MerekatCreations.com :: View topic - Hey Look! I did something not under an NDA!!

Posts: 359 Joined: 18 Jun 2006

After a lot of elbow grease and grindstoned noses, some coworkers and I finished a major update for GW1 (that's Guild Wars, my game for those of you not in the know. ;}). For the first time, we were offering costumes for sale in the store. And we were working looooong hours to get them there in time, I'll tell you! ;}

http://www.guildwars.com/gameplay/loot_and_items/costumes/
(the rectangles show in-game shots)

As I like running the forums I mod as places of learning, I thought I might give some minor insight into these costumes:

Kekai designed the Grenths, but I built their models and added the ice theme with icicles, frost, etc. In addition, I designed the capes and the back views, and lemme tell you it was a great challenge getting all those layers onto 75% of a 512 with resolution enough to see those crazy details. Oh, but I must say building and designing without template seams (for swapping out pieces of armor and mix and matching) is a whole lot more relaxing. ;}

All of the costumes are essentially two pieces... one is the helm (which includes the hair in the case of the Dwaynas... this is significant in the game because it's the first time you have both hair and a helm or crest of some sort at the same time. Helmets usually replace hair. So a by-product of this is the costume hair is dyable any color you can mix for the outfit!), and the other is the outfit from the neck down.

I designed the Dwayna costumes, but my good pal Susan built them (I'll see if they'll let me post the concept sketches).

One costume (of four) took 8 days to build because of the complexity. However, there's even more of a challenge once the main model is done because we had to port each of the four on ten different rigs (male and female, 10 professions each) with ten different boning structures. And these had to be balanced across them all, as the costume had to look equally good on all rigs. So if one rig had no skirt bones, but another had 10 beautiful skirt bones, we had to assume the one with none, unfortunately, ignoring any other skirt bones that might be there. Else, the outfit would have moved better on some professions and that wouldn't be fair for those that purchased it with others in mind. Porting took a while to shape and fit and hook up when you consider you're doing 40 of them. ;} Heck, not to mention bug fixing what we could afterwards. We got a LOT taken care of, but there's just nothing to be done with some due to the rig and the lack of vertex weighting and other constraints.

But also during this time, I designed and built the free hats that drop during the Wintersday event festivities. This year I wanted a couple things for them: one, they had to keep the hair as much as possible (which has the nice side effect of trying your best to avoid clipping with all the hairs of all the professions ever built, shipped with all four games). Two, I wanted them to be an accessory for the player's armors and coordinate well with what they already may have or with the costumes if they bought them. This last part had a side effect: they matched the ice and snow themes of Grenth and Dwayna.

This made the hats a bit different than the past versions because they were intentionally minimalistic and meant to be elegant rather than something so unique it really doesn't match with any given outfit. There's a place for those more unique designs too, of course, I just wanted to do something simple and pretty. ;}

Here's a list of all the past hats, including the last two I did: the Ice Shard Crest and the Snow Crystal Crest.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Festival_hat#List_of_Festival_Hats

Anyway, that's what I've been up to lately that I can talk about. All in all, the costumes and the festival hats ended up giving us 80 files to juggle and bug fix, and that was quite a lot for us few folk (not to mention the testing hours of the poor Live Team). However, I LOVED making them and hope people love them just as much. ;}

Now back to our regularly NDAed programming schedule.

heheh.

Posts: 1 Joined: 16 Jan 2010

The costumes look great! You should definitely share your concept art if you can. Very Happy

Posts: 2 Joined: 31 Dec 2009

I liked the Grenth ones enough to pick them up in game, although it would have been nice if there was a way to remove the cape which goes flying every which way while running.