I wonder how long does it takes to create a skin. Hours, days, or weeks?
Pretty sure Jeff said it takes months, hence why they can’t take much feedback for skins
if we are talking legendary, I’d say a solid month or 2 because you have to do the art design, pick the theme colours, not to mention it might need an animation.
Definitely not the former two I’d imagine. Skins need conceptualization and execution and that can take ages with all the steps in the middle.
According to what I have gathered from past developer responses it can take over a year for certain legendary skins. Legendary skins unlike Rare or Epic skins, often uses completely unique character rigging for things like hair, weapons, and loose clothing that is different from the original hero rig. This combined with conceptualizations, 3D modeling, and all of the other factors that goes into creating 3D characters in a video game compound on the time for new skins to be made.
4 Likes
Probably a good month or two.
Cause the art team has to come up with a art work for it.
But then they have to integrate that art work into the game, without the character suddenly becomes cancer model (like Dota 2 skins when they are not properly loaded).
About 5 to 8 weeks. You develop skin pretty early, but it’s still a while before it’s thick enough to be useful outside the womb.
Hard as this is to believe on the surface, it sounds right. Don’t forget this is Blizz, not Riot. They put an emphasis on art and polish, and have few clipping issues, etc. It all has to be tested and reviewed as well.
1 Like
6 Likes
I’m a 3d character artist so I can try to help answer…
https://www.artstation.com/yuuva
here’s my most recent 3d characters if anyone’s interested 
To make a new skin on top of a pre-existing nude body depends on how thorough you’re talking about
Do you want to include the time it takes for initial concept art creation? Then the modeling and texturing but what about rigging and animating it?
For me, to simply do modeling and texturing of a full new outfit/hairstyle takes about 10-14 days of casual work depending on the complexity, or 5 to 10 days of crunch work
3 Likes
i wonder how long each individual skin took. moira’s banshee is near identical in model to her default, but the textures are very different.
blackwatch is much different, but has a LOT less loose fabric, save for the loincloth that they could have borrowed from mercy
I believe it takes a long, long, LOOOONG time to create a skin, first because you need creativity and that creativity needs to fit with the personality of the character and then be polished so it becomes better, later on they create the textures, the model, and finally animate the character, after that they need to look for bugs.
Depends. I doubt if the Dr.Ziegler skin took too long to create.
But yeah it may take months.