Hosted Project: WME
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- Apr 19, 2008
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After Frozen Throne released in 2003, the team who created it published the 3DS Max plugin that they had originally built only for in-house at Blizzard. This plugin was the one used to create all of the Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and Warcraft III: Frozen Throne assets. I'm referring to the assets now called the "classic" graphics in the Reforged engine.
Along with this plugin, Blizzard Entertainment published a PDF documenting how to create a Warcraft III model, important key elements for how to ensure to model would fit the Warcraft III, and a viewer using a copy of the Warcraft III code called War3Preview that allows users to preview a model that they were working on in 3DS Max.
I was lucky enough to use this plugin with a student version of 3DS Max in 2004, and I have models created back then such as a Peon with an alternate form who becomes a skeleton that I have never published. However these models are an anachronism in terms of features: I did not have tools to create a peon who becomes a skeleton in his alternate form on this game that were free for maybe 8 years after that. When I got a tool like that, it was only when I had a programming class in 2011-2012 in high school and decided to write my own tool for the task.
To this day, the release of the tools and scripts used to produce the original Warcraft III models has influenced the Warcraft III modding community even though 3ds Max was bought out by Autodesk and quickly lost support for the old version that could run War3ArtTools. So few to none of our Warcraft III modders use the original tools, generally because they cannot afford it and because the 3DS Max version to run the tools was taken off the market even if they could afford it.
Despite all this, having myself had the opportunity to make Warcraft III models with the Blizzard tools influenced how I wrote the Retera Model Studio into being that people still use today to make Reforged custom models.
But the Reforged tools used to create the Reforged models were never published. The theory for how to make artwork in the style of Reforged, from scratch, is only that -- a theory -- to me. We can see that Maya was used as the last step if we datamine certain files in the Reforged installation, but I'm pretty in the dark about the pipeline, really, even 2 years after the game's release. For the particles, some data mining shows that Reforged uses the PopcornFX particle editor which is available online, but I have not myself purchased the software to try to make particles for Reforged, and when I emailed their company to ask about buying a license to display these particles on Retera Model Studio they suggested that doing so was not supported, and even if I created a software to view the particles I would need to know from Blizzard what version of PopcornFX was used and any other customizations specific to Warcraft 3 in order to be able to use the PopcornFX plugins to render this kind of particle.
So it occurred to me that if we from Hive ever had one more chance to communicate with Blizzard on the topic of Reforged, then I wish we could ask them for a release of their Maya Export Plugin for creating Reforged assets and any notes that they would be able to share on what version of PopcornFX was used on Reforged.
I am not saying this because I have a license to Maya or because I have ever used it -- I don't have such a license. But I might be incentivised to buy it and try learning it if I had any hope at all of actually exporting my work in Maya to Reforged. Even if the Maya plugin was closed source similar to the original War3ArtTools -- in other words War3ArtTools was usable, but there was not any way to learn how it was made -- the usability of such a tool on Reforged would still be great for those people who mod Reforged.
So I wanted to create a poll. If you had one last chance to talk to someone in a position of authority at Blizzard over the Warcraft III: Reforged codebase, would you want to ask them to publish a War3ReforgedArtTools bundle (assuming it was low effort for them and they just throw their Maya plugin in a zip file or something)?
Along with this plugin, Blizzard Entertainment published a PDF documenting how to create a Warcraft III model, important key elements for how to ensure to model would fit the Warcraft III, and a viewer using a copy of the Warcraft III code called War3Preview that allows users to preview a model that they were working on in 3DS Max.
I was lucky enough to use this plugin with a student version of 3DS Max in 2004, and I have models created back then such as a Peon with an alternate form who becomes a skeleton that I have never published. However these models are an anachronism in terms of features: I did not have tools to create a peon who becomes a skeleton in his alternate form on this game that were free for maybe 8 years after that. When I got a tool like that, it was only when I had a programming class in 2011-2012 in high school and decided to write my own tool for the task.
To this day, the release of the tools and scripts used to produce the original Warcraft III models has influenced the Warcraft III modding community even though 3ds Max was bought out by Autodesk and quickly lost support for the old version that could run War3ArtTools. So few to none of our Warcraft III modders use the original tools, generally because they cannot afford it and because the 3DS Max version to run the tools was taken off the market even if they could afford it.
Despite all this, having myself had the opportunity to make Warcraft III models with the Blizzard tools influenced how I wrote the Retera Model Studio into being that people still use today to make Reforged custom models.
But the Reforged tools used to create the Reforged models were never published. The theory for how to make artwork in the style of Reforged, from scratch, is only that -- a theory -- to me. We can see that Maya was used as the last step if we datamine certain files in the Reforged installation, but I'm pretty in the dark about the pipeline, really, even 2 years after the game's release. For the particles, some data mining shows that Reforged uses the PopcornFX particle editor which is available online, but I have not myself purchased the software to try to make particles for Reforged, and when I emailed their company to ask about buying a license to display these particles on Retera Model Studio they suggested that doing so was not supported, and even if I created a software to view the particles I would need to know from Blizzard what version of PopcornFX was used and any other customizations specific to Warcraft 3 in order to be able to use the PopcornFX plugins to render this kind of particle.
So it occurred to me that if we from Hive ever had one more chance to communicate with Blizzard on the topic of Reforged, then I wish we could ask them for a release of their Maya Export Plugin for creating Reforged assets and any notes that they would be able to share on what version of PopcornFX was used on Reforged.
I am not saying this because I have a license to Maya or because I have ever used it -- I don't have such a license. But I might be incentivised to buy it and try learning it if I had any hope at all of actually exporting my work in Maya to Reforged. Even if the Maya plugin was closed source similar to the original War3ArtTools -- in other words War3ArtTools was usable, but there was not any way to learn how it was made -- the usability of such a tool on Reforged would still be great for those people who mod Reforged.
So I wanted to create a poll. If you had one last chance to talk to someone in a position of authority at Blizzard over the Warcraft III: Reforged codebase, would you want to ask them to publish a War3ReforgedArtTools bundle (assuming it was low effort for them and they just throw their Maya plugin in a zip file or something)?
