Orcs + Facelift = Forklift?

Well, it's Friday afternoon here at the office, and it's been a long week. I thought I'd share some of what the Art Department has been up to. They've been busy working on the new expansion and the new units being added, but they've also been working on various other small side-projects. As of late, they've mostly been one and the same: War.

Our Art Director has a personal vendetta against the War faction. He refuses to be satisfied until they look awesome. So, as a side note in the process of preparing for the expansion, the Orcs are getting a face-lift (similar to what happened with the Ogres a few months ago).

The process of creating any new unit (or re-creating a unit in this case)starts with concept art. Here you'll see a quick sketch of one of the Orcs. This particular example is the front view of the new Boar Rider concept. This, along with a half dozen other sketches, will be given to a 3D modeler, who will generate a model based on the various views and details of the sketches.

The model starts out looking rather like a gray blob. From there, the model is textured, sometimes by the same artist, sometimes by a separate artist. The Art Director makes sure that the look is consistent across the board, even when multiple artists are working on the various models and textures.

Once the model is finished and textured, it's given to another artist to rig. Rigging is the basic process of adding a skeleton structure to the model, and creating bones that attach to specific parts of the model's geometry. Then, the rig is animated through a series of key frames. The image at right is a blend of the stages of modeling, texturing, and rigging.

New Orcs sporting brass armor. And no, that isn't a boar.

But it isn't just the units that're getting attention. The War faction is getting an architectural renovation, too. The buildings have been re-textured in spare time over the course of the last several months. We've been hinting at this one for a while now, and have posted a handful of pictures in past newsletters, etc.

The new Farm

The new House

The new Stone Quarry

The new Watch Tower

I still need to ask the artists if the red splotches across the buildings are blood. If so, I wonder if the Orcs are in the habit of tossing corpses against the walls (a gruesome form of splatter painting, perhaps?)

The new models and textures for the War faction will accompany the addition of (optional) particle effects being added to the buildings over the course of the next two patches. For the War faction, the particles consist mostly of bonfires and smoke, though other particles are coming for other factions, such as fountains.

On a related note, I have it on good authority that one of our players has written an impressive guide to playing the War faction. Next week, I hope to be able to present you with the finished guide, and perhaps even a short interview with the author.

Stay tuned for more on that next week, as well as an update on what some of the programming team has been working on for the last two months (which has been kept secret until now)...