Tauer's Models 2.0

[Tauer]

Well.

I recently started coming back to this place, because nostalgia.

And I couldn't really help myself, I had to try to make another model. And I loved it every bit as much as I did way back when.

I don't even know how many people still hang out here, but new models are uploaded almost every day, so I take it it's still pretty active.

I really should not make this thread, because I really don't have the time for it but I have a feeling I'm going to make more models, simply because it's so much fun. It's kinda my way of relaxing after a hard week of studies and other duties.

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I'm only including what I believe to be my "next generation" models. That is, scratch made. No model edits.

Tauer's Models

Heroes of The Horde

Hidden

Durotan (OLD)

Durotan

Orgrim Doomhammer (OLD)

Orgrim Doomhammer

Blackhand, the Destroyer

Blackhand

Grommash

GrommashHellscream

Garrosh

Garrosh

Durotan

Durotan

Ma'ghar skin

Garona Halforcen

Garona

Zul'jin

Zul'jin

Orgrim Doomhammer

Orgrim Doomhammer

Gul'dan

Gul'dan

Cho'gall

Cho'gall

Thrall

Thrall

Heroes of The Alliance

Hidden

Krasus

Krasus

Anduin Lothar

Anduin Lothar

 

[Demon boy]

God is back...

 

[Tauer]

God is back...

Hehe

I made some changes to Krasus. His skin has more highlights and shadows, should look a lot more WC3 like. Also fixed a minor animation bug.

Hope you guys like the changes.

Well, I'll be damned... I just found out I still have the files for the Blackhand model I started making a looong time ago. I thought I had lost them. Heck, I might just finish him. He was fun to make

 

[Heinvers]

Finally the model boss is coming back. Good to see you're still making models Looks great.

 

[NhazUl]

Looks nice, but please, do something for the face. He's a mage with elven features, not a mobster. Good luck. ^^

 

[Tauer]

Finally the model boss is coming back. Good to see you're still making models Looks great.

Thanks!

Looks nice, but please, do something for the face. He's a mage with elven features, not a mobster. Good luck. ^^

He's a dragon mage.

I tried going for elvish look with some avian-like features, I think it turned out alright.

Model is pretty much done anyway, only updates are for bugs and the like. This was the design I chose for him pretty early on, not really interested in redoing it now, sorry.

Besides, I added some higher res eyes. Looks better now.

 

[Heinvers]

In fact it is indeed looking better with those eyes. Keep working on it

 

[Tauer]

Yay, Krasus is approved!

Alright, time for the next one. Don't know when I'm going to finish him, between studies, starting up a company and planning a friggin' wedding, I don't have a lot of spare time lately

I've decided to finish the Blackhand model I started ages ago. Right now I'm working on defining his muscles. I've posted the old look for comparison.

OLD:

NEW:

Trying to give it that Warcraft 3 feel. Still an ongoing process of course.

Feedback welcome.

 

[The_Legion]

What a nice and bada** looking model but maybe you could a bit more armour to it considering that the blackrocks are the most armoured among the other orc clans. You could add some knee guards and some armour on either his right or left breast.

 

[Tauer]

What a nice and bada** looking model but maybe you could a bit more armour to it considering that the blackrocks are the most armoured among the other orc clans. You could add some knee guards and some armour on either his right or left breast.

True, but usually with my models, I try to stay as close to the concept art as I can. I get what you're saying though. I'll see if I can squeeze in some armour somewhere. If it doesn't look good I'll remove it though.

Here is the concept art for Blackhand:

Also, one more WIP before I sleep. Doing some shading work on his armour and cape.

Here's an old picture for comparison:

 

[PROXY]

Great to see you back man. You were a lot of inspiration to me back in the old days.

 

[Kyrbi0]

Awexome! I love to see old modellers come back with a bang!

I am lovin' that Blackhand. You're shading has definitely improved, capturing that 'high-contrast' Warcraft feel as far as I can tell. Subscribing. : )

 

[Tauer]

Great to see you back man. You were a lot of inspiration to me back in the old days.

Thank you! That means a lot to me. I never imagined I would be an inspiration for anyone

Awexome! I love to see old modellers come back with a bang!

I am lovin' that Blackhand. You're shading has definitely improved, capturing that 'high-contrast' Warcraft feel as far as I can tell. Subscribing. : )

Thanks! Yeah, I'm really trying to improve my hand-painting skills, and WC3 models is a really good way of doing that. Plus it's just so much fun, I should really sleep but I don't want to

A few more pictures and then I really gotta sleep, got classes tomorrow morning.

Still working on shading him and adding details. I'm trying to spend as much time as possible on the texture this time, to really hone my texturing skills. I'm liking the result so far.

Good night folks

 

[Rui]

Amagad Tauer is back! =)

 

[Heinvers]

Awsum

 

[Rui]

What's the matter with Krasus's chin

 

[Ujimasa Hojo]

That's awesome, being able to create a model based on that simple artwork.

 

[Tauer]

Amagad Tauer is back! =)

It's great to be back!

What's the matter with Krasus's chin

I know his chin may look a little sharp, but if there's one thing I've learned about making low polygon models, it's that the shape is really important. It has to work as a silhuette, which means exaggerated features. Trust me, if it looked realistic, he would look really boring in game.
But... It may be a little too long. I've made it a bit shorter, will update at some point.

That's awesome, being able to create a model based on that simple artwork.

Thank you! Making my models close to the concept art is a really big deal for me, I'm glad that I'm successful.

Awsum

Thanks

Alright guys, the texture is almost done. There's not gonna be alot of team color on this one, just the belt I think.

Just need to find out which texture to use for his axe..

 

[The_Legion]

Maybe you could use rexxar's axe texture or maybe the felguard's axe?

 

[Tauer]

Maybe you could use rexxar's axe texture or maybe the felguard's axe?

Thanks for the suggestion, had I seen this post a few minutes ago I might have done so... alas I already started making my own texture for the axe..

 

[The_Legion]

Thanks for the suggestion, had I seen this post a few minutes ago I might have done so... alas I already started making my own texture for the axe..

Oh alright. Fair point XD

Edit: sorry for an out-of-topic question but how do I suscribe to this post?

 

[Tauer]

Oh alright. Fair point XD

Edit: sorry for an out-of-topic question but how do I suscribe to this post?

Not off-topic at all

But actually, I have no idea
I didn't even know you could subscribe to posts..

 

[The_Legion]

Finally, I subscribed to this thread now . So post MOAR WIPs !!XD

 

[Tauer]

Finally, I subscribed to this thread now . So post MOAR WIPs !!XD

As you wish!

Working on the axe now. Had a bit of trouble getting the look right, but I think it's slowly getting there.

Not done yet, of course. Thoughts?

 

[Heinvers]

M mm. Looks yummy great work even for a WIP texture it's great.

 

[The_Legion]

OUTSTANDING WORK!! But the axe needs a bit more lighting in the middle and it kinda needs a hilt maybe some sort of bear pelt/fur? But other than that it's a fantastic model

Edit: oh yeah it seems that the only thing missing now is the shaft texture

 

[Tauer]

M mm. Looks yummy great work even for a WIP texture it's great.

Thanks

OUTSTANDING WORK!! But the axe needs a bit more lighting in the middle and it kinda needs a hilt maybe some sort of bear pelt/fur? But other than that it's a fantastic model

Edit: oh yeah it seems that the only thing missing now is the shaft texture

Yup, working on it now. And thanks!

Last WIP before I sleep. I reeaally gotta sleep :'(

Made some more shadows and highlights on the axe head and started painting the shaft. The black part near his hand will be team colored.

 

[Tauer]

Yay, Friday!!

So I started animating.

WIP of the Stand - 1 animation.

Not sure it's quite there yet though, any ideas?

EDIT:

Worked a bit more on the animations, here's a gif:

Includes 3 stand animations, stand ready and one attack animation.

Of course, this is a low quality gif, it will look better ingame.

 

[Kyrbi0]

Woah, you animate too? Man, where have you been all my modding life?

ON-TOPIC: They look pretty dang good so far; not to exaggerated, not to clunky, pretty Warcraft-y.

 

[Heinvers]

Woah, you animate too? Man, where have you been all my modding life?

HAHA. Yeah I agree, it's pretty darn good. I knew you would make good animations, but these tend to bring the overall look of the model to a great level

 

[Hawkwing]

Glad to see you're back! I'm eager to try out this model when it's done.

The texture looks so much better than in the original version!

Two things I'm noticing right now: the swing of his axe in the attack animation seems to all be in his forearm. Try rotating his hips and torso some more as he winds up before he strikes. Also, I think the second smaller axe head needs to be moved closer to the bigger one. It looks a little odd to me right now and in the concept, the two seem to be touching.

 

[Tauer]

Woah, you animate too? Man, where have you been all my modding life?

ON-TOPIC: They look pretty dang good so far; not to exaggerated, not to clunky, pretty Warcraft-y.

Hehe, been here for some time, just not always been able to animate nor make very good models I'm afraid.

HAHA. Yeah I agree, it's pretty darn good. I knew you would make good animations, but these tend to bring the overall look of the model to a great level

Thanks, glad you like it

Glad to see you're back! I'm eager to try out this model when it's done.

The texture looks so much better than in the original version!

Two things I'm noticing right now: the swing of his axe in the attack animation seems to all be in his forearm. Try rotating his hips and torso some more as he winds up before he strikes. Also, I think the second smaller axe head needs to be moved closer to the bigger one. It looks a little odd to me right now and in the concept, the two seem to be touching.

Good point, I moved the axe head up a bit.
Also tried rotating him more in the attack animations, to give it a bit more force.

Again, it will look better ingame, these gifs tend to take some of the force from the animations.

Right now I'm working on the darn walk cycle. Those are always the hardest. Could use some feedback on it:

Tried to make it a bit exaggerated, to make it feel more Warcraft 3-ish. Blizzard's models tend to have extremely exaggerated animations though.

 

[Hawkwing]

The walk cycle is pretty good. Something about it doesn't feel as imposing about it as it could be though. I really like this model and want to push you to make it as good as possible, so I'm being a bit hypercritical. Maybe try bringing his arms out to the side a bit more. Blackhand is a very bold, confident character in my mind and I imagine making him take up more space and feel like making him less tight and rigid would help establish that. I'm kind of guessing here. I don't really do much animation myself lol. The attack animation looks quite a bit better. For the first attack animation (the top image) I think you should have the axe move in more of an upward arc. Right now it looks like he's bashing the ground as if his axe is a club, defeating the purpose a having a giant bladed weapon. This is assuming his target isn't lying on the ground, accepting their impending death, which is a reasonable thing to do in a battle against Blackhand! Add some more movement to the left arm as well. In the first animation, make him hold it in front of his chest as he winds up to strike and then pull it back as he swings. I'm not exactly sure how I would move the left arm in the second attack animation, but it looks particularly stiff here.

Keep it up. I'm super excited! There have been several models in the past where I have made maps solely for the purpose of testing them out and I imagine I will be doing that with this one.

 

[Tauer]

The walk cycle is pretty good. Something about it doesn't feel as imposing about it as it could be though. I really like this model and want to push you to make it as good as possible, so I'm being a bit hypercritical. Maybe try bringing his arms out to the side a bit more. Blackhand is a very bold, confident character in my mind and I imagine making him take up more space and feel like making him less tight and rigid would help establish that. I'm kind of guessing here. I don't really do much animation myself lol. The attack animation looks quite a bit better. For the first attack animation (the top image) I think you should have the axe move in more of an upward arc. Right now it looks like he's bashing the ground as if his axe is a club, defeating the purpose a having a giant bladed weapon. This is assuming his target isn't lying on the ground, accepting their impending death, which is a reasonable thing to do in a battle against Blackhand! Add some more movement to the left arm as well. In the first animation, make him hold it in front of his chest as he winds up to strike and then pull it back as he swings. I'm not exactly sure how I would move the left arm in the second attack animation, but it looks particularly stiff here.

Keep it up. I'm super excited! There have been several models in the past where I have made maps solely for the purpose of testing them out and I imagine I will be doing that with this one.

Thanks for the input

That is exactly my problem with the walk cycle. There is a fine 'Blizzardy' line between too simple and too exaggerated animations. If it's too simple, it'll look boring ingame, too exaggerated it will look downright goofy.
It's all about finding that line, but that's pretty hard. I'm still doing some tweaking on the walk cycle.

Your input about attack 1, something like this perhaps?

Or did you mean something else by upward arc?

 

[Heinvers]

Now he definitely emanates force with that attack.

 

[Hawkwing]

You interpreted my suggestions a bit differently than I had expected, but the results are good. Interestingly enough, the animation looks significantly better in the second image provided. In the first image it almost looks like he's batting his target with the side of axe, but I'm pretty confident that it's just the angle causing this. Now if you want me to be super nit-picky, I would say delay the movement of his left arm a little bit so it's a bit out of sync with the movement of the rest of his body. That would make his upper body look more organic and less like a single unit rotating together. This is something that might take some playing around with though. It would be a difference of a few frames of animation and won't be very noticeable, but it may be worth exploring, if you're not fed up with this animation.

 

[Tauer]

Well guys, I'm a little screwed atm...
I animated him using IK Solvers, which makes animations look a lot better and is easier to animate with... NeoDex supposedly supports this. But when I try to export it looks bad ingame, like the IK Solvers aren't exported. Apparently I have to use a tool called IK Snapper in NeoDex which fixes this, but the tool doesn't work. I get an error message when I use this tool. So... I sent BlinkBoy a message. But I don't know when or if he gets time to answer it.

There is a workaround by baking all the animations into the skeleton. Which means there will be a keyframe for every single frame in the animations. There is a problem with this aproach however... The filesize is atrociously high. Like 1 MB for the model :/

So that doesn't really work either. I'm a bit stuck on this one. The model is pretty much done, I just have this on problem.

EDIT:

There's a tool in NeoDex called key reducer. Maybe that'll help. I'll try it out. Afraid it'll mess with the animations though.

 

[Hawkwing]

Key Reducer has been pretty good in my experience. And BlinkBoy is good about responding. Of course there can be exceptions to this, but when I was first trying out Neodex I was messaging him back and fourth and he was very receptive to my issues.

 

[Tauer]

Key Reducer has been pretty good in my experience. And BlinkBoy is good about responding. Of course there can be exceptions to this, but when I was first trying out Neodex I was messaging him back and fourth and he was very receptive to my issues.

The key reducer didn't really help that much... While it lowered the filesize, it was still about 500kb. Which is too much, especially for the model alone.

I've been thinking about some other ways of fixing this, I'll be trying it out today.

Hopefully BlinkBoy will respond. Looks like he hasn't been online for some weeks though.

EDIT:

I can for the life of me not figure out how to solve this...
Only solution I can see right now would be to redo the animations . . .

I guess I could try exporting using 3DS Max 2011 instead of 2013, I think that's what BlinkBoy uses...

EDIT 2:

Well, good news and extremely bad news.

Good news is that in 3DS Max 2011, the IK Snapper tool works. Bad news is that it royally screws up the animations. So basically, not much use.

I'm really f*cked with this one I think. I think the only solution is to either wait for BlinkBoy to respond or redo all the animation, using normal animation technique instead of IK. And that would suck a bit...
I'll have to think on this a bit more.

In the meanwhile, I started doing some light touching up on my Doomhammer's texture. Blackhand model is basically done, just this one hurdle. Might as well do something else while waiting.
I might redo the animations for Blackhand though, just need to find the motivation to do so first.

EDIT 3:

Yet another edit

So I kinda figured it out. I can now snap the IK without completely screwing the animations up. It still needs some cleaning up afterwards, but that shouldn't be too difficult. Expect a release soon.

 

[Tauer]

Alright, sorry for double post, but he is DONE.

Finally

Now, because of the complications during export, his animations may not be quite as good as I would've liked, but they should be okay. Let me know what you think.

I'd like to thank everyone for their input.

He was fun to make, but I'm glad I'm done. The exporting was a b*tch.

http://www.hiveworkshop.com/forums/models-530/thedestroyer-250052/

Please let me know if you run into any bugs, so I can fix them

 

[Heinvers]

Well, it turned out quite gorgeous. Well the file size is acceptable, quality counts here. Will you make other heroes too?

 

[Tauer]

Well, it turned out quite gorgeous. Well the file size is acceptable, quality counts here. Will you make other heroes too?

That's the plan.

Right now I really want to upgrade Doomhammer's texture though. Maybe even Durotan's as well.
I feel a little bad giving Blackhand a better texture than them, since he's kinda a douche. I think Warcraft's best bromance deserves better.

As for my next model... I really wanna do a badass Lothar. Or maybe Khadgar, make both young and old version

 

[Heinvers]

I think Warcraft's best bromance deserves better.

As for my next model... I really wanna do a badass Lothar. Or maybe Khadgar, make both young and old version

lol, well that's a great idea. What about a Grom Hellscream model? Do you have in mind something like that?

 

[Tauer]

lol, well that's a great idea. What about a Grom Hellscream model? Do you have in mind something like that?

Well, you're not the first to suggest that. But I dunno.. I guess I don't really feel like making custom models for heroes that already have one. Though.. Grom is a pretty cool character and his design is awesome. Plus the Blizzard model is really low quality.. I'll have to think about it

 

[Hardtime]

Make Lothar!

 

[Tauer]

Make Lothar!

I want to. But he's gonna be a hard one I think. Gotta be perfect, I've got his legacy to live up to

Been doing some upgrading on Doomhammer's texture. Just trying to give it more highlights and shadows, like Blackhand. Also changed the face a bit.

Not done yet, of course.

Here the old look, for comparison:

Thoughts?

 

[Heinvers]

Well I hope now people won't complain about him being too slim:/ The face looks better (a lot). Personally I would make the armor texture more rugged. I'm also curious about the hammer. Will you make a custom texture for that too(I hate the Blizz one)?

 

[paladinjst]

Well, you're not the first to suggest that. But I dunno.. I guess I don't really feel like making custom models for heroes that already have one. Though.. Grom is a pretty cool character and his design is awesome. Plus the Blizzard model is really low quality.. I'll have to think about it

we need u to remake ur Kargath Bladefist and Kilrogg Deadeye ~

 

[Zaljinzoo]

Oh... My... God.

I knew it. I knew you'd be back at some point! So so glad to see you returned, Tauer.

In case you didn't know, this is the user formerly known as Warchief_Grom, I'm the guy who originally suggested the Clan Grunt models XP Really missed ya, man! You were probably my favorite modeller back in the day!

 

[Heinvers]

Oh... My... God.

I knew it. I knew you'd be back at some point! So so glad to see you returned, Tauer.

In case you didn't know, this is the user formerly known as Warchief_Grom, I'm the guy who originally suggested the Clan Grunt models XP Really missed ya, man! You were probably my favorite modeller back in the day!

Bless you then. Those clan grunts are really useful, you know. Yep, paladinjst is right, a remake of your Kargath Bladefist and Kilrogg Deadeye would be nice too.