Sub-Race Photoshop Mockups

[Kathranis]

Are these pictures from the collector's edition artbook? And do you have any bigger version of this picture?

Those pictures are in the artbook, but these were taken from Sons of the Storm.

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Coming from communities of artists and hobbyists who can take constructive criticism this may seem harsh to some, but I really do not have a great appreciation for Vaanel's work beyond appreciating it as passionate fan art, and I find the amount of people who think it's superior to Blizzard's artists for the hyper detail and dark gritty colors while they ignore the actual form underneath all that detail annoying. It's far too ornate, far too angular and busy, and mostly just recycled assets heavily modified in a very creative use of collage, but it ends up looking muddy from a distance and the silhouettes are just sharp angles to my eye that lack distinction and personality and character without the name of the person pointed out to you or the obvious details up close in your face. I love and appreciate their passion and dedication to their creations, but they show little personal appreciation for form and characterization and seem to focus more on heavy details that just end up looking impressive at first but end up distracting you from the actual form and shapes they are using as a foundation. It all looks like it's made of triangles to me. Form should trump detail in my opinion. A cartoonist who can make a strong confident elegant line creating a sense of volume and mass and depth your mind can feel and fill in takes the sort of talent I tend to gravitate towards, someone like Mike Mignola can do a lot to show what a grasp of form can do with a minimum of lines, economy of line is essential to me. And in 3D work there is an economy of line rule that is equivalent. I think Vaanel potentially has a bright future ahead of them if they keep practicing and pushing themselves and don't sit on their laurels, but they need to be careful of going off on visual tangents.

Yes, this. Thank you.

I appreciate Vaanel's passion, but when I see people saying "Blizz should hire him," I cringe, because he really hasn't shown much actual aptitude for modeling, and his texturing and rigging skills are surely not up to snuff.

He's a "Franken-modeler," using bits and pieces of existing WoW and D3 models to create new ones. He also doesn't seem to have a solid grasp of Blizzard's design sensibilities; he pays little or no attention to silhouette, creates busy, overly complicated designs, and his textures lack the extremely important painterly aesthetic.

Compare his fan renders and concept art to Tamara's, and it becomes immediately discernable why she was hired as a 3D character artist and why he probably won't be, at least not any time soon. He needs a lot of practice to reach Blizzard level, and the unfortunate thing is that he doesn't seem to have made much effort to adopt their aesthetics.

[Rhywolver]

Yes, this. Thank you.

I appreciate Vaanel's passion, but when I see people saying "Blizz should hire him," I cringe, because he really hasn't shown much actual aptitude for modeling, and his texturing and rigging skills are surely not up to snuff.

However, he is passioned enough to be a good addition to an art team. I'm not saying let him be the lead designer and all the models should look like this, but working together with the actual team could spice things up. The things where he lacks skill could easily done by more professional artists.

On the other hand, some artists are very 'individual' characters and just don't fit into any team at all.

[Kerath]

Watch the art team go all out and drop every preview for every race on us, that would be like, better than Christmas.

I think I might implode if they do that! The suspense is palpable now, can't wait to see what they have to show us.

[shoc]

I hope we see new animations in the form of a video. Wait a minute, didn't Chris Rob say they were going to (try to) explain every design decision for the new races, more so than they did at Blizzcon? That might mean we are going to see something in the form of an art panel or something, with Dev narration for all the new changes /swoon

[Immitis]

I hope we see new animations in the form of a video. Wait a minute, didn't Chris Rob say they were going to (try to) explain every design decision for the new races, more so than they did at Blizzcon? That might mean we are going to see something in the form of an art panel or something, with Dev narration for all the new changes /swoon

we will probably get one of those dev round table majigs like when they showed the undead female

[Aeluron Lightsong]

However, he is passioned enough to be a good addition to an art team. I'm not saying let him be the lead designer and all the models should look like this, but working together with the actual team could spice things up. The things where he lacks skill could easily done by more professional artists.

On the other hand, some artists are very 'individual' characters and just don't fit into any team at all.

He does it as a hobby. Which is a nice thing and good if he wants to draw all that fancy stuff. He has talent in there. Is it super developed? Not necessarily but it's raw.

[Deleted]

I really want Night Elves looking more like this and with that armor:



And like on this arts:







And High (also Blood) Elves looking like this:




Especially the merge of Night and High Elf model look great for me, I think that Night Elven poses and animations suits High Elves more than Blood Elven. It needs just better armor and hairstyle, the rest is great.

[Ote]

I'll be more than happy is they show us NE and finished gnomes with animations.

[Alteiry]

I'll be really happy for anything as long as the races with glowing eyes get irises and not just blank orbs. So much expression and life is lost with blank orbs.

[Deleted]

Damn son...
*Faints from the epicness*

Holy CARP! This one actually looks legit!
Where did you get it?

[Toiran]

God, I cannot wait for the day of launch with all this new shiny-ness.

I can't believe some would call that "barely an update", it's a HUGE update.

EDIT: I'd believe the Night Elf above if it wasn't for the high heels, and much darker face. Looks amazing either way though.

[Yig]

Oh, don't get me wrong. I'm not calling them lazy, as it'd be just as easy (if not easier) to give both sexes a hunch than not. But I think they should pander less, and go more with "logical". If Nerubians were made playable, and the males had four or six legs and looked monstrous, while the females were just bipedal and looked like human females with a few arachnoid features.. well, that'd be lame too.

True.

I just was about to get started on the whole "why is wow so limited with customization" thing. But that's tricky ground, and the following isn't necessarily aimed at you. But I'd like to offer a history lesson about WOW to some of you which is a favorite of mine and it's why I've been playing this game for almost a third of my life. This is my wall of text, and by Odin's beard I'm going to lay it down here as my innately born rights as an American on the global world wide web of this planet's internet dicate I am free to do so.

Looking back at what can be construed, they had very specific reasons for limiting character customization compared to the astronomical scale of effort that went into the world's terrain that had nothing to do with cutting corners. Bill Petras and Samwise and Metzen and others all offer a lot of insight in places if you can track down a lot of old interviews.

At the time before WOW was a sparkle in someone's eye, Blizzard wasn't sure what kind of game they wanted to make next. They almost made a Necromunda style game based on Warhammer 40k's spin off about small squads engaged in gang warfare in a ruined planet wide cityscape's subterranean levels similar to the lower seedier levels and sewers of Coruscant in Star Wars 1313, which later was turned into Warhammer fantasies' Mordheim. You could take and level up a gang of 10-15 guys and deck them out in gear upgrades and visual customization to let them be distinct while you fought rival gangs for territory in these miles of underground mutant infested ruins. In the fantasy version it was a ruined village filled with warpstone deposits which gangs of freebooters were pillaging and fighting over.

So Blizzard was prepared to make a video game based on the idea of taking a squad of guys and leveling them up in gang wars, but there were rumbles of something else in Blizzard's darkened depths. Bill Petras and several of Blizzard's devs were obsessed with Everquest and the idea of what an MMORPG could be if they got the chance to make it. That's what Blizzard does, they take games they love and make them in ways they wish you could play. Like what if the Dune RTS had multiplayer competing armies? Answer? Warcraft. Diablo was based on a game like Rogue if I recall, but they went from turn based to live hack n slash through swarms of demons.

WOW was inspired by the model of Everquest, which took Ultima and created a full scale fantasy world using a 3D engine, graphically very crude, but still better than isometric sprites.

Blizzard wanted to take the lore of Warcraft with it's larger than life in your face characters and colors and lore and shoulder pads and bring it to life with the idea Everquest only opened the door to.

It would seem from what archaeologists have pieced together that Blizzard decided above all the game should be fun and easy to play even if you only had 15 minutes, and that you could level via questing solo instead of the grinds of old, but also importantly and almost above all to the detriment of gameplay vs graphic gladiators everywhere, they were determined to bring Warcraft to life and evolve the niche of EQ with a visually dynamic "full sized" scale world with terrain which blended entire continents together for the first time without loading times, with natural and artistically calculated transitions and blending between zones and terrain, with foreshadowing and vistas worthy of a fantasy illustration if you stopped and took a screenshot at any given moment. And not just any fantasy painting, but Warcraft's distinct look of Don Bluth/Disney animation meets Warhammer Fantasy.

It was as if Disney World decided to create a Warcraft park rendered in a simulated 3d engine. Each region representing the thousands of miles that existed in the lore of the world but given the miniaturization of a gnomish shrink ray to create approximation just large enough to create the illusion of such a magical place in our imaginations if we but played along and went with it.

So establishing this had to look like a fantasy painting at literally any second you took a screenshot, they put incredible effort into lighting effects that would replicate the look of an artist's painting and brush strokes and washes and gradients, especially focusing on light and color and the way color saturates a place based on the behavior of light.

Like the way the terrain fades in the distance into the color of the air itself which is visibly infused with sunlight or moonlight, while the edges of cobblestones gleamed with glistening reflective highlights in dynamic angles, and they took the effort to make more unique and individual tree and shrubbery models than you could ever in your life hope to shake a stick at.

People take all this for granted now, but back then in RPGs, you mostly just got terrain that looked like it came out of a random terrain generator nine times out of ten using the same basic tree model like a stamp in anything but what the small sized maps allowed artists to only explore in first person shooters and third person action RPGs based on Tomb Raider, Heretic 2, Rune, and Severance: Blade of Darkness. Where the promise of those full sized cinematic vistas were just 2d skyboxes a fence on the road kept you from hopping over and exploring before banging your nose into the wall as you realized that mountain was just a big ass painting on the wall and you'd never be able to walk there from this forest.

WOW was an absolute paradigm shift in not just going a little out of their way to look different in this respect towards terrain, they went fucking mind melting light years ahead of the bar to somewhere nobody had even hinted at going in an RPG or MMORPG. They basically constructed an entire world made up of two instanced continents with all the dynamic artistry of a full scale diorama you would have commissioned an artist or team of artists thousands and thousands of dollars to construct in real life using model train set materials like a few metric tons of styrofoam, swimming pools of model airplane glue any glue sniffer could live a lifetime on a deserted island with, and all the whimsical style of an origami Dreamworks or Pixar production. If they made stuff out of cardboard and folded paper origami.

If you let your imagination go with it and stopped counting polygons, what they did was in many ways in the video game world akin to creating Stonehenge or the Great Pyramids. Nobody had seen that before, I know I hadn't.

So there was really no reason they would not have put just as much effort into the character models as they did the look and feel of the world terrain. People act like limitations indicate short cuts and corners sheered, but that's just not really precisely true. They wanted a very specific guided experience that had the illusion of free will in existence just enough for you to feel like you were truly traversing hot sun baked scorched deserts, frosted and frigid snow caked peaks and pines, twilight shrouded magical forests of fairy tale trees and pools of glistening enchanted water, all with the whimsy and soul of an artist's touch.

And they wanted you the player to be driving around this world in a vehicle which had the very basic and distinct sense of the way Warcraft's in your face DNA manifests in the anatomy of it's people as much as it did it's world. No wrist neanderthals with facial hair that could carve a turkey and a chin you could break boulders on. And every subsequent anatomical alternative would be a fractal like mandelbrot set of similar extremes folding outward and inward from that spirit into the goofy things we wear as avatars today.

So we walk around as walking tanks made of meat and stick thin runway models and voluptuous bouncy wenches and blue dudes built like refrigerators, but instead of giving us the established precedent of the MMORPG generic mannequin with a thousand sliders to tweak a nose with but only one basic series of animations for almost every race and sex like most MMORPGs did before WOW, they went with incredibly distinct strongly unique racial models with their own completely unique animations and sense of tone and culture.

And not only that, they gave them males and females too with totally unique personality in their animations.

They also wanted to avoid the sense that RPGs give the uninitiated, namely that they're doing school work or making spreadsheets and balancing their checkbooks instead of playing a game to have fun, as this was made to simplify and attract the person who usually had no interest in this genre. It was not made to be the most challenging and detailed gameplay experience ever created in the MMO world, despite what many in the community seem to be under the delusion of. Every choice Blizzard gives the player was a risk at making their game seem like school work to the uninitiated. And that's likely a large reason for WOW's explosive success in the way they let the choices trickle down and build up over time.

I will now cast the spell of Samwise Didier's quote I have bookmarked forever on this subject. It's an automatic once per day spell that I don't need to roll any dice for to cast,... so stand back.

Source:http://wow.joystiq.com/2009/11/24/po...in-cataclysm/2

We gave very simple choices, and there wasn't any of this 'Is my guy five pounds overweight? Are his eyes sea blue or sky blue?' Don't get me wrong, that sort of thing is cool, but we made a very simple UI and character creator, and that's one of the main things that helped people gravitate to the game.

And the price for all that was what we now lament as seemingly obvious, and now some of us have been stewing on these fixations and gaps for a decade. So people are understandably under the impression it was laziness to give us such limited customization. But in many ways the reason you don't have different body types is the reason you can't have a bright pink or purple orc, and if you follow the logic of that analogy and it's equivocation, you understand they could have chosen not to do that.

We're basically kind of playing with He Man and Ninja Turtle toys in a giant stylized origami diorama under the guise of a social role playing game, to the detriment of girly gamers and customization crazed artists and hobbyists across the planet. And out of 100 million people in 9 years, that's a lot of girly gamers and customization crazed artists and hobbyists staring at the He-Man toys and wondering what the hell they're having so much fun for,... the answer?

The Riddle of Steel.

I always have this fear my breakers are going to flip from bad wiring in my ancient house when pontificating on a post like this. Thank you all, and good night.

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Like I said, I don't think there's huge amounts of thought that have gone into it. I think they originally planned an azure glow for the arcane (corroborated by the colour of Malygos's dragonflight) and then opted for purple when designing the arcane spec, perhaps to distinguish it from the blue colour of frost. The Sunwell itself appears to be a warm yellow now, but that's also potentially due to M'uru dissolving in it.

The Moonwells have a silvery glow to them, and they are apparently drawn from remnants of the original Well, so I think you may be right regarding the silver coloration for the ley energies. The light blue azure coloration has such strong associations with the arcane now, though, that it'd be difficult to backpeddle and go with purple, although strictly speaking I think you are right that these energies should be purple.

The only thing I would add is that the arcane is typically described as the ley energies that seep through the world, from the Well, and that dilution could make them blue, as they are no longer pure Nether energies. It's all speculation, of course, but I suspect it's also what fel and the arcane share in common - they're both derived from (arcane) or admixed with (fel) Nether energies. The Nether is described as a place where thought and the intellect alone can shape it, which would explain the common denominator between these two forms of power in being intellect-manipulated, rather than spiritual forms of magic, like shamanism, the Light, the Shadow or druidism. I guess some Warlocks also need a strong will to dominate their demon pets.

What's interesting is that mages seem to be able to manipulate the Shadow through arcane pathways too, taking it to the extreme that warlocks do. The Blood Knights also had a rather warlock-like approach to drawing on the Light, and with the Sunwell being a mixed source of power, I suspect they'll be able to wield the Light in the way magi wield the arcane. I suspect the high elf mage-priests of yore were simply dual-classed characters, but it goes to show how dominant ley energies were in determining the glow of their eyes; fel stronger yet.

This is one area of the lore that is ripe for an update from Blizzard, to tie the various threads together.



I thought you liked it? Or was that with respect to the size differences alone?

Personally, I am with Yarathir; the dimorphism with respect to some traits does make sense, particularly with races where there's lore driving it (e.g. insectoid or reptilian, or whatever), but it would seem Blizzard always seems to opt for it. The least dimorphous races are the little guys, for the most part.

Agreed, and this is all understandably speculation after the fact of course, yes. But it makes a lovely sense.

When I say dimorphism has no place, I mean as a basis for criticism. Take Olive and Bluto in Popeye, totally different species of animal. But it works in a cartoon, because size and stature denotes personality as much as the color of the bad guys hat in a western or the lightsabers in Lucas' brilliant (come at me!) cinematic realization of Joseph Campbell's work.


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Are these pictures from the collector's edition artbook? And do you have any bigger version of this picture?

I'd have to check my book, but probably so. But my scanner is uh,... I'l just not talk about that.

This is the library for the soul of Blizzard's most,... Blizzardly of artist's art. These guys in many ways are the proteins which bind the DNA that is Warcraft.

http://www.sonsofthestorm.com/

Honorable mentions from me to Chris Robinson, Thavirat, Petras, and right now I'm smitten with Polidora's Blizzard art. And the other dudes and dudettes I always forget.

http://norsechowder.deviantart.com/

If you're unaware, those female Worgen are from Glow Wei's gallery. He is recently leading the team at Skywalker Ranch's Industrial Light and Magic on the creation of the orcs in the World of Warcraft motion picture. Not to mention veterans from WETA digital who worked on Avatar. Under Nick Carver and Wei's guidance, can you imagine something much cooler than that?

To me I'd have to opt for equivocations on a par with Alexander the Great and his orchestrations stretching from Greece to Egypt and on to India,... or dare I say Temujin's realization as Genghis Khan and his Mongol Horde as they invaded the castles of Poland? I would even go so far as to cite the small group of humans responsible for the original and single successful exodus from Africa which consisted of around as little as 300 people that led to being the ancestors of every single non native African settlement living on Earth today, but that is some relatively new science dealing with haplogroups you will have to watch the Incredible Human Journey I think to truly appreciate the profundity of such a thing. It's one of the coolest things ever I think. I think it's brought up in episode 1 or 2. I think I see something shiny over there now,...oooo a butterfly.

http://youtu.be/vwa6o-s1Yvs

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Watch the art team go all out and drop every preview for every race on us, that would be like, better than Christmas.

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Those pictures are in the artbook, but these were taken from Sons of the Storm.

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Yes, this. Thank you.

I appreciate Vaanel's passion, but when I see people saying "Blizz should hire him," I cringe, because he really hasn't shown much actual aptitude for modeling, and his texturing and rigging skills are surely not up to snuff.

He's a "Franken-modeler," using bits and pieces of existing WoW and D3 models to create new ones. He also doesn't seem to have a solid grasp of Blizzard's design sensibilities; he pays little or no attention to silhouette, creates busy, overly complicated designs, and his textures lack the extremely important painterly aesthetic.

Compare his fan renders and concept art to Tamara's, and it becomes immediately discernable why she was hired as a 3D character artist and why he probably won't be, at least not any time soon. He needs a lot of practice to reach Blizzard level, and the unfortunate thing is that he doesn't seem to have made much effort to adopt their aesthetics.

You know what's up, ma main man. Or lady.

[Mormolyce]

Forgive my enthusiasm I don't mean to seem like an asshole but but ye jess'dinnae know what you're talking aboot when ye say dafty wee things like that, lad/lass.
Night Elf males get as big as orcs and 7-10 feet tall to boot. Yes, they're WOW's version of Dark Elves, they are also a very unique take of them making them more creature than idealized human.

They run the gamut of frames actually, and would be ideal for the "3 body type" concept we talk about.
Bear druids get frickin' huge in elven form.

Yeah but that's the old Bear Druid from WC3 (whose proportions never looked right), Illidan and Malfurion and other druids in "hero" style.

I agree that they actually have a variety of body types in lore (as do most races). I don't think we'd ever get body types for any of the WoW models though.

I've personally always thought the male Night Elf model looks wrong. Proportions, texture, everything. I'm really looking forward to the new Nelf models.

I fully agree with the people above me.

I don't know why they felt the need to add the anime style in WoW, but it ruined the 'serious' depiction of certain races.

Back to the Warcraft 3 portrayal, would be my advice.

There's nothing anime about WoW's style, unless that word is now synonymous with "cartoony".

The facial differences between the old and new forsaken was pretty drastic, but the response at Blizzcon was overly positive. I don't think Blizz is going to be afraid to take some risks when it comes to the new models.

Definitely in the faces. I feel like the new Orc face is a big change as well. Really hope they come up with something good for Nelves, I always wanted to like my Nelf druid more than I actually did.

I think this paints a pretty good portrait of the level of quality we'll see of how they'll update individual facial features, they've made it pretty clear that they don't want you to look completely different when you log in, if you had the metal jaw (which I totally didn't know was supposed to be metal before now), when you log in to your undead you'll have a nicer looking metal jaw. If the facial features follow this trend, then we're going to at the minimum see all the old faces for every race, even the ugly old man Illidan snarly face for night elves, updated to match 6.0 standards. If we're lucky we might see new faces too, and I have high hopes for new skin colors and hair cuts.

I also did not know that was supposed to be metal!

Also never been able to tell if those blotches on Forsaken skin are supposed to be bolts or boils or something else gross.

All (or nearly all) of Blizzard's art is heroic. They're not "typical" anything. People are free to contradict Blizzard's concept art and rely on the de-canonised, out of date WRPG* if they like, but going by their art, particularly for TFT and TBC, they are not lacking in muscularity. Not even the in-game models do, although they are poor quality because Blizzard made ad hoc changes to the alpha model. That will be fixed in WoD.

True they do exaggerate muscle in most art, that's what I meant when I said you have to account for the art style.

You know looking at Illidan's model again, I think the actual issue is less the musculature and more the way the highlights make it look really pronounced. It's less visible on his real model because it's all in dark purple but shoc's recolour really makes it obvious.

Regarding Tolkien and pointy ears, see this.

Haha, he said "slightly pointed" in a letter once? Come on that's a real stretch. Anyway I meant in the novels.

They should make the racial Berserking make you grow in size, like the Warcraft 3 headhunters -> berserker.

And turn reddish? That would be awesome.

[shoc]

@Yig

Was long, did read.

And everything you said, they are my thoughts exactly and I would have said so myself if I didn't lack the literacy skills. I actually couldn't find the Samwise quote myself until now but put in that context just fits perfectly. Every thread about "baww we want sliders lazy blizz gimme fatty" can now be redirected to that post with a swift and silent /thread.

[Mormolyce]

I like how their eyes are yellow instead of being glowing orbs of yellow, do you think Night Elves and Blood Elves will also have coloured eyeball orbs?

There may be a lighting layer that goes on top of the raw model we've seen so far to make them glow a bit but yeah it looks a lot better. Hopefully it'll fix some weird helmet issues too.

They have got to include visible irises with the new models for races with glowing eyes like Draenei and Belfs.

I wonder if it'd look right to have a darker glowing green iris in a bright green eye or something?

Similarly, check out the Night Elf in this design.



Her eyes are regular eyes, with a faint glow to them, but in game they just have floaty glowy balls in front of where their eyes should be.

Am I crazy or does that box art look like it was used as a reference point for some of the new faces? Especially Orc and Tauren.

Oh, and this is just me, but I've never liked the upright worgen fanart. It looks too much like a human wearing a mask, destroying the unique silhouette of the race. The same is true in werewolf movies, the ones depicting werewolves with humanoid bodies and just wolf-like heads tend to look really look corny and cartoonish to me.

I feel this way in general about wolfmen/werewolves yeah.

What they need to do is stop giving the males of a certain new race a hunch, and not the females. It's either - neither have a hunch, or both have a hunch. These stupid extreme cases of sexual dimorphism annoy the crap out of me. Same for orc males and orc females, and troll males and troll females. And so-on and so-on.

That's silly, the "hunch" in Orcs is due to their massive exaggerated shoulders. Wouldn't make sense on a female.

Trolls - you want the alpha female back?



Kill it with fire.

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Holy CARP! This one actually looks legit!
Where did you get it?

It's clearly not, the art style doesn't fit with WoW at all. Looks like Aion or some other MMO.

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*biggest snip of all time*

That was a great read. I love this thread.

I think another one of the key reasons we don't have sliders and aren't likely to is that Blizzard likes to control the game's artistic integrity. Imagine logging into the game and seeing hordes of people with totally messed up wrong looking faces like those people who deliberately made retarded Commander Shepards.

[Yig]

It's true, Tolkien never described anything really visually that everyone now accepts as Tolkienesque visual tropes.

Green orcs that look like ogres with jutting fangs were inserted into the lexicon by Games Workshop. Warhammer.

Tolkiens orcs could be any number of things visually before Games Workshop cemented orcs in pop culture, all we know is they were elven stock corrupted in Angbad genetically by Melkor over a long time period before what he was doing to them was discovered and awesome stuff happened. Jackson made a brilliant allusion to this with his aptly named Gothmog in Return of the King, taking genetic corruption to it's limits with tumors and deformities. An orc named for a Balrog, if ever there was.

Peter Jackson was heavily inspired by the things Games Workshop made seem intrinsic to Tolkien's visuals as well as Alan Lee and John Howe and Brian Froud, in many ways they and Games Workshop kind of changed fantasy art in the early 80s from very generic Dungeons and Dragons type stuff to something almost elemental and archetypal.

Frazetta is another very distinct fantasy artist, but he was much more of a Robert E Howard man, and it's lovely to know Tolkien was an enthusiast and fan of Howard's writing. As I recall he even wrote him a letter. Too many people attribute too much to Tolkien out of context, he did so much for modern fantasy but he basically just did what Blizzard did to Warhammer only he used mythology from Scandinavia, some Celtic and Germanic, with a dash of any number of things. Before the names I've listed above it has to be said the Hildebrandt Brothers did a lot to inspire the look of the classic Warhammer Tolkienesque look we recognize from Jackson's movies. Arguably more so than anyone in many respects I would opt. Tolkiens own visions were mostly unrecognizable from what we see in Alan Lee and John Howe's work and subsequently Jackson's movies, though it's also incredibly cool when you see the ways they've fused Tolkien's own drawings and paintings into their styles if you know where to look.

The exaggerated anatomy of Warhammer, like Blizzard, came from needing their miniatures to have strong silhouettes and colors because the model armies needed to be instantly recognizable being tiny miniatures.

And just as in Warcraft, Warhammer has realistic concept art but very stylized in game miniatures

When you get down to the things Tolkien actually said in the Lord of the Rings itself, elves never were described with pointed ears in the novels, in fact one of Gandalf's many names translated to Elf Rod or Elf with a rod, as some men suspected him of being an elf in his aloof ways. Tolkien drew his own world as he was a painter and hobbyist, it's very much in the style of tapestries and art deco, the only pointed ears you're going to find are on his personal hobbits. I am fascinated by the linked to in depth physical descriptions however. He had much more subtle things in his mind's eye than we are used to, as we've seen a century of evolution forged in the fires of amazing and brilliant artists who took the soul of the same mythology Tolkien was inspired by and blended it with our modern sensibilities.

British comic books like 2000 AD also did a lot to create evolution towards the overly muscled male models of Warcraft, Simon Bisley's Sláine work, Judge Dredd,...

I have no idea where I'm driving anymore here.

Tolkien wanted a mythology for Britain that predated Beowulf, and I have to chuckle now when the people call Kargath Bladefist a rip off of the Pale Orc in Jackson's Hobbit, when what you're seeing is mutually exclusive influence and interplay between artists today. WETA's various artists are huge Warcraft fans, and Blizzard in 2004 was obviously comprised of many massive WETA fans, it's fascinating and infinitely divisible to dissect all this stuff.

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@Yig

Was long, did read.

And everything you said, they are my thoughts exactly and I would have said so myself if I didn't lack the literacy skills. I actually couldn't find the Samwise quote myself until now but put in that context just fits perfectly. Every thread about "baww we want sliders lazy blizz gimme fatty" can now be redirected to that post with a swift and silent /thread.

Aw, shucks. Thanks
I need to learn to make money from this word stuff.

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I think another one of the key reasons we don't have sliders and aren't likely to is that Blizzard likes to control the game's artistic integrity. Imagine logging into the game and seeing hordes of people with totally messed up wrong looking faces like those people who deliberately made retarded Commander Shepards.

Oh yes, that too. So much that too.

I have a thing for glowing eyes SANS irises, so I feel for you folk, but I like em. They make something feel more like a demon or god or a being of pure power, whited out eyes freak me out in horror, and glowing pure eyes of energy tingle my happy button.

Personally as I said, Trolls are monstrous, and female trolls I think should look like a disgusting Hag. I'd show you more of Meg Mucklebones to demonstrate one of my all time favorite creature designs in the hall of fame, but it's NSFW. Robert Picardo arguably did a more brilliant job there I think than Tim Curry with Darkness, but fuck. I mean damn. Darkness is just,... so coooool. And then Blix? That lovely green goblin, and comically based on Keith Richard's face and played by a female actor, fun fact. I often wonder if Ridley Scott came back to fantasy with something like a mixture of Legend and Gladiator, but I think that's basically what Warcraft will be, with the DNA of a good World War 2 movie showing the humanity of both sides. I don't want to talk about Prometheus. Go watch Black Rain and leave me in peace

Werewolves? My all time fav is most certainly An American Werewolf in London. Just hearing a person utter the word "moors" gives me chills. And Diablo had moors!!!!

Trolls in WOW are weird for me. I'm obsessed with drawing gaunt elven faces, dwarves, and Scandinavian Trolls. Froud and Paul Bonner are basically the teats I was suckled upon,... I've got to be careful with my analogies.

WOW trolls are just weird to me. It's rare to find an artist who nails their tusks correctly. And they have none of the appeal of Scandinavian trolls, but I love the weird take on trolls Blizzard has for what they are. Weird voodoo mother fuckers.

[Alteiry]

I wonder if it'd look right to have a darker glowing green iris in a bright green eye or something?

It doesn't have to be super dark in comparison to the rest of the eye, just so dark you can actually tell there's an iris in there somewhere.

Take this screenshot of Maraad from the BC cinematic as an example of what I would like to see in-game.

http://imgur.com/h8PEFHV

[rcshaggy]

Holy CARP! This one actually looks legit!
Where did you get it?

Look up a artist named NadrojWobrek on Deviantart.

Also will this be a good Orc female?


Possible new female Human? I would enjoy if it looks like this.

[Yig]

I'd say you should be looking to expect something more cartoony.

Take the current WOW human female's basic posture, make it look more natural and balanced but make it still clearly evocative of the human female you know, then give her the very animated and expressive exaggerated facial expressions of the gnome, slightly toned down from the gnome but more exaggerated than usual, mixed with something like the quality and style of Everquest Next's human female and the soul and texture of this oldschool human female WOW concept art.

The proportions of WOW vanilla given more natural body language tweaks to make it look less rigid, don't expect your weight to seem different or your overall proportions or even your overall stance beyond a tilt of the head or the angle of a hand, expect cartoony facial expressions and lush gradients and texturing, yum. Expect your hands to have volume in each digit and knuckle, softer than the dwarf or orc but just as defined.

Put all these things together and you get the purest methamphetamine in Albuquerque.

[Rhywolver]

^
^

I don't think Orcs should just look like grown-up Goblins.
Also, she looks more like a sixteen-year old orc cosplayer.

I'd like them more savage!



Edit: Holy shit holy SHIT Everquest Next looks sick...