After playing World of Warcraft for hundreds or (for some players) thousands of hours, it can become easy to completely forget what you’re even looking at as you play. As such, when Blizzard revealed that World of Warcraft‘s latest expansion Warlords of Draenor will upgrade and overhaul most of the facial models in the game, I looked at the original references and thought “wait a second, WoW doesn’t actually look that awful, does it?” Alas, it does. But soon it will look much, much better.
The improvements in both detail and the ability to convey facial expressions are pretty dramatic, but the task was apparently quite a bit more difficult than you might imagine. So much so, in fact, that WoW’s art team considered rolling out new races with upgraded models (facial improvements included) instead of improving the current ones, as it would have been a far less grueling task. In the end, the team decided to do the job right and upgrade everything, mainly because it “wouldn’t have been ideal to see a mix of lower-quality and higher-quality models running around side by side.”
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In the past, facial expressions were simply painted on via textures, but with the new improvements they’ll actually animate and adjust realistically. As a result, while previous expressions simply required that an artist add, say, an altered mouth or eye shape to adjust an expression, the new system requires that the model actually pose in the desired facial position, then have new textures applied, and finally mesh said pose with all other existing or planned expressions. I guess “daunting” really wasn’t an exaggeration.
The upcoming expansion includes a number of visual overhauls, including entirely new character models in addition to the aforementioned facial improvements. GameSpot has a handy video showing off some of the more notable changes, so give it a watch if you’re curious.
[Via: IGN]
