So I’m not that great at programming although I do understand it a lot. However I’m looking at drakes in wow. If you look at anyone having the Crimson Gladiator’s Drake and you watch its animation, overall it’s a normal drake with very modern animations that looks 100x better than any other drake in the history of World of Warcraft.
But in my mind changing the animation of a normal drake to those is like changing a few line of codes. Am I wrong ?
I also am thinking that maybe is it different skeletons, although both are extremely similar and looks the same and then I ask what if we just copy paste the skeleton onto an old drake’s skin ?
I mean I wish, but basically it’s cause when you look at 2 drakes, the Highland Drake and any random wow drake before Dragonflight, they are almost the same, however the Highland Drake normal flying animations (OUTSIDE of Dragonflight (the Gladiator Mount is usable outside of Dragonflight with fresh animations)) are awesome and I’m wondering what’s stopping them from passing a week to cover every Drake and make their animations freshier
Blizzard probably needed to update the models a little bit (hopefully). Old drake models probably would have had some awkward clipping issues with the new animations of the highland drake.
I’m hoping Blizzard introduces some sort of pegasus “dragon” as a dragonriding mount just so mounts like Invincible or Tyrael’s Charger are guaranteed to be updated to dragonriding.
This is key, you can have something that looks like something else, but not have the same internal skeleton, that is, the model is not “rigged” the same. This could be as simple as the wings not being able to fold back (such as when the mounts are diving).
Updating model is not “a few lines of code”, it’s someone going in and, while not completely redoing the model, they have to adjust it, add elements to it, add surfaces and textures. It’s a sculpting process. It become laborious, as it’s not something you can just go “cut and pasting” new code in to.
There’s a reason Blizzard recolors a lot of models, models are a bit of a pain to make.
Oh yea you can literally just look at the wings of most of the older drake models in game ATM and see how they would instantly break and have huge holes in the sides of the mounts of they did as much wing movement as the new one
The skeletal sharing is nice cuz it’ll cut down work a lot, but there’s gunna be alot of patching these old fellas before they can fly
Yep ! Actually, those that reached Gladiator and got 50 wins (and so the mount) got both a Highland Drake customization and an actual mount. I knew that since the beginning of the Season but if you want Proof, you can go on that link here which is the actual Crimson Gladiator’s Drake item that allows for flying anywhere and that was also given at the same time as this one here which is the Highland Drake drakewatcher manuscript for the Embodiment of the Crimson Gladiator (the drake customization) usable in Dragonflight together with Dragonriding.
No, and that’s why it sucks for anyone else doing something else than PvP, as the Renewed Proto-Drake customization Embodiment of the Storm-Eater gotten from A N Y raid difficulty was only a customization and not a mount usable outside in the world.
Even worst for the KSM people, who literally got a shi*ty looking Azure Span random beast mount as reward for reaching 2k Rating (aka AOTC, aka Vicious), and those reaching Keystone Hero which is like 3k Rating were getting an even worst reward, a transmog animation for the raid sets. Which by the way shares an equal lock with Cutting Edge and Gladiator achievements, which means Blizzard considers them equal, yet did jacksh^t for those doing keys.
Now this season I thought would bring a better looking KSM mount, as instead of doing a recolor of the Gladiator one they made a completely new one (here’s the Drakewatcher Manuscript) and as the raid area also got an other customization, this time the Embodiment of the Hellforged, but turns out that no, they couldn’t bother, and decided to make a recolor (although cooler, sure) of the old beast poop we got last season, but adding onto it some animation to be like " well hey we actually did some more work this time! ".
Gladiators : Cool Drakewatcher Manuscript, even a usable mount outside of Dragonflight
Raiders : Cool Drakewatcher Manuscript, eventually will be usable outside of Dragonflight
Mythic+ers : An Azure Span beast, does not fly, in a dragon expansion.
As someone who has animated 3d models, it can get REALLY tedious some times.
Usually when I animate, I stupidly decide I need to complete 40 at a time before I can take a break, otherwise I stress that I’m not getting enough work done.
It also depends a lot on the program that is being used, as well as any bone limitations that might be in place.
Swapping a model that has its own rig to a whole different rig is a lot different than changing some code. Sure, you can data transfer a lot over, but data transfer is not flawless and there is going to be a lot of weight painting adjustments in order to make the model work with a different rig.
NOW DONT GET ME WRONG, I’M NOT EXCUSING ANYTHING. While I animate as my own choice for tiny tiny sales, and its all my own choice to do… Animators at Blizzard are being paid to animate. It is their job. That is what they do. If something has icky animations, then Blizzard should be paying their people to work on getting things looking nice.
But we all know how Blizzard is about employees…