard.