I personally think it will be.
Reforged’s style is generic enough that I can see a lot of models from other games easily fitting in. Aside from some really whacky proportions (I still don’t understand why Arthas’ head is so tiny and shoulders so big), most of the other units I’ve seen could fit in Warhammer Total War or any given Korean MMO/ARPG.
I could see someone bringing in some modified Vermintide models into Reforged that would fit just right.
You’re totally right about the possibility of ‘handpainted’ + PBR graphics, it is possible.
If you hand-paint a texture of a character… and after that you do some roughness, metallic and normalmap extra layers (with the correct values), merging all these different maps in a shader that supports PBR, then you have a handpainted PBR character.
like this:
xhttps://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/we/k0eq1t8py3tp.png
Your pictures show another thing. It’s a procedural tool that creates textures ‘automatically’, using programming logic and not artistic skills. He is using normal map in the second image but it’s to actually fake its info to use it as a diffuse map. It’s hard to explain but, at the moment the pictures were taken, no it isn’t PBR.
That asset you showed is still kinda cartoonie…
1.I was explained by someone that first come PBR tehnology and handpaint goes after PBR in photoshop ? I need to know is it correct order…
2.a) Is there a way stylezed handpaint like wow character look more realistic with PBR tehnology than this asset you showed ?
For example this , would it go more realistic ?
2.b) Does it means i can still do PBR on them ?
What i wanna know does PBR has anything to do with textures , or its just real time shadow tehnology aka physical base rendering on zbrush models ?
The style of the asset is cartoonish, but it has PBR values.
The order of things don’t really matter for the topic because there’s too many ways of doing it.
BUT… usually the pipeline would be:
You first do a very ‘high-res’ sculpture of the asset in Zbrush. Here’s the part where we even sculpt micro-details such as fabric and wrinkles. All this is in fact ‘carved’ in the geometry of the object.
After that we do the re-topology: over the very high-res sculpt we manually do a very lighter version of it with almost no geometry details at all. (this ‘lighter version’ is already what you see in the game).
After that we do the texture baking process. This is very important because it’s where we transform all that micro-surface details of the high-res into a Normal Map for the lighter version. Normal Map is a texture used for making the lighting system of the game engine interpret the lighting of bumps and dents… in a way that it really seems they are modeled in the object. It’s a trick. All that wrinkles I did will be printed in the normal map and then interpreted by the engine’s lights so we really think they are there.
This is crucial for PBR because PBR uses Normal Map (as other things).
Just after that we send this object to a texture software. It’s here that you decide if you’ll give a ‘handpainted’ style for your texture or a more ‘realistic’ one. You can paint, or you can use a real photo, or both, etc etc. In this process you can also do the different textures that will be in the PBR Shader, such as metallic and roughness. We almost never change the Normal Map we did earlier here because it’s pretty much done, but you can also add more details to it if you want.
So, after the textures are done, you send everything to the engine and make the material, which contains all these different textures to become a PBR thing.
As for the WoW Character, see, if you RESPECT the original art style of WoW, it wouldn’t be too much more ‘realistic’ than that because we have a kind of…style barrier… that we cannot overcome. With PBR, it would look… kinda it is in HotS. It would look similar to the image I showed.
But even so, even if you really want it to look more real, I’d say it’s a mix of little changes you would do. You’d add more ‘realistic’ details to the zbrush sculpting, you could use real skin photos to make her skin texture, etc etc etc, and of course, a PBR shader would help because the material would look ‘physically based’ to our eyes.
I kinda hate doing this comparison, but a Stylized or Handpainted Character with PBR would almost, kinda, look more os less like an… action figure… to our brain, because even if we’re using handpainted stuff, the values would be ‘physically based’ as well.
PBR really is a RENDER thing, but for that to work you use textures in ‘specific’ places of the material, or it wouldn’t work, but the art-style of the texture doesn’t matter.
– I admit all this is kinda complicated to understand, but it’s actually more simple than it seems.
I think the key words would be:
PBR makes everything more ‘real world’ plausible, which is different from ‘makes everything realistic’.
This was a revelation message to me, i bookmared it…I know it sounds funny but i am deadly serious, it was all basics i need to know in 1 message.
Still sorry i bother you, i got 2 little question …
Steps by order you provided is important for my question.
1.In this order of making model, do you create Normal Map directly from 3D model where 3D program is reading all those micro-surface details, calculates everything using algoritms etc and then from it create a Normal Map texture ?
But what if i do Normal map by just importing diff in texturing program (without model import) and for a model that by default was created for “diff only game”…
It seems it will not calculate those micro details from 3d model, but rather from diff…
It seems that texture program will not do such a great result in this way as it did for your way…
Rly need this answer 
Well it’s one possible path of evolution. Sure Warcraft has always been cartoony but I always thought a part of that was because the game would slow to a crawl if you had graphics as detailed as you saw in the cinematics.
The reforged stuff is cartoony as well - but it’s a mix of WC2 and the cinematic style which I really like. HOTS just looks awful 
Haters Haters Haters Haters Haters
1 and 2 -> Yes, that’s how baking process works. The software cast ‘rays’ that scan all the high-res object and from that it makes the Normal Map with the ‘bumps and dents’ you did in the sculpt.
By ‘diff’ you mean diffuse? If so, yes, there’s a ‘technique’ that tries to create a Normal Map from a Diffuse Map. The diffuse map is basically the regular drawing you do in photoshop, with color and light all ‘painted by hand’ over the paper. You can also try to make a Normal Map from a photo. The result varies greatly according to the quality of the drawing / photo and the shadow direction, which needs to be ‘neutral’ to be good in the resulting normal map. It is difficult to say how much this technique is used. Usually perfectionists won’t do it because the result won’t be 100% equal to the traditional pipeline.
I’m not sure if a realistic approach would make the game slower to render or something like that at that point. Utilizing the same technology of the game you could also do graphics with a realistic approach (the software doesn’t make any distinction of what is ‘hand-painted’ or a photo). Change the textures of the game by real photos and voilà, it would be ‘more realistic’ to our eyes. You could easily adapt the anatomy of the characters to real persons utilizing the same amount of geometry as well.
Sure, something as ‘advanced’ as a CGI movie is not possible to reproduce by its current era of real time graphics (it’ll always be like that). So even cartoonish CGI at that time would look better than cartoonish in-game graphics, just look at Kingdom Hearts CGI intro and ingame cinematics.
Even if it was not the case and the 3D engine they had couldn’t process something realistic (which is not the case), they could simply do a prerendered game like they did with Diablo 2, it would be closer to the cinematics because that’s the point of using prerenderd graphics.
They did wacraft III like that by a conscious decision. That was, and still is, the default style of the game. It’s called product identity and that’s why Street Fighter is still cartoonish to this day while Mortal Kombat still aims realism.
The graphics in Warcraft III: Reforged actually look great and realistic in my honest opinion really.
I really wish for this game to be very successful truly.
This is clearing trolling.
So, do you like the Skittles and Playdough look of the game? Are you satisfied with it? All the people that pushed for a more “cartoony and unrealistic look” should really be happy right now.
Well now it did. Because of the likes of you, @Rocketeer
haha. Very pathetic. Are you blaming me now? This situation was what I expected pessimistic. Blizzard has kept the same direction, contrary to my claim, and it has failed enormously. that’s it. lol
