The second one was done with about about weak-auras -- everything you can see except for the portrait. For the portrait I'm 99% sure that was a custom little addon with three functions:
- Draw a 3d model for target/target
- target the player when left-clicked
- show the normal menu when right clicked
If it wasn't a completely one-off addon then it was KGPanels with a bit of lua -- which is effectively the same thing. In either case the vast majority was weak auras. The "render a 3d portrait for a unit" code cut/paste from either pitbull or stuf. So far as I know there aren't any "just draw a 3d portrait of this unit" addons but I haven't looked very hard either
The second one does a lot of things really wrong - it looks pretty. It shows very well in a video too. If I were playing on a Mac and recording raids without a UI, I'd probably make something like that as a "fake UI" that I could superimpose for a kill video. to actually use it in combat is kinda rough. It was fine for like farming deathwing at 30% or facerolling 5-man content but it's really bad for doing something "hard".
The cool stuff (like predicting effective health, highlights for crossing "phase change" HP percentages) can be done in anything. The layout that you see is pretty bloody bad and I'd encourage you to take as little from that as possible (even the pixel fonts are tasteless IMO). The tiny text/icons take too much mental effort to parse. I really need get that "why that ui sucks" thing posted so that nobody feels tempted to copy it.
--- The first one was a combination of weak auras and (I think) pitbull. Weak auras provided the 3d fancyness for class/buff/debuff and then pitbull was the text/click target/etc. I recall that the font was Gotham edited to include small-caps because wow doesn't do advanced typography (kait is very clever when it comes to things like that).
I think that approach is probably better for the typical person -- let an existing unit frame addon do the bulk of the lifting and then "enhance" it with weak aura. Trying to replace it wholesale is a difficult task. It's not obvious at first, but you're left to do a lot of work that is normally covered by your unit frames (like handling clicks, menus, entering/exiting vehicles, possessing mobs, etc). Without learning a fair bit about lua and how WoWAPI works it's probably not something you'd be able to pull off any other way. Maybe it'd be possible with RDX but I haven't played with that since like BWL was end-game and I doubt it would be any less learning if it still exists.
I don't use the term to be derogatory, I just mean to identify the "nerds among nerds". I like to imagine myself in that group but I suspect I'm probably not that clever. I admit to being one of those people with a tricked-out shell setup that was done to "maximize efficiency" while actually writing maybe 30 lines of good code per day. Truth is: it really is just fun to play with sometimes.