Battle for Azeroth Old World Creature model updates

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Quiv
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Re: Battle for Azeroth Old World Creature model updates

Unread post by Quiv »

75% of people on official forums wrote:THSE LAZY DEVS WANT 2 KILL WOW UNSUBBED BLIZZ GG
Anyway....

One thing I am certainly guilty of is using terms like skin and model interchangeably when they probably shouldn't be. I guess the greater context of the conversation helps, but still I think its good to be accurate. Wish I could produce a visual guide of sorts to illustrate the difference between things like skin and model, even concepts like skeleton, rigging, and animations. There may be more!
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Re: Battle for Azeroth Old World Creature model updates

Unread post by Thwip »

Quiv wrote:
75% of people on official forums wrote:THSE LAZY DEVS WANT 2 KILL WOW UNSUBBED BLIZZ GG
Anyway....

One thing I am certainly guilty of is using terms like skin and model interchangeably when they probably shouldn't be. I guess the greater context of the conversation helps, but still I think its good to be accurate. Wish I could produce a visual guide of sorts to illustrate the difference between things like skin and model, even concepts like skeleton, rigging, and animations. There may be more!

That'd actually be a great topic! It's easy to get visual guides together or link videos so peeps can get a better grasp at what all it takes to do this kinda thing. :D I could ramble about parts of a mesh model, but I feel like I've already derailed a bit more then I should in here.

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Re: Battle for Azeroth Old World Creature model updates

Unread post by Wain »

Thwip wrote:Do we know for sure how many of these are true 1 to 1 replacements yet? Some of them obviously are and trying to get the original crystal spider look where it was more light aqua on the legs is great! Or get the red spider to be just as vivid as the parrots. I like the older color on some of those. I'm not 100% sure the brown is a true replacement for the white wind serpent, however. Nor the Dark Red Stegodon. Some of them are so far off that I'm curious if we're even comparing them to the right things yet since it's still alpha and they're cranking things out on a daily basis.
I was trying to be sceptical too, and held off until we could confirm. But it appears that those colours have actually been subbed in by the designers to replace the ones on the old models. For some of them I'm completely certain that no artist intended them to be replacements, but they don't have any control over how they're ultimately used. Hopefully better skins will appear and they'll be swapped out again. None of the thunder lizard skins has a name that corresponds to an old one (unlike most skins slated for update models), making me think that the artists' primary goal with them wasn't to create replacements. But they appear to have been swapped in anyway. Hopefully more skins are on the way, but none of the Alpha updates have contained any new beast skins at all, so I suspect the art team's attention is elsewhere right now and we may have to wait a while to know for sure.
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Re: Battle for Azeroth Old World Creature model updates

Unread post by Thwip »

Wain wrote:
Thwip wrote:Do we know for sure how many of these are true 1 to 1 replacements yet? Some of them obviously are and trying to get the original crystal spider look where it was more light aqua on the legs is great! Or get the red spider to be just as vivid as the parrots. I like the older color on some of those. I'm not 100% sure the brown is a true replacement for the white wind serpent, however. Nor the Dark Red Stegodon. Some of them are so far off that I'm curious if we're even comparing them to the right things yet since it's still alpha and they're cranking things out on a daily basis.
I was trying to be sceptical too, and held off until we could confirm. But it appears that those colours have actually been subbed in by the designers to replace the ones on the old models. For some of them I'm completely certain that no artist intended them to be replacements, but they don't have any control over how they're ultimately used. Hopefully better skins will appear and they'll be swapped out again. None of the thunder lizard skins has a name that corresponds to an old one (unlike most skins slated for update models), making me think that the artists' primary goal with them wasn't to create replacements. But they appear to have been swapped in anyway. Hopefully more skins are on the way, but none of the Alpha updates have contained any new beast skins at all, so I suspect the art team's attention is elsewhere right now and we may have to wait a while to know for sure.
I gotcha! That's why I was super skeptical on it, since the skin names weren't even remotely close enough for me to agree that they were replacements. That certainly means it's a good time to start getting that list and getting loud about it. Just in a constructive way! The skins themselves don't look bad as stand alones, but I do certainly agree that closer skins could be made. I'm hoping their attention just got pulled to the Alliance hub city right now as some were saying in videos just this week that it wasn't even in yet while the Horde hub already was. Lots of other updates coming in from what I've been seeing, so it could just be a redirection thing internally.

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Re: Battle for Azeroth Old World Creature model updates

Unread post by Wain »

Yep :) I held off with comparison pages/lists until I was certain they were being swapped in.
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Re: Battle for Azeroth Old World Creature model updates

Unread post by Qraljar »

Thwip wrote:
Wain wrote:
Thwip wrote: Also, Qraljar, I did mean the mine spider! Sorry for not clarifying. When someone says 'skin', I immediately think of the texture as that's what I refer to as the skin for mesh models. The mesh itself also looks fine. I think the animation bone on the tip of the foot lost it's animation weighting somewhere along the line as the animation is running, save that one spot. That does absolutely mean the mesh weights are broken somewhere or not even placed properly. I still think it's a rig issue since the weight painting goes with the rig. Does it do that in it's idle animations as well? Or just the running/walking ones? I'd actually love to get a list set up with all the broken animations in game so we can tweet Chris R. about them and see if we can bring some attention to it.
Ahh, that explains it for me.

I always see it like this:

Polymodeling: creation of the basemesh

UV unwrapping: laying seams so the 3D mesh can be unwrapped and the 3D geometry can be projected onto a flat surface with different UV/texture islands so that a 2D painting program like Photoshop can paint the textures on a flat surface that can later be projected back onto the mesh. (Although, as an aside, I think in this day and age, WoW's texture artists use something like 3D Coat, where they can paint directly on the mesh after unwrapping it and see how it looks, rather than going back and forth between Photoshop and 3ds Max/Maya)

Rigging: Creating the skeleton that will go with the mesh, the bones and according nubs.

Skinning: Painting the vertex weights to the appropriate bones of the rig/skeleton to get a smooth transition between several different body parts so animating it will look as good and natural as possible.

Animating: Self-explanatory.

Of course, you have several other practices, like sculpting for games where baking normal maps and retopologizing high poly meshes is common.


I get where you're coming from. A lot of people see rigging as creating the skeleton and painting the weights together, but I like to separate them, because having a good skeleton doesn't mean it immediately animated properly, that's where the vertex weights come into play (as you undoubtedly know), so I like to separate them as I do unwrapping and texturing. It's also because the modifier to paint the weights falls under the "skin" tab.

But those were just my 2 cents.
Quiv wrote:
75% of people on official forums wrote:THSE LAZY DEVS WANT 2 KILL WOW UNSUBBED BLIZZ GG
Anyway....

One thing I am certainly guilty of is using terms like skin and model interchangeably when they probably shouldn't be. I guess the greater context of the conversation helps, but still I think its good to be accurate. Wish I could produce a visual guide of sorts to illustrate the difference between things like skin and model, even concepts like skeleton, rigging, and animations. There may be more!
The issue with skin and model often being seen by gamers as synonymous has mostly to do with how different models are called skins, by say, League of Legends, or Heroes of the Storm. In technical terms, they are, at the least, remodels, but "skin" as a consumer term for them has become so common that I can't really fault it.
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Re: Battle for Azeroth Old World Creature model updates

Unread post by Thwip »

Qraljar wrote: Ahh, that explains it for me.

I always see it like this:

Polymodeling: creation of the basemesh

UV unwrapping: laying seams so the 3D mesh can be unwrapped and the 3D geometry can be projected onto a flat surface with different UV/texture islands so that a 2D painting program like Photoshop can paint the textures on a flat surface that can later be projected back onto the mesh. (Although, as an aside, I think in this day and age, WoW's texture artists use something like 3D Coat, where they can paint directly on the mesh after unwrapping it and see how it looks, rather than going back and forth between Photoshop and 3ds Max/Maya)

Rigging: Creating the skeleton that will go with the mesh, the bones and according nubs.

Skinning: Painting the vertex weights to the appropriate bones of the rig/skeleton to get a smooth transition between several different body parts so animating it will look as good and natural as possible.

Animating: Self-explanatory.

Of course, you have several other practices, like sculpting for games where baking normal maps and retopologizing high poly meshes is common.


I get where you're coming from. A lot of people see rigging as creating the skeleton and painting the weights together, but I like to separate them, because having a good skeleton doesn't mean it immediately animated properly, that's where the vertex weights come into play (as you undoubtedly know), so I like to separate them as I do unwrapping and texturing. It's also because the modifier to paint the weights falls under the "skin" tab.

But those were just my 2 cents.
I think we were actually on the same page with different terms! Ahaha. I've dabbled in 3D and the last time I did anything with a rig was actually a nightmare and I never did manage to fix it. >:| (I'm pretty much self taught which probably explains a lot.) What you called Skinning, I just straight up called Weight Painting. Knowing most people generally use skin as a go-to for the model itself, that's what got me. (I've had to explain so many times that a texture and a model are not the same.) My experience was with Blender and Avastar and I generally put the weight painting and rigging in the same category (And I guess I'm not the only one!) since you can't weight paint until you add a mesh to a skeleton/rig even though they are separate and both time consuming things. One can create a rig, but can't weight paint without one! (3DCoat is an amazing program, but it's horrible with unwraps from what I've seen through friends. I've not had the chance to play with it myself!)

Either way it's still the weights bein' borked up. Do all the spiders have this issue or just certain colors?

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Re: Battle for Azeroth Old World Creature model updates

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Now I really wish they'd create land animations for this creature so it could become a hunter pet.
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Re: Battle for Azeroth Old World Creature model updates

Unread post by Valnaaros »

I think that is a new model for Osumat. He was recently datamined as an npc.
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Re: Battle for Azeroth Old World Creature model updates

Unread post by Valnaaros »

Dolphins!! :DD

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Re: Battle for Azeroth Old World Creature model updates

Unread post by cowmuflage »

I'm not normally a Dolphin person but those are neat. I'd of given them horns like the orca imo.
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Re: Battle for Azeroth Old World Creature model updates

Unread post by Equeon »

Wow, finally an update on what became of Poseidus? Will we take down Ozumat once and for all?
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Re: Battle for Azeroth Old World Creature model updates

Unread post by Valnaaros »

Neptulon, and there was supposed to be a resolution in Legion, but that was cut. I guess we'll see something in BfA :)
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Re: Battle for Azeroth Old World Creature model updates

Unread post by Lamiara »

I like many of the newly introduced models for BfA, such as dolphins and the compy dinosaurs.
The newer parrots and raptors look also good.

As I've already explained in other threads, I'm not a fan though of any of the force-changed old pet models, because most of them look nothing like the original, many got chubbier and less elegant, have derpy faces, and the colours are all wrong sadly.

I fear this will be like "new player models" all over again: some resemble the original slightly but still feel off, others are complete strangers.
This happening to my faithful pets I've worked with 10+ years will be really sad.
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Re: Battle for Azeroth Old World Creature model updates

Unread post by Rhyela »

Lamiara wrote:I fear this will be like "new player models" all over again: some resemble the original slightly but still feel off, others are complete strangers.
This happening to my faithful pets I've worked with 10+ years will be really sad.
This is actually why I still struggle with Rhyela a little. None of the new faces match the original. One is kinda close, but still off. Same with my human warrior. I think that's part of the reason I didn't play Rhyela much in Legion. That, plus I felt like the hunter class wasn't as fun to play as previous incarnations. I think that's why I'm considering making a new main. There won't be any original anything that I've grown attached to that got changed on me. New faction, new race, new pets, new scenery, new lore, etc. I just hope the changes to hunters in BfA make them more fun again, or at least more like they used to be.

(Sorry for the tangent!)

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Re: Battle for Azeroth Old World Creature model updates

Unread post by Lamiara »

Rhyela wrote: (Sorry for the tangent!)
ye, this is a topic that has been written about in many capped threads on the Blizz forums (and not a single blue answer).
I play many races, some got it worse than others, but since the new animations have been forced on everyone, they all feel like strangers.
Nightelves got some of the worst, imo.
I'm so turned off by the new player models that I only play fully zoomed out these days and avoid looking at my characters.
When I can, I use transformation toys, so I can at least choose how to look and move (sadly, they all only last a few minutes).

I wish "updates" were handled differently, especially when the result is unrecognizable.
No matter whether it's player models, pets, or NPCs.
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