Fat_Cap's Workshop Thread
polycounter lvl 18
Thread re-named to be my all consuming Workshop thread to stop me spamming up the place with multiple threads!
Apologies if this makes the first page of replies look like they're talking to thin air now that my WIP first post has been replaced
Current Workshop Submissions:
Baba Yaga Ward Set:
Baba Yaga Ward/ Courier Set - Collab with DrySocket/ ChemicalAlia and KorbenDallas:
The Claddish Renegade Set
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=217959871
Apologies if this makes the first page of replies look like they're talking to thin air now that my WIP first post has been replaced
Current Workshop Submissions:
Baba Yaga Ward Set:
Baba Yaga Ward/ Courier Set - Collab with DrySocket/ ChemicalAlia and KorbenDallas:
The Claddish Renegade Set
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=217959871
Replies
2) Kinda nope. Tvidotto made a post in the workshop thread showing an edited particle effect, so there might be a way to do it. However Valve generally handles the particles for us unless they've already specified an importer for the particles. There was a kunkka sword that was submitted which had coin particles added, so even if you don't figure a way to add it yourself you might be able to get Valve to add them in for you - not something to be too worried about right now I think.
And even if you couldn't do those, I think the set would look great without them anyway!
There are a few birds without animations in-game already but they are much smaller and less noticeable. Yours will definately need some animations.
I wanna point out that there are already a pegleg and hook in-game, but i suppose yours are different enough to be ok.
http://dota2.gamepedia.com/Pegleg_of_the_Cursed_Pirate
http://dota2.gamepedia.com/Captain's_Hook
Regarding the bird animations : while there is no way to add extra bones for such needs, there *might* be some clever tricks you can use in order to add at least some hint of secondary motion. To do so you could try to weight the vertices of elements like the beak and wings very lightly to an existing bone, and get some subtle motion that way. I did that on the ears in my recent hat, weighting them the beard bone, effectively making them swing in the opposite direction.
No guarantee that it will work, but it is worth trying - especially since very individual item gets exported with the full bone hierarchy of the whole character anyways.
And yeah, the chest on the back might be too big to be part of a character set. I could be worth taking the risk to add it in ... but I would suggest playing it safe. (no pun intended ! hehe)
Good luck !!
RE feedback: @Pior and HawksEye - Hehe - I personally liked the size and chunkiness of the chest and thought the spec would look pretty cool glinting off a few of the coins and gems, (especially if I could get coin particle effects working as intended), but am totally open to suggestions to make it work better. Is it just the size that is an issue - would shrinking it down a bit help, or should I think of another item for this slot entirely?
@Pior - thanks man
@HawksEye - I've checked the store but can't find any instances of Can anybody show me an example of a bird that has made it in? I might just reduce the size of mine to fit with the no extra bones. Does the fact that there are already a peg leg and hook automatically mark me down, or is it just a general rule not to make an item too much like another?
Also - what about the skull on the hat? I've seen people say that bones and skeletons are a no-go for China and warn people away from making items with them in/ on. Is this something I should worry about? I'd hate my submission to fail on something like this and would rather change the skull to something else before I get too far into it.
Here's one of the birds, cant remember the other one.
http://dota2.gamepedia.com/File:Cosmetic_icon_Shoulders_of_the_Forest_Hermit.png
You could make the chest a bit smaller, more like a jewellery box, and maybe half closed. It looks a bit too heavy and clunky i think.
As long as the pegleg and hook dont look exactly the same, i dont think its gonna be a problem.
It only occured to me mid way through modelling, that each item in a set would have to work with every other item available in the store..is this correct? This proved problematic to having the shoulder guards in their original position and made the ropes/ belt a bit of a nightmare to get sitting over Kunkka's original shoulder pads, as well as sitting snuggly to mine, and his body - they currently feel a bit floaty so as to avoid clipping issues to the base set.
I was going for an anchor theme with the sword, but after modelling it, as my concept showed it, I wasn't sure whether this came through so tried some different variations. Which do you think works best? To me, the original on the left looks most sword like and most liekly to work as a weapon, whereas the fourth version looks most anchor like, but I'm not sure about it's viability as a sword...I've been staring at this for too long so would appreciate suggestions!
Also, when making items a good rule of thumb that people follow here is to make stuff work with your set (obviously) and with the default items. I wouldn't worry about making it fit with every other set in-game. In fact, Kunkka actually have 2 pipes on different slots and they clip with each other. So as long as it don't clip with your set and the default items, it's all good.
@MDK - Hehe - I agree the skull on the hat is really flaky at the minute - I'll tidy it up in ZBrush for sure and try and make it less cartoony. I'll have a look at playing with the proportions of the hat as well, to try and steer it away from being too stylised.
@CottonWings - I'll go with one of the simpler swords then - I was leaning towards the first or second, but will go with your suggestion and see how the second comes out, after a high poly pass
@B elkun - Thanks for the positive words and heads up about clipping and item sets
The bird will be posed to be more front facing once the lowpoly and bake is done too.
Feels like it's right on the border line of cartoon/TF2 territory but it's well enough executed that I think it should be ok. I'm glad you reworked the skull on his hat to be less cartoony - that was pushing it a bit too far over the line in the previous image.
I would suggest you make some of your scrapes/dints just a bit more pronounced (even creasing the edges a little might do it) as chances are they'll get almost completely lost when you get the final texture down to 256. Depends on how featured you want them to be - if they're there just to give a bit more varied surface detail it'll be fine.
I was trying to keep the shapes chunky so they would be easily readable with the in-game size, but I guess I could have taken it a bit too far and made some parts too cartoony. I'll try pulling back the size of the hook and other bits to see if it helps.
Looking at the screenshot here, I definitely agree that there needs to be some larger scale scratches and dings so that they'll read well after the textures have been resized. That's what you get for scaring at the screen too closely, and focusing on the details I guess!
So, I'm finally wrapping up the textures on this set. Definitely learned a lot on the way and made a few rookie mistakes that ended up wasting more time than they should!
Now onto skinning the various parts up and trying to balanace the textures in-game to match what I have in Max (my first brief tests show that there's a pretty large difference between the behaviour of the specular, gloss and metal textures compared to the 3DSMax shader that Ace-Angel released) - is this only on my end, or do people normally just do their final balancing in-engine?
OK - so, I've exported everything and started testing in-game, but have a few questions about the whole process of actually submitting everything.
1 - Clicking the help link for the "Marketing Material" upload section for each item takes you to the page http://www.dota2.com/workshop/requirements#marketing which seems to refer only to the main "banner" image for a set/ item - not the icon? It gives the required size to be no smaller than 664x362 (non square), be a .PSD have no border, or authors signature, which a fair few workshop submissions do indeed have. Is this correct? Or is there some other requirements for icons, and then I get to upload the full size "banner image" somwhere else when I make the items into a set? What size are the square icons for each item generally authored at?
2 - Are items visible to anybody browsing the workshop as soon as they're submitted, or do I get a chance to double check everything, upload everything, make the set etc. before finally making it "live"?
Marketing material is what will be used to promote your items if they get approved for the game. The banner that you are asked to submit in a PSD (following the guidelines) is what is used in areas such as the slider on the Dota 2 Store ....
and the in-game promotion space ...
The smallest size that these spaces have is 664x362px and hence the minimum requirement. One very important thing though, when finalizing the PSD, please make sure that your background and your model are NOT flattened. Let them be on separate layers or groups.
Here ends what is required as far as marketing material is concerned.
Sparing this, other imagery that you will need will be prompted to you when making the submission such as display image for your Workshop Submission Page, Related Artworks, Videos and etc. All of these are to help you glisten up your Workshop page to make it better presented.
As far as the in-game icons are concerned, you do not do these. So don't worry about it.
Edit: You do get to double check. There will be nice button to Publish it when you are all set. You can always edit the privacy settings to alter the visibility of the submission too.
I guess this is the icon I was referring to - the icon that is seen when people browse through the Workshop - rather than any in-game icon. This IS created by us - correct? And this is what is being requested when you've uploaded the models and textures for an item, and click on the Marketing button?
...like these examples...
So we just upload a .PSD of these with each item (I've seen somebody mention they're meant to be 512x512) - and then get to upload the full size, banner marketing sometimes after, when making the collection of items into a set?
Sorry for so many questions, but I'd hate to have wasted all of this effort at the last minute, just because of uploading an icon wrongly, or mis-understanding which image to upload where!
Nope. That is done after the import is completed. You will be presented with a Workshop page for your submission where you can edit all these entries, upload images and more to present your submission. These are not a part of the marketing button. They come after.
- After a set is accepted, the final ingame purchase icons (bright grey background, lowres textures and models) are made and provided by Valve. You don't have to worry about that.
- The square Workshop thumbnails for each items are made by the artist, and are extremely important. They are uploaded through the game interface, right after the meshes and textures. They can be resubmitted after the fact as many times as you want through the ingame exporter (I think I redid mine about 4 times
Remember this : these thumbnails are the first thing that people are going to see when browsing the Workshop and stumbling on your items. You want maximum impact. Don't hesitate to do mockups beforeheand, pasting your wip icons onto screenshots of the Steam Workshop gallery, to make sure that they stand out nicely and look as good as the best ones out there.
- The promo PSD / banner upload is an optional step in the in-game uploading process. Personally for my set it did *not* upload such a file, as I feared that uploading a large PSD for each item of the set would be a waste of bandwidth and could create issues in case of a network fail. Instead, I simply uploaded the text-free promo JPG image as my main picture for my item collection. (a collection is a family of items that you create in Steam once all the individual parts of your sets are all uploaded already). Valve figured it out and used that as promo, as intended.
- There are other "promo" images that you can do. These can include : your promo banner but with extra text information written info on it, ingame screenshots, animated GIFs, embedded links to Youtube videos, and so on.
These all go into individual galleries that people can see once they choose to click one of your item's thumbnails in the Workshop. I find it to be very important to have all of these ready even *before* uploading the actual meshes, textures and icons. The reason is that you want to make a strong impact in this weeks "most recent" page. A great way to do so is to have not only your set properly uploaded, but also, have all this extra fluff to back it up, since this is the only way for viewers to get a feel for your item. Now of course these can be edited and improved upon with time ; but an item only stays in the "most recent" page for a week, so it's best to upload everything at once for maximum impact.
You'll have to upload these gallery images repeatedly for each item page.
- Steam also has an "Imgur-like" fanart artwork gallery for Dota2. You can upload your big promo image there too, with links to your collections for people to check out. They have a "your videos" section too, but I cannot comment on this as in my case I did not manage to link my Youtube account properly to it.
- - - - -
Overall, my advice would be to take as much time as necessary to prepare all this - even if it ends up taking a few days to do so
The whole thing can be rather stressful to go through ... my advice would be to allow yourself to take your time and try to take it easy
Good luck !
@Pior - I'd actually come across your Workshop thread here and saw that you'd asked some similar questions yourself, which were really handy (and made me feel slightly less of a lonely noob in the dark and confusing lands of Dota submissions!)
I think I've got everything straight now. Definitely more work ahead of me than I anticipated though - I think you're advice of taking my time and trying not to rush is pretty sagely in this instance Pior. So hard when normally the finishing stretch would be in grasping distance!
sir what software did you use for the concept?
After pressing the SUBMIT button it takes me to a page displaying the error:
Sorry!
An error was encountered while processing your request:
That item does not exist. It may have been removed by the author.
Here's a link to the Steam Community home page.
No matter how many times I log out/ back in/ restart the computer/ try different items, I still get the same error message.
Anybody have a fix? I feel like I've encountered EVERY problem possible in this whole process! So near...yet so far!
@belkun - Thanks for the tip. After much faffing about, waiting, more faffing, and eventually completely uninstalling DOTA2 by accident, it seems the problem was with PeerBlock blocking the connection to the workshop submission
It was great fun overall, and really pushed me to remember some of those old-school ultra low poly count, ultra-low texture size tricks
...and the link to the full set
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=217959871
I'd be really happy if you could pop over there and have a look and let me know what you think
Onto the next one now!
Thanks man
Next up is hopefully a courier (I've got a couple of ideas floating about). The thought of having to rig and animate it is making me nervous though! Might have to start looking for collaborators for that side of things I reckon.
In response to this, I've just added a NEW, alternate weapon to the set. Both weapons will be available in the set, giving the player more choice in how they deal out death! More choice... more weapons!
You can check it out here:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=220572663&tscn=1390655359
It evens comes with a custom run animation.
Game is hard.
Nice second sword, don't see why people don't like the anchor much, but regardless this set is really amazing.
awkward....
Still wondering whether to add the hanging sashes as well. I'm thinking that they look pretty nice now and could look cluttered with anything extra, but on the other hand, the secondary motion from them during animation would be cool to see.
I'll try a few things to try and push them further away from that though if there's a strong argument for it. I'll test out adding the sash and see if that helps.
Oh it's just my opinion. Others might disagree. I just thought that they might look pretty similar (especially from top view because from the current wip it looks like the lower jaw is bigger than the upper, which would make the inside of the mouth visible from top view - much like for Greevils). I suppose that you could push those two couriers apart with animations, though.
I can see that the Dire version with wings might be the most similar - although I think once I've fiddled around with them a bit and added the colour pass and animations they shouldn't really be too samey. If I can't get anything working and they're still too similar I guess it's back to the drawing board for this pair