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Xels034 — sin'dorei
#arcane #bc #blender #burning #caster #cata #cataclysm #cycles #desolace #draenor #elf #fantasy #frost #lichking #mage #magical #mists #mop #pandaria #pyro #render #warcraft #wod #world #wow #wrath #cursade #sindorei #wotlk #warlods #tarecgosa #fire #gorgrond
Published: 2015-07-16 18:48:11 +0000 UTC; Views: 2354; Favourites: 34; Downloads: 11
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Description
This had to be done.Thats my WoW character of nearly 10 years (although I don't play anymore)
I finished this work pretty fast. I think it took my about 2 weeks, where I only worked 2-3 hours at a time in the evening after work. But oh boy, was the render time absurd. 17 hours! All those hair particles n stuff prohibited me from using my (a bit aged) GPU, so CPU only. Oh and hairs+SSS materials are just bad. Insane amount of samples were needed. I used branches patch tracing in the end, but its the equivalent of over 2000 samples unbranched. There is still some noise actually, but I've had enough render-waiting
I planned to stick to the original design of ingame-items precisely, but figured out some items just don't make any sense, don't fit or are plain ugly. So the wrist and shoe armor are completely made up, and the robe is a mix of 2 items. But overall thats a pretty accurate depiction of my ingame character.
I can't decide where this place should be. Desolace? Gorgrond? ... hmm.
Blender & Cycles as always. 2.75 gooseberry branch.
Credit to redheadstock [link] for the rune textures.
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Comments: 10
Holy shit..... I want one of my DK worgen........ I have photos *.* (3 years that I don't play anymore)
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Is this 100% computer generated ? Or is it based on a photo or something ? I looks amazing
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Yup, this is all 100% computer generated.
Glad you like it
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Amazing! How did you do the glow for the crystal with the trims?
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The crystals are quite glowy, which part exactly do you mean? The glowing outline of them? I hope you mean that ^^
I asked that myself when I first saw items with that effect in the game:
You can observe that effect here really well: (click on view in 3d) www.wowhead.com/item=90085/spa…
At first I thought it was some neat post-process effect, but its something entirely different:
Backface culling:
(Maybe you know that perfectly well, but I thought claryfying wouldn't hurt) Every game uses it to gain more performance. Basically, when the normal of a triangle points away from the camera (you'd see the back side) it doesn't get rendered at all. Huge performance boost in games. Normally, every mesh should be a closed shell, so seeing the inside should be impossible, so why not ignore those faces while rendering?
So what they did in the game was to have a slightly bigger copy of the glowing part with inverted normals in the mesh. The effect was that you would only see those faces where the original part ended, but the bigger copy's inside was visible, resulting in a clean outline with consistent size in respect to the model.
Sooo. recreating that in cycles was really easy. I modeled the crystal as usual, slapped a solidify modifyer on it, checked "invert normals" and applied the correct materials. That was a little bit confusing but worked out pretty well. You'd get a "volume" of the crystals surface, where both sides of the volume's faces point inwards ... get it?
In the materials for the bigger part of the shell I used the geometry node's "backfacing" socket as the mix value between an emission and transparent shader. So when set up in the right way, it did visually the same as backface culling. Oh, I also made sure that this edge-material was only seeable by the camera (using the light-path input node's socket "is camera ray" for mixing again.) Otherwise it would illuminate the inside which looked just bad
The inner part of the shell is a regular material. emission/absorbtion volume shader with textures
Well, the explanation was a bit longer than I thought, but thats how I did it
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Thanks man for the info. I looked around a bit and got a similar effect of the crystal in one of my newest render. Feel free to check it out
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wait...you stopped?
anyways, this is an OUTSTANDING tribute to a videogame character
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Thanks a lot pal ^^
At one point I thought "needs more epic" ... thought about an ongoing battle in the background and so on but that would be WAY to much work. Thats my only complaint about this work. I personally think the background ... is missing something.
Yeah I stopped ...there are always times when I come back but the current expansion is ... lackluster I must admit. I don't raid anymore and while the game is at its peak regarding raiding quality and quantity, everything else was forgotten it seems. I hope Blizzard does better next time.
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