Warcraft Development

With a new World of Warcraft expansion in development and the massive amount of attention towards it, it is a great opportunity to observe a triple-A title being made in almost real time. Recently, textures for some of the races were datamined and we are able to see them.

This gives me an insight, at least, into how Blizzard's character artists go about producing their textures for the new character models they are developing.

You can tell how the mesh has been unwrapped and the how the UV mapping has been done; this image wraps around the model neatly. We can tell that the yellow spot at the bottom left is the eye because of the shape. We can tell the teeth are located at the top, too.

This isn't something I'm unfamiliar with in terms of a texturing process, but it is different to the method I went about producing my latest work, working with Mudbox. Overall though it does remind me of the level of detail that you can explore in Photoshop and if the model is unwrapped as it has been here, you can achieve a very stylised look.