Chosen are not "grainy"

[EngraDeathsword]

Alot of people have been saying that the Chosen look grainy.
In the podcast of the month however thay don't
so that means they DO look better in-game

[Aqe]

O K .

[Taurth]

I think the reason the Chosen in the video wasn't grainy was because it was a lower set basically withought any detail, but where it did it did look grainy. You can see this when it zooms into his shoulder plate and you can see the Tzeentch symbols on his shoulder.

But I could be wrong... I just hope they sort it out.

[Ralzar]

Yeah, it only looks grainy when zoomed in. GW has the same issue. Everything looks fine until you zoom the camera in to look at someones arour, then it becomes allmost identically grainy with the Chosen footage.

[Immortalis]

Wait 'til you see high-res screenies taken with a good monitor. Should look sweet. :D

[Michael Ritter]

Well, I'm sure they will go through them and clean them up. If you watch the podcast, it does take some time to get it perfect since your painting a flat surface to go onto a 3D surface. I think the grain your talking about is because its being stretch somewhat.

[NurgleBurgle]

Remember that that was an absolute bare bones model, we literally saw the guy slap it together on the video. Based on the improvements we've seen in the dwarves and orcs this newsletter, I've no doubt that the Chosen will get a vast visual improvement in time.

[Soulsmith]

tier 4 chaos armor *drool*

[Tharg]

Its not realy the fact their grainy since thats not realy the term for it, to me its mainly the Shoulders I find the most pixelated. Considering the size of a Chosen players avatars model and more than likely the texture size for the model would be the same as the other classes youre sticking alot of model mapping information into a set sized texture, compared to the possably less detailed meshs of other classes. Sticking a 512x512 texture onto a small model results in better textures than sticking that same sized texture onto a much larger model.

Also the textures you can see in the podcasts are more than likely the uncompressed originals the artists are working on, not sure if Mythics artists work in true rez or resize their textures down to the standard 512x512, 1024x1024 dimensions textures tend to be once completed. Working on a texture larger than the dimension the final texture will be ingame is often alot easier than working on a true size one. So once resized and compressed into what ever texture format WAR will be using you can loose alot of detail, and a low detailed texture wrapped onto a large model usualy suffers somewhat. Not sure what texture format WARs using, i know DAoC used DDS and that can make a texture become pretty blurry through compression, although boy does it give a nice reduction in file size to makeup for any minor lose in overall quality. To me this sort of shows it...

Ingame Chosen up close...

http://www.warhammeralliance.com/gallery/showimage.php?i=800&c=4

**of note the chest plate and shoulders

Ingame of Dwarf and Greenskin upclose.

http://www.warhammeralliance.com/gallery/showimage.php?i=842&c=4
http://www.warhammeralliance.com/gallery/showimage.php?i=613&c=4

While both the Dwarf and Greenskin have minor blurring,which is something you cant get away from unless you use big old huge textures, which just aint practical, the Chosens texture is way more blurier and noticable at similar distances. While I dont realy like it, it wont realy bother me much, in WoW i played mostly Tauren characters and i got resigned to the fact textures on my characters large model would be alot more blurry compared to my smaller buddies.

The thing to me is that since the classes are not sharing texture files between them like WoW does (ie the Chest armor texture used for Crypt Stalker armor is the same texture used and mapped onto all races) Im surprised they didnt up the texture size for the Chosen models somewhat in order to keep the texture quality consistant between the different sized classes.

Up close they wont be as pretty to look at as the others, but at the distance we all tend to play at it wont realy matter much. My only other observation is that in the podcast the textures seem to be alot more like the concept art color scheme wise. The textrues ingame that should be bluish seem to be all gold tint'd... it might be environment mapping thats causing that but i dont know. I hope they go back to having the grey-blue with gold trim of the concepts or its hopefully just the ingame lighting.

Remember that that was an absolute bare bones model, we literally saw the guy slap it together on the video. Based on the improvements we've seen in the dwarves and orcs this newsletter, I've no doubt that the Chosen will get a vast visual improvement in time.

That model looked pretty much completed to me, damn nice model to. He didnt slap it together, looked like he unhid a clone of the original that had its texture material visable/applied. Heh, then again its still beta and imsure they arent above redoing somethings... poor texture artists :neutral: their works so damn good on the podcast... hope they dont have to redo any of it.

For all we know, maybe the screens where taken with character texture quality turned to low :p i hope.

[Crtical]

Yea I think that pretty much sums it up. The Teir 2 armor set looks pretty good, but judging from the model we saw in 3DSMax, to the screenshots, something is wrong. It looked great in 3DS, I'm guessing the textures were turned down or the image was scaled.

[Axxar]

As Greg Grimsby stated in this thread (http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11448):

Let me clarify a few things about the chosen model shots.
1)The models in the screensohts were not tinted Tzeentchian blue. They are left grey so they _could_ be tinted that way. So, you are seeing default grey.
2)Our armors have great spec maps on them, but static screens shots are not the best format for viewing those. You can see the spec map better in the Podcast video where the camera rotation shows the light sheen across the armor. Spec maps help pop the detail, especially on plate mail.
3)The resolution of the texture we paint these at is quite high. What you saw on the model in that particular screenshot was not the highest res.......

Thanks for your feedback and interest!

-Greg

[Gemside]

It looks like it came strait out of the N64.

[Tharg]

As Greg Grimsby stated in this thread (http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11448):

Heh, thanks for pointing that out... my niggles are put to rest :p , I need to read a few more forumns besides just the General discussion and the Chosen ones :p.

[Michael Ritter]

You should also start taking a look at the developer tracker here (http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/devtrack.php). Aways neat taking a look at what the devs have to say.