Portraits

[tillinghast]

There's a lot of evidence that originally all wc3 models had their portraits included in the main model. So why did blizzard decided to separate them into "model.mdx" and "model_portrait.mdx"? Is there any benefit to having two separate models like that?

 

[PROXY]

A wild guess, but as the graphic settings affect the visuals of the model, I suppose they didn't want their portraits to look like this:

 

[Razorclaw_X]

If you look at nearly every unit in the game, the portrait has more detailed facial features than the unit model. Then for optimization they remove portions of the model that won't be seen to 'recover' the budget from using a higher definition face.

For Reforged this is mostly a legacy feature since they use the entire flippin model for the portrait anyway.

 

[Macadamia]

There is something else that would justify a separate portrait model :

- the need for several detailed talk animations that should not be included in the main model.
- as for the background, it can easily be added to the main model, but then be careful with the extents of the background that could interfere with ingame mouse selections.