Art Pack Released! news

WE REQUIRE MORE MINERALS:
Even though we hadn't properly planned the time it would take to put the remaining parts of Warcraft vs Starcraft together, we'd still like to release something before the end of the year. To this end, we've put together a small pack of importable models and textures from the WvS mod to be imported into your own Warcraft maps!

Barring any unexpected events we're still following the plan towards a release soon¹, but until I've reworked our development plan I'm just going to play it safe and list the whole of "Q1 2011" as the launch window. Regardless of the delay, development updates will continue to ensue each weekend(or so) for entertainment along the way.

Work, work!

MODEL PACK:
We've released a Warcraft vs Starcraft "art pack" containing several custom detailed models, portraits, and icons. Gabriel's working on a map with everything already imported for convenience, but in the meantime we will have some tutorials posted to get you started if you're new to the WC3 import process.

Model Pack Zip (~8.7mb)
Zanmgt.com

Artwork Included:

• Zergling
• Hydralisk
• Roach
• Baneling
• Xel'Naga Tower
• Zerg Beacon
• Marine
• Belshir Tree

Note: The Zergling is the only unit in the pack that has been properly trimmed and reduced in polygons, the others should be considered "High detail" (approximately 2,000 polys) and used accordingly. In addition, the textures are at their highest uncompressed quality. A compression tool such as the "Warcraft 3 Viewer" (Wc3c.net) by TheProphet, or other similar tool should be used to reduce the size and quality of the textures when they're used in multiplayer maps.

If you use any of the artwork in a public map, please throw us a bone and give credit to ZanMgt and the Warcraft vs Starcraft mod. Thanks!

DEVELOPMENT TIDBIT:
A year ago, when Starcraft 2 and its beta were still unavailable, I had used public screenshots of SC2 units to create the models and textures. This wasn't necessarily the best solution for a detailed texture, but for Warcraft standards it worked well enough.

After the beta and Wings of Liberty released, we were able to obtain better angles and closeups, but much of the process remains similar, only with more Photoshopping being required. Trying to maximize the available texture space while preserving the hi-res shadows and specular is tricky, especially with WC3's solid team colors murdering any and all of our attempts to retain specular. We've come up with a few tricks to get around this though.

Below are a couple of the units in WvS that are still using the Blizzard Screenshots for textures/models.