Request to Find the Alpha Owl Priestess

[Retera]

I was wondering if anyone had a way to obtain or find the ancient Owl Moon Priestess from the Alpha.

I made a discord server called Save Owl Moon Priestess for this.

Discord - Free voice and text chat for gamers

This is not an easy model to find, because to my knowledge no one has it at all. There are remakes made with in-game WarCraft III textures and the moon priestess tiger rider model as a base. However, the original rider model and high resolution owl texture with team color striped wings seems to be missing.

Here is a picture of what exactly I'm hoping to dig up (again, this is different from fan made recreations that I found online):

Edit:
Based on what I was able to intuit over the years:
The small Huntress owl model included in WarcCraft III was made after this flying hero. They needed to make it fast, so they grabbed the same texture file, recolored it and compressed it down to a lower resolution and made a simpler model file. The simpler one notably doesn't have the same feet and other details. If you look at the texture file for the Huntress's owl, you can see in the alpha channel and color channels where the rider used to be, but only a silhouette can be extracted. It's notably a different shape of rider from the one who rides the riger, although they bare some similarities. I was able to get them to almost fit when I was doing layering research but I felt that they had different armor and were a different color, and ultimately didn't quite fit as though the rider had been reworked or redrawn.

In The Frozen Throne, they added the Snowy Owl critter where they again used this texture but this time turned the low resolution texture to a whitish blue color. This was where Blizzard dropped the gold mine that allowed fans to "recreate" the model pictured above. The Portrait model for the Snowy Owl was supposed to be an HD better owl, and there was not time to draw such a model during the hasty development process. So, Blizzard borrowed their own alpha Moon Priestess model and deleted the priestess off of the back, then slapped the Snowy Owl texture on it, creating effectively an HD portrait for the Snowy Owl in comparison to its own in-game model. Blizzard did not even spend the time to remove the Walk and Attack animations from this portrait model.

So, it is a trivial geomerge to take the Snowy Owl portrait, and the tiger rider, and put the tiger rider's physical mesh on the back of this portrait model that is actually the old Owl Moon Priestess with the rider deleted. This creates a product that looks similar to what I am looking for, but it has a few key differences:

1. I am convinced from the pictures above that the original model had a higher resolution texture in comparison to the result of the trivial geomerge case.
2. The model shown above has a different color of owl and is less washed out than the one included in the game. The included one presumably has quickly done color tint filters that may have removed some of the color variety in the original texture art.
3. The model shown above has team color stripes down the wings. I believe it was true, if memory serves, that the Snowy Owl portrait derived from this model still retains proper layering to display the team color if it were given the lost texture. But we do not have the lost texture, and that portrait file is missing the rider entirely.
4. The model of the rider is very different looking when inspected closely. It seems to have changed or been recreated to draw the tiger rider.
5. If you look at the files included in the Reign of Chaos Beta, they all reference Team Color textures directly. For example, this model was probably created as a working unfinished product where the team color was always Blue (what became Player 2). This also means that if the model were ever found, it would probably be using something akin to the BLP0 texture format from the same time that consists of many files for each texture. Using libraries such as DrSuperGood's BLP0 parser, this is a trivial problem for us to fix. Even if it were a different version than anything included in the RoC Beta, DrSuperGood's code is open source and could be modified to parse new and unknown historical formatting.

As many know, the icon for this model is included with Warcraft III and can be loaded in the editor at the path:

ReplaceableTextures\CommandButtons\BTNHeroMoonPriestess.blp

(The source of the picture of the in-game model is an image that I made by clipping together everything that I could find on Google on this model. They are images from WarCraft III Alpha, probably taken on Blizzard Entertainment computers in 2000 or 2001)

 

[Lake]

Never stumpled upon it, but it looks really cool, so I'll just tag a long here

 

[Retera]

Thanks! I just edited the post to include my past research on the topic.

 

[stein123]

Well, this is the only version there is: HeroMoonPriestess i highly doubt anyone has any of the alpha models, only remakes, like the beta DotC, DotT or Shadow Hunter :'c

 

[Retera]

Yes, perhaps so. But I'm making this thread just in case.
According to my research, the model you linked is the one created from the Snowy Owl portrait file combined with the Warcraft 3 public release tiger rider Priestess of the Moon. One obvious example is the shoulder pads, which are very different in the unreleased alpha model image vs the model that you linked. After the owl was gone, there would no longer have been team color wings, tail feathers, and head. Probably then the developers wanted more team color on the tiger rider so they gave her team color shoulder pads and changed her hair and such a bit.