DOTA2: Nyx Assassin Desk Jockey

Just b/c it made me laugh I made this, not for in game.

Unlike most grubs of his colony, Nyx Assassin was the chosen one, anointed with an extract of the queen goddess herself! ...but all Nyx Assassin wanted to do was fit in!

Sometimes Nyx Assassin needs to go under cover. "Nothing unusual here..."

Nyx Assassin is looking forward to having that picture perfect scarab smile.

DOTA2 Chen update

So I've been hiding in a cave as I re-re-re-work the designs. I'm close to where I want to be to show something. I want to add in the Misc slot something on his chest, maybe attaching the shoulder armor. Not 100% sure yet. Also the weapon is coming along nicely but not ready to show. The theme is "Holy Persuasion", Chens spell take control of any neutral creep or beasts. So its mixing the clean lines of his built in armor with beast motifs. I was thinking of those Gothic lion head knockers (hah I said knockers) But how they mix these ideas well. The mount armor was insane to come up with something "better" than the default which if you look at mounted armor it almost always does what the default does so it was hard to make it new and interesting... I hope I got that. Anyway, this has been/continues to be a trial. Working hard to make me happy with the design :D 

the gauntlets seems a tad simple right now, after I texture them if they still feel that way I'll need to re-address them.

My favorite part of the mount armor is the blade like spike on the front. Seems neat like you don't want to get in his way, ahah.

DOTA2 Chen Re-Re-Re-Work

I did 2 days of research and sketching... Lord, 2 FULL days pretty much (I did go to work friday hah). Watching videos of people playing Chen watching videos of learning DOTA2 (b/c I realised I need to learn more about the game and get semi decent at it before I can make really great designs). Anyway looking at tons of conecpt art on anything armor related, history of armor, armor of the ages and areas like japan, etc.  Anyway I had this awesome idea. spent hours today painting it up...

...then realized Fock! There's no belt or body slot!!!! AAARGH! Only shoulders, arms and head! You'd think I'd get that, or that its obvious, but that's not even all. The texture size for characters on a mount (meaning they are slightly smaller in game) is REALLY small. I developed this cool technique for making details in armor in 3D Coat but with shoulders at 128x256 how much of that is going to be readable? crap! so back to the drawing board earlier today but luckily I've got a day+ of solid researching and other tricks came about. I saw that Chens armor is mostly about silhouette  Its like I'm learning how to concept characters the way they tell you too but out of pain of doing it "my way" until I get why there's a process people/pro's suggest. Argh why do I have to learn the hard way? Aaanyway So I skip back to 3d and mess around with silhouette and came up with this.

Its rough-ish. I like the armor, and there's not a whole lot of poly's left to do stuff with. Infact I'll have to reduce this if I want to keep the tassels (which I'm not THAT attached to)  I think the most work at this point is on the mount armor. That's probably the most prominent item in game. Anyway, Its been rough, I was hoping a vision of somehting would hit me but no, its been sketching and re-re-reworking back to sketching... thinking anyway here's where its at as of now.

DOTA2 more?

I had a lot of fun making the first Character kit, and I think I can't edit the set until after the competition. I think I did well, it was a great learning experience. But now I want to do something more. I want to push myself to do something bigger, more challenging. I didn't stray far from the original despite having a new take on things. Also I didn't know it at the time that the Phantom Lancer is kinda popular for people to work on, not a bad thing but there are people smart and going for crazier designs. So now its about pushing myself to see if I can go further. The character I'm picking to work on next is Chen.
Here's what he looks like before:

And here's my initial concept blocked in:

I think first thing is to do some rigging tests to see if this idea (big heavy armor) is even doable with the character animation in game.

PolyCount DOTA2: Submitted but not finished

So the criticism I'm getting on the steam workshop right off the bat, is the lance is too similar to the original. I agree and felt that yes the whole kit is conservative but I feel that the idea I had for the character was conservative. I don't really want to edit this set so much to make it "differenter", however I agree the guys saying the lance specifically might need tweaking. What if I didn't even re-UV too much but just stretched it like this? I think its kinda cool.

PolyCount DOTA2 Challenge Submitted!

Just published my first set of gear to the Steam Workshop. Here are some images. I don't yet know how to put all my items on the character at once to see them all in game... so here are each solo'ed

and what it will look like (for just he shoulder group) in game camera

PolyCount DOTA2: Tweaked

Now its down to finessing and tweaking. I added a lot of details in texture like wear and leather cracks, but more noticeably was adjusting the color and contrast of the textures to match the stock armor. On the left is the Default character armor on the right mine

Obviously left and right swapped for the back side. I will say getting the colors right was a bear. Partly b/c I started out w/o a reference and was just editing the colors to match from texture to texture THEN I used the reference character. I assume that they original armor has been tweaked contrast wise to get it to show up in game, I'll do my own in game tests next.