An attempt to realistically unsucc Reforged Graphics (actual content inside!)

General Discussion
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So I’ve been doing texture work for games for quite some time now and this weekend (after over a year of enduring) Reforged finally bugged me enough to download Reteras Model Studio (props!) and have a direct and uncensored look at the root of all that evil that made competitive multiplayer so hard to watch and play - or is it?

Yes - no - its complicated.

First up, after digging through some model files (mostly nightelf units, in particular the huntress), the texture / shader setup and fighting with the editor (ive never worked on wc3) for some time I just can underline what I have been suspecting for a while now:

Essentially the craftmanship on those models is generally really good - those models should be made by lemon sky studios, so props to them. but some models have serious issues and look unfinished or totally uninspired. the frostwyrm texture is truly awful (pre production?). it consists of 3 colors. grey, red, white. how does that fit on a frost dragon? it also makes the frostwyrm blend with various ground textures, if the team colored wings dont cut it. you find alot of spots on units that could be “more”.

A consistent theme throughout Reforged models is lack of a color concept, color matching, very unoptimized shader setup for outcome (if you consider how capable the lighting and shader system in Reforged ACTUALLY is) and sometimes bad texture contrast.

Now what do i mean with color concept and color matching? Basically I’m refering to connecting units from a race via a color theme.

All races use metal weapons and armor but for Reforged no one actually planned what goes where.

Now the huntress only has a shiny glaive but her (and the cats) armor looks like bog standard hardened steel - something that you would connect with humans instead. theres more potential, also lore wise. why would nightelves use human/dwarf quality steel?

So my underlying understanding of a color concept would be the following:

nightelf: metal is very shiny, bright, blueish tint. otherwise violet skin tones, red/brown/violet armor, leaf colors, feathers (but not tauren feather colors). if gold gets applied, its a very soft, yellow gold tone.

human: standard steel color, blue, red, bold gold, white/black colors. dwarf and gnomes get bronze colors.

orc: blued steel weapons and armor, obvious skin color, no gold. otherwise yellow, ochre, wood brown, sand colors.

undead: very rough metal, blind, scratched, rusted even maybe. gold metal color scheme is very ochre and blind, otherwise white/blue colors for “frost” creatures, fel colors (green/yellow) and “unhealthy” skin colors in green/blue/yellow shades.

This also includes bringing some recolored units back to their original color, like ghouls, aboms, wyrms you name it.

This way all the units are already color coded by race helping clarity, giving specific contrasts to all units. color palettes are also chosen in such a way they dont blend into background textures, which also is a HUGE problem for reforged, because some unit textures just lack color and contrast pop and some background textures are mindboggingly saturated and contrasty. In a next step background textures should be “de-popped”, so units are the main eye candy, not that toxic green grass.

Now lets get technical.

The texture work for the Reforged unit models is based on three to four textures per UV map - or lets say “model” to keep it easy.

The classic models should only have one (maybe two?) texture map(s), which contains all the information, but it also carries alot less information overall, because the shader and lighting setup in classic is worlds more simple and also the textures are very low res.

Unit models (those that i have looked at, especially huntress) consist of following texture maps:

diffuse map with alpha channel for transparency (basic color information, no lighting).

derivative normal map without alpha channel (a fancy bumpmap containing 3D information in 2D, but without the blue channel of usual tangent normal maps. helps to retain highpoly model details without actually using polygons).

ORM map with alpha channel - now this one is interesting. its a texture map that stores FOUR different informations in one file. basically its a texture container with 4 greyscale maps.

O stands for occlusion map and is stored in the red channel - its the shadow detail for the diffuse map. its basically rendered shadow information from the highpoly model that used to be in the diffuse map but now is in a different file, so the diffuse map is strictly color only. increasing contrast on that channel increases shadow contrast on the model.

R stands for roughness - its stored in the green channel. it controls the specularity from matte to glossy. black is glossy (zero roughness) and white is matte (maximum roughness).

M stands for metalness - its stored in the blue channel. it controls how much “metal” a material is. black is not metal, white is extremely metal. this influences how the material reflects light and colors.

im not entirely sure what it exactly does because i lack the tools to really examine it but a rule of thumb: 0% roughness and 0% metalness gives you a very very polished glass ball while 0% roughness and 100% metalness gives you basically fluid mercury and 100% roughness and 0% metal is matte paper.

then theres the ORM maps alpha channel that contains the the information for team color patches. its the alpha, so white = true. interestingly the team color patch can be blended with the diffuse map via varying alpha channel strength.

last but not least theres the emissive map, thats basically controlling the self illumination in a standard RGB map. whatever you draw in there will be as bright as you color it in that texture. glowing green eyes in the dark -> paint green eyes on that map to make them ignore ambient light and glow with their specified color value.

there is another texture called “environmental map” which basically is “the” reflection used for various models. whenever something is a reflecting material, it should be reflecting that texture. its a sunrise over green meadows. fun fact.

“Okay okay, so I just learned 3 Semesters of Game Graphics, whats the point?”

People often bring up how Reforged is such a distinct switch in graphics style compared to classic and they wish Reforged would essentially look like Classic - looking at how the texture files are made specifically for that 3D rendering engine using numerous pretty up to date shader map methods, makes it extremly hard to convert the textures into classic handpainted “diffuse lit” textures. you basically start at 0, but you dont have the source files to do it, so you start at -50 instead. unless you’re a game studio sporting a good number of texture artists that can redo basically all the texture work, Reforged is like it is.

But theres another way - why fight the updated Graphics Engine of Reforged? What you see (or not see) with Reforged Graphics is only pulling about 40% potential of what actually is possible.

I started screwing around with the Huntress to get into the retexture workflow and model reimport for reforged. Thanks again to Retera for the tools and tutorials.

I tried diffuse lit textures first and they look good, but working on the base of the already existing textures i’d need days to finish one model - and its a complete switch of style, you’d have to redo the whole game.

Then I tried another workflow which worked really well for the Huntress:

Recolor the diffuse texture via Curves and other quickly maskable adjustment layers so that we are within the color scheme proclaimed above (blueish bright, reflective metal, skin colors etc), add more contrast.

Use the ORM map to create more team color patches, to increase specularity and brightness for nightelf metal armor and get more depth into the texture by increasing contrast for the occlusion channel.

I made some minor adjustments on various texture maps to nudge the huntress into what I believe is the proper way to realistically partly unsucc the Reforged graphics without overcommiting on time for doing so. After the multiplayer unit models the terrain textures could be adjusted in the same way (pulling some sliders) and the last department would be some particle effects and unit scalings (and amputation of 2 fiend legs).

Reforged shipped somewhere between classic style and “next gen” style, which means it doesnt look like classic, and it doesnt look overly convincing in any other area either.
I might as well pull everything out of the 3D engine to make it do what we need while also looking quite spectacular, in fact.

Now finally some screenshots from the WC3 Editor, as i currently dont own Reforged (refunded it due to frustration, which also brought me here). Its the original Huntress next to the reworked one.

Thats an overview:

https://i.imgur.com/pfAQ3p2.jpg

thats basically “in game” distance:

https://i.imgur.com/7owabZT.jpg

and thats a close up:

https://i.imgur.com/Wk9iWQI.jpg

Learning the workflow and reworking the huntress took me two days, part time. if you know the workflow, one unit can be done in a day, which would make “unsuccing” Reforged totally doable for a single person within months as a hobby. we’re just rebalancing colors, contrast and shaders. we’re not actually doing any texturing work.

If the team color patches turn out to be an issue when receiving very little light, its should also be possible to slap a slight self-illumination on these.

its a case study and its doable by a single person part time. theoretically, with w3champions in place, we could get those models into the game. maybe the new team working on reforged is open for such things aswell - i mean, it could be a “free” improvement of the game.

just wanted to share that. i might do a few other units for fun. if nothing else, this is just to show what reforged “could” have been with just a tiny bit more time and effort put into it instead of that undercooked abomination we got.

PS: i could not get any normal maps re-imported into wc3. i tried the intel DDS and nvidia DDS photoshop plugins for CS6 and neither put out normal maps that worked in the editor. a tip for the correct exporter or settings are much appreciated!

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Should I feel guilty that you said you used my program, then refunded your game? The budget of my modeling tool is much, much lower than the budget of Reforged. My tool only renders diffuse surfaces because it was developed for a long time for the old Warcraft 3 game, with Reforged support basically hacked in at the end (since Reforged is so much newer than Warcraft 3 itself).

The rumor I heard was that when exporting DDS we should use DXT5 or DXT3 codec, but I actually have not tried with normal maps if I recall and I only really have tampered with diffuse or emissive colors in most cases.

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no, i refunded all the way back on release day when they patched the beta state onto live servers.

intel doesnt offer DXT5 for normals and the nvidia plugin for CS6 is basically broken for those kinds of normals (spits out semi transparents, blue tangents etc.) as far as im concerned, except for i overlooked something, thats why im asking. maybe you could give it a quick try for a sanity check. maybe i need to switch tools for normals exporting with native support.

and in the case it somehow sounded like i was complaining about the state or the model studio, i wasnt. im glad there even is a tool like that, since blizzard promised to release tools and we all know how that went. i know my way around the modding scene and model studio is far from being the yankiest. it works, does what its supposed to do and didnt crash on me. what more can i ask for realistically?

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Because World of Warcraft? As far as I am aware in World of Warcraft (have not actually played it…) nothing stops a Night Elf player from going into a Human town and buying and using Human stuff. As a lot of the concept art and designs used were from World of Warcraft (for consistency with that game) it is possible such assets leaked their way into the designs.

Classic uses pretty much just 1 layer, diffuse. There might have been ways to blend layers together for some alpha effects and even animate textures but generally it was just diffuse. The textures were also uncompressed in video memory as Warcraft III pre-dated texture compression becoming standard. Normals were specified per vertex. Normal details were pre-baked onto the diffuse, and often included pre-baked shadows.

The environment map used should vary based on the tileset selected, similar to the sky box. If they did make it vary is another question.

Reforged needs an entirely different terrain engine from classic, possibly used instead of the classic one if present and being played in Reforged mode. Otherwise it is stuck with the same limitations as classic, such as at most 18 full tile variations and just 1 blend variation. No matter how well the textures are made, they will still look very repetitive and be prone to discontinuities along tile edges due to the limitations of classic.

StarCraft II used large repeating terrain textures which were blended in layers together by an alpha value. Although the texture did repeat, it was large enough that generally it went unnoticed, especially if blending was used to give more variation to the terrain.

World Editor does not accurately reproduce the in game graphics of Reforged as far as I am aware. From the screenshots I have seen, in game usually looks significantly better, as if some shaders are disabled for the editor.

Normal maps seem to use ATI2A2XY (3Dc based) encoding. That kind of makes sense given that encoding is intended for normals. Diffuse and ORM seem to use either DXT1 or DXT5, likely depending on the required alpha precision. Blizzard made the textures using NVTT (likely NVidia Texture Tools). This can be seen by inspecting the DDS files with a hex editor and looking at the user data structures (packed into the 11 unused DWORD of the header).

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I half speedread your post, sort of. but you mentioned a little point about why fight the updated graphics engine of Reforged.

I personally don’t want to ? the main problem in my eyes are the models and how they are constructed. in my opinion they should have checked certain things when it comes to functionality. to be beneficial for the game as a whole.

And each problem is a chain reaction itself.

1 - Not overdependent on ingame lightning engine to look good.

  • All other Blizzard game models have this feature, when you look at them in Hives 3D model viewer and compare it to a Reforged one you start to see the drastic difference.

2 - Atleast Try to maintain a level of design faithfulness to the original game. i’m no way advocating for 1 on 1 copy. but Reforged is like… Who is Classic model design ideas ? i never met this person. or as thanos likes to put it, I don’t even know who you are.

3 - A loose topic, some level of higher optimization for the models, the first 2 steps already make everything far better. game size will be reduced. model complexity will reduce which in return would mean producing custom models off of the existing ones would be easier. and performance and FPS would remain consistent.

Now a bit of word within my own bias, i am one of those people who would even be happy if the whole remaster was higher quality texture redesign but didn’t even have a better lightning engine. excluding realistic shadows.

But right now if you asked me, would i prefer the Reforged “Designed” models screened through the first point i mentioned over actual Reforged. i wouldn’t hesitate to smash the yes button. because in an objective functional aspect it fixes the majority of the problems.

The faithfulness of the artistic design of the models can be brushed aside, even though i would personally prefer proper faithful designs to the original ingame models of war3. because they already looks good and unique.

Take the Doom Guard model for example, you know the funny thing with the other 2 different models of DoomGuard in Reforged is that none of them actually resemble the original one. and that critique can apply to most of the new models across the board.

So if Blizzard wanted its custom community to very fastly adapt and transition their maps from Classic to HD and get everything over and done with as fast as possible the visual overhaul project that they chose to apply is the about the worst possible way to do this.

It lead to the custom games community not increasing in development speed, but taking an absolute halt and then choosing to outright ignore RF HD. or very very slowly moving forward. the momentum that this community rightfully deserved was stopped. the momentum to strike and grab audience attention and quickly capitalize on it is over. and the way in which the models were done had a direct impact on this.

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So you are blaming the failure of the WC3 community to upgrade our rendering technology to match the game… on the game itself?
I work with some of that technology, and so you’re saying what’s wrong with Reforged is basically me and my failure to support it. Or at least it feels that way when I read this statement.

I know I am reading it a little out of context but when you blame your dislike of Reforged on people like me, instead of making code contributions to fix the problem, it just makes me sad honestly.

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no he wants 100% selfillum diffuse lighted textures instead of the dynamic lighting and shader based approach used in reforged.

theres a point to be made the lighting setup in reforged can make some models appear relatively dark and hard to read - but on the other hand its also just the lighting setup and the shader configuration. above i demostrated how it can be improved on the model side without actually redoing everything.

either way - like i outlined in my initial post - due to the method the textures are made (specifically for dynamic lighting and shaders) reforged is gonna stay that way. from all the things that will not happen, reforged assets being remade with diffuse lighted textures wont happen the most.

one part of the only way to improve graphics based on whats actually doable is the approach i outlined - improve what we have (reforged models are a great base to work on, lots of untapped potential) instead of asking for something thats essentially impossible to do effort wise and due to the lack of source material.

just for clarification - the diffuse map is made to be dynamically lighted - without shaders it looks kinda horrible. and then you gotta repaint everything by hand - its extremely tidious - and you gotta do that to all the models of reforged to have a consistent style - thats multiple thousands of models with multiple texture files for some models - all that without the original source files.

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StarCraft II uses practically the same mechanics as Reforged… Most modern games do. Without using the normal map and emissive texture with a HDR shader they will look flat and bland.

Many of the Reforged models were based on World of Warcraft redesigns due to those more clearly defining the current Warcraft lore. In addition to that some aspects were further updated, such as human proportions, to be more realistic similar to how they are in Heroes of the Storm (which also uses a similar lighting configuration).

Number of layers and lighting does not really affect this. Model vertex count does, but they already use optimisations like normal maps to reduce that.

Any performance issues drawing the models is more likely to be due to how Warcraft III was originally programmed not being ideal for modern real time graphics APIs.

They resemble the World of Warcraft Doom Guard, with additional high fidelity art work that was not possible/viable when World of Warcraft was made. Similar to the Infernal model.

A lot of Reforged HD maps are being made. The issue is that many custom map developers decided they would start as good as entirely new projects to take advantage of the many new features. Like all Warcraft III maps this means that actual products take 2-3 years, if they ever are finished.

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Duskstalker answered you. you may attribute blame to yourself for not developing a tool that perfectly showcases Reforged models as if they were ingame. but the part you confuse yourself is that for some reason i blame a feature lacking from your toolset on Blizzard. i merely use it as an example to point out a difference that exists because my actual model terminology is lackluster. i’m not saying its Blizzards fault that your tool shows something bad. i’m saying its Blizzards fault for deciding to produce such incompatible models for Warcraft 3 as a game that they decided to not change the engine for in the first place.

And for the future i’m most definitely not proposing we need 2200 extra models done “The right way it should have been”. because no one but Blizzard has the resources to do this.

I’m just pointing out the obvious flaw in the models development decision. for W3’s case, one can keep claiming that this square piece is so well developed and full of detail. well, its not going to fit in a round hole, not without causing serious damage beforehand and permanently damaging the shape of the round hole.

Then i proceeded to agree with you that the lightning engine is fine, but my problem was the models. are not fine.

You have to excuse my apparent lack of knowledge for how certain things function. but i hope you also understand the drastic difference between other Blizzard models compared to Reforged. i even saw you complain somewhere else that Wow models are basically just using more polygons while Reforged actually “looks better”, or something along those lines.

Well, in my opinion what Blizzard is using if not for their other games, was absolutely REQUIRED for War3. for things to be far more easier.

I can’t read this with a straight face. Reforged has a completely different artistic design decision compared to Warcraft art in general. and Human proportions being made realistic is exactly a big part of what’s actually wrong with Reforged art. if you actually draw similarities between how wonderfully executed the art of HotS is to Reforged then you are gravely mistaking.

If you look at Samwises original art, when he himself said he was never good at drawing realistic human proportions and that is how he just went and created his own visual style, one that humans are more bulky in a quote that also mentioned how it is superior for an RTS game. it is then very obvious how Reforged was a huge step AWAY from such stylistic design.

And then there is the common misconception atleast when it comes to Warcraft 3 itself as the most pure example. that somehow Blizzard artstyle just means giant armor. thats wrong in so many aspects i almost want to vomit. its actually not. if you again, look at Samwises original arts especially that of the humans the armor was never big. the human bodies were bulky and stylistic. the armor just fit on that.

And as if that was irrelevant which it isn’t, Nobody in their right minds should advocate for models of an RTS game to be inspired from a Single character centric game like an mmo where the upmost amount of outlandish designs and details need to be crammed on pieces of armor so people can marvel at their heros.

Warcraft 3 is an RTS game probably literally the single most overlooked aspect of the whole group of people that actually defend Reforged models.

And they already made the decision to not touch the core game engine too much. the lightning engine was completely re-written. but the models that were feed to the game was way above the league that the game needed or it could possibly handle properly, and it directly hurt peoples ability to quickly adapt and move forward ON RELEASE. it took people more then a bloody year just to get remotely comfortable with geo-merging.

My advocation for a more humble, and faithful style of models is by large connected to how functionally useful and fast it would have been for everyone to get comfortable with it and move on. Reforged models provided nothing of that.

Blizzard also never released the tools they promised on the stage of in 2018 to the community. so the fact that they also didn’t take into consideration then how the models that they provide would be more easy to use and manipulate by 3rd party tools is completely and universally their fault. a served lie that was never delivered and a careless series of actions that will most likely never be undone.

This statement is pretty stupid imo. you know the reason i said none of them resemble the older one is because people like the original design of the older Doom Guard which was not carried forward. many models across the board that used war3 models with specific design decision now are literally forced (if they still want to use HD) to look for entirely new models to import that have a similarity in artistic design to the original models because the idea of the look of their map was heavily crafted around this. Doodad models being extremely different being one such example of an absolute pain in the @$$ for terrain makers.

You stating that the new models have additional high fidelity art work that is impossible to replicate back then has literally nothing to do with my statement. you’re basically saying a piece of art that was inspired from wow is automatically superior to a previous art design when in reality, the original Doom Guards art can be faithfully transitioned to the same amount of fidelity as the Reforged ones have. because in the real world, unlike the imaginary world you created for this response, Art is not bound by old technology just to be transitioned from SD to HD. you lose some massive respect points from me by somehow twisting and blaming an older version of a game because a new version had a new design of art. without even realizing how a piece of art is not inferior when Lemonsky could literally make a one on one replica of the older DoomGuard design with Reforged levels of detail. not that i would want that because it doesn’t address the other issues. whole of Reforged can be one on one with Classic but it still doesn’t address the underline functional decisions that harm everything from adaptability to performance. the only benefit would be consistency. which apparently nobody cares about.

I think statement doesn’t really counter mine, it just adds a set of information to it.
like, my original post and your reply to it don’t exactly counter eachother.

Its just that because of the choices with the models, its easier to just start from scratch then transition. because of the extreme difference between the visuals and not even the slightest care for consistency. which would have allowed us to move forward with greater speed. and part of that does include having more simpler models but using the iconic art of Blizzard or atleast Samwise, and not just relying on brute forcing our way in with cramming detail in models needlessly.

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This is a video of me doing complex geomerge of Nether Dragon wings WITH ANIMATIONS onto a sheep with a Grunt head geomerged on, and the video is from Reforged Beta before it released…
The model format is the same so geomerge basically works the same and took a day or two to figure out…

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Look at the models of the Warcraft heroes in Heroes of the Storm, which are technically the second newest Warcraft models since World of Warcraft is just a continuation of whatever was already there from before. A lot of people complained that those models were realistically proportioned, especially Alexstraza.

This seems to have been a general change in their art style, and the art style of the industry as a whole in general.

A lot of people pre-ordered Reforged for the reason that it was going to be made more WoW like, including “Reforged” campaign with WoW style maps that did not really materalise (only a few maps had this treatment? Or was it just 1?).

It had to be completely rewritten. Original Warcraft III used the fixed function lighting pipeline of Direct3D 7 (although it required 8). Direct3D 11 does not support such a pipeline and only supports using programmable shaders. As such at the very least programmable shaders had to be made to emulate the fixed function pipeline for classic.

To put it in perspective it took the Warcraft III community 15 years before they actually understood how BLP textures worked, when I finally wrote a guide for it the other year. This is why so many textures of older models are buggy or do not work since the tools back then did not correctly implement the BLP format.

Taking 1 year for people to start geo merging is pretty good going in my opinion, especially given how much more complicated the models are compared with before. Not that it even took that as Retera pointed out.

I was always sceptical of the “integrated model editor” they promised and I made that no secret at the time of announcement. 3D model editors are very complicated pieces of software and there is no reason for them to reinvent the wheel when there already exists ones such as the free and open source blender which are aimed at professional usage. To me it would have made more sense to promise some open source plugins for blender to deal with model editing, since even if Blizzard up and walked away from them the community who uses them could still maintain them.

To be honest part of the blame with third party Reforged modeling is with third party tool creators. Retera’s model studio is pretty much the only open source and so maintainable software solution to editing Reforged models. The once famous Warcraft III Model Editor could not be updated as the author of that tool insisted on keeping it closed source, with only a small but useless part of it being made open source.

Again, I made it no secret that I did not like their decision to WoW some of the designs. I personally think the new Infernal looks terrible compared with the old. However it is what it is and based on the feedback my posts received back then a lot of people actually like the models being more like they are used to in World of Warcraft.

World of Warcraft was made based on the Warcraft III engine to a large part. As such a lot of the people who worked on Warcraft III went on to work on World of Warcraft. I think the reason World of Warcraft changed some of the designs back then is because the developers felt that they were better in some ways. This happens a lot with game development and old video game box art is a good example of this where often what was shown looked different in the final game because the developers felt that what they shipped was better than what they sent for the artwork to be printed.

Technically old technology did limit what they could do. They did not have programmable shaders to handle normal maps and so capture fine surface detail. Even if they did, they did not have the required video memory for all the textures that would require, especially given that they did not even have real time texture compression for them and had to fit everything in under 64 MB (or was it 32 MB?) of video memory.

Judging by how legacy Warcraft III has literally a perfect example of broken colour management pipeline I am not too sure the developers even knew how to properly use real time 3D graphics when it was made, as it was their first real time 3D project. This is why Warcraft III lighting always acted and looked kind of strange, because it caused almost certainly unintended colour shifting with brightness changes.

Only in some cases. In most it is all about the fullscreen UI and Lua. Also nothing stops map makers from forcing the use of classic graphics which largely has remained unchanged (except the removal of the Chaos Orc Marine…).

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Yeah, with a tool you built yourself and know how to do, you were one of the single exclusive individuals that would ever know how to do this. sadly this doesn’t apply to anyone besides you in the context of any counterargument to my statement.

That’s noted. however it doesn’t change my mind about the need to carry forward a faithful artstyle in a game that’s being remastered and not made a sequel of.

That is correct. Blizzard tried to specifically market the broader audience of Reforged with “Wow” and “Cutscenes” and “A completely new re-creation” while under the hood the inner community were told the engine wouldn’t change. it all seemed like too much of a promise to be universally good on all fronts.

Yeah and i have no issues with it. my main issue is the models. i only dislike the water graphics but then again no Blizzard game ever had good water visuals imo.
And no RTS game for that matter. except for Red Alert 3.

Well that’s not a bad point, general advancement in the technology field made this easier. but it doesn’t really change my opinion that, had Blizzard done something a bit more humble, this process would have been easier.

Because, in my eyes, i wanted War3R to succeed on day one, and constantly keep moving forward as an unstopabble flaming spear. because even then we would need a lot of effort to break through a more casual base of audience in terms of attention and drag and convert them to more faithful players and content creators.

Warcraft 3 evolving through the years. it was apparent to me that the easier way to mass produce SD models because of the more basic skill required in doing edits with it had stopped becoming an issue and more of a feature.

And in my eyes, the models for Reforged would un-doubtedly be more complex. but not too much. had Blizzard followed their traditional of model making, which happens to be something beneficial for w3 community. but instead it just became so hard that some of the most skilled model makers tried to argue in Hive model section that Geo-Merging in war3 RF HD should not be considered a cheap mockup like SD is. because it takes considerably larger level of effort.

You can imagine, creating actual models of the level of Reforged, the guy mightawell go and work as a freelancing model maker then do it for free as a hobby. i’m saying all of this for you to perhaps understand the ease of access that was once created did not transition as good as it should have on all fields. especially not in the field of models.

While all of you said is going on, i’m just wondering why didn’t Blizzard bother to stop and analyze the situation of the community, to deliver them something more easily usable. there is a middle ground between Classic modes, HD models, and what Reforged models are. they didn’t really give us something we can chew more easily. i’m sad that they didn’t think of a middle ground.

Well, okay, in the end there is a hierarchy of things i’m fine with one above the other over what Reforged ended up being. so i’ll just point that out for context. and this is purely just my bias. from most desirable to least. in a realistic sense the extreme ends would not be reasonable because one is just too bad for the existing community and the other is just to poor of an excuse for an audience that wanted “more” i guess. even though sc1R seems to be doing fine in terms of visual update.

  • High texture and resolution update with realistic shadows
  • Dragonflies HD models produced for Sc2
  • World of Warcraft esque artstyle models
  • Reforged HD models but produced with traditional Blizzard methods
  • Reforged HD models.

And i knew you would bring this up, i’ll also include the lack of tools such as the modern photoshop that can allow people to create far better texture resolution. but i think you already understood what i meant when you were responding to me. but yeah i agree on that part. its just that its wrong to assume old art can not be faithfully transitioned to just as high fidelity, i’m starting to wonder if they did these design changes because they might have been too similar to Warhammer. but idk.

No i have to disagree with this, in most cases this is true, not “some” but what is true ?

if i as a person wanted to move to the HD visuals i most likely have to start from scratch, i think this is the context you missed.

So i’m more encouraged to start a new SD or HD project apart from eachother. not aligned and committed to support both visuals. not unless i want to use basic bones ingame models or fancy having my map cross the mapsize limit with brickton of imports.

Oh and i’m sure i can dig out Chaos Orc Marine from the old mpqs haha :sweat_smile:
Sad they removed it tho.

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today i looked at the destroyer (since i found that particular one to be especially lacking in terms of visual fidelity) and put together some videos to properly demonstrate how the changes look in real time, since pictures not really bring across the visuals.

theres always two different versions of the units. one is the old, one is the new.

i tried getting some team colors into the scepters of the destroyer and depending on the team color it looks really cool.

huntress
https://youtu.be/aEodMsrGzGI
huntress
https://youtu.be/YXVOBdDsA1c
huntress
https://youtu.be/CgnvDEE0YWQ
obsidian statue
https://youtu.be/W0LN1ZZLvAo
destroyer
https://youtu.be/rEURIznq0YQ

i noticed the pack of destroyers really tank the frame rate (50%), but its not the specularity, because setting the game to “lightning quality: low” solves the performance issues and specularity looks basically the same. the difference i could make out was an effect looking like ambient occlusion or self shadowing. i dont know why my changed textures produce that issue. i didnt change the resolution of the maps and i really just increased the intensity of already active effects and this shouldnt hammer the gpu like it actually does.

thanks. like said, im using the nvidia tools for photoshop cs6 (kinda outdated). this plugin supports the 3Dc normal map export, but its corrupted ingame (completely flat). either i need the new version or im not running the proper settings - but that export tool is loaded with settings and i have no idea where to start. there are probably about 30 settings you can screw up. the intel photoshop export plugin for DDS works great but doesnt support 3Dc.

ah well, its not like this is going to be a serious project anway, so theres that.

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