Community project proposal...

Looking back at the whole modding affair, it's just a story of disorganization, strong ambitions but never matched by dedition or effort of the same intensity; even the few big project that have been completed, those who made the history of wc3 modding (an example? Cotd), imo have been severely butchered by the lack of resources.

Now despite warcraft modding being so old, there are more good modelers, skinners and animators now than in the so called "golden age". What still lack, is organization. The "art guys" are an indipendent group (and proud of that, I may add) from the "mappers", and they don't want to be tied to the needs of the latter. As much as that is understandable, it also means that their resources will almost never used as they were meant to be, and the mappers themselves will hardly find an answer to their needs.

I'm not naive enough to believe this can be changed, but a compromise can be tried. The idea, is to make something similar to the triggers template section. - Basically, a database with generic models, with or without textures, animated to fill the lack of animations wich can't be found on blizzard models.

This would help both the artists, wich won't have to start new stuff from scratch (or at least, not always) and the mappers, wich could request a model editing instead of 30+ hours stuff (or hopefully, do the editing themselves).
That's all bitches, think about it.


/rant

Discuss.

It's an interesting point, to be sure.

But I suspect there is something in the artistic temperament that just stops us from doing this kind of thing. You said it yourself - we don't want to be tied down by anybody else's needs.

And also, creating "generic" models is in itself a bit of a rubbish occupation; no real artist is going to spend his time making stuff he doesn't really care about.

It's hard to say. For it to really work, you'd need a large team; and more importantly, an actual game-plan - what "generic" models do we need? Every single character in the game without swords and shields? All of them using footmanimations? You're proposing to open quite a can of worms here.

So I'll sit on the fence for now, if you don't mind. It may or may not work.

The idea was to make some models with custom animations, that could fit a generic role; yes, you can make some decent\good units by simply transferring blizzard animations. But there are some others who can't be done with them.


Then I guess I should say something like "why did you join a modding community in the first place?" Because really, I don't understand.


That's stuff he'll have to do either way. Say you want to do an elf warrior; instead to make everything from scratch, come here, get the "general humanoid warrior" edit the mesh and skin it. Done. Saves time and effort.


I disagree on the large team. One modeler, a couple of animators (I would be one) and someone who can rig it's all we need. Of course, the more we are, the better. As for what has to be done, that's a matter that should decide the team itself. Just a few ideas:

- Pikeman
- humanoid rifleman; from a modern marine, to a star wars trooper, or something more warcraftish, this will be definetely be useful.
- cinematic humanoid model; with walk, run, sit, eat, multiple talk and stand animations. Then you could use it for humans, elves, orcs and stuff. If you watched cotd, imagine how it would have been with a better villager model (or, imagine how the last act would have been without a that custom villager ) It's not as difficult as it may seem, and many cinematics\campaigns\rpg would benefit greately from a model like this one.

That's overall my idea; the details of course are to be discussed.


Thanks for replying Rao.

I'm only here for the banter.

Fame and fortune, and all that. And to help others... Not by producing stuff for them, mind you. I'm a DIY kind of a person. Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, and all that nonsense.


An admirable goal, to be sure. What's to stop you doing it all yourself?


Maybe I'm more worried about tools than team sizes. Warshape is notoriously dodgy; if the whole toolset that such a project requires was more functionally... effective... then I'd be happier about pledging my support. I know from bitter experience that working with tools that don't quite give you what you're looking for is horribly demoralising.

Surprised nobody else has commented... There is much scope for goodness.

This was more of a general question than directed to you.



First of all, I can't be arsed to help a community who doesn't want to help itself. And even if I was, I don't have the time nor the tools do to it alone.


Warshape is good enough even to do scratch animations; being very basic means that it relies much on the skill of the user, but you could say the same for the vertex modifier.
The only real problem is that I have encountered errors when tranferring animations from models edited with it. But I'm sure that can be solved too.