It's more along the lines of where would we put her on the character or store screen. There's really not a lot of room. Or you'd get a tiny cute dragon. Pet dragons are cool but we like the bigger kind.

Just to give some background on this. This isn't about the model being old. He's not. All our heroes use the same size texture sheet. This means our larger heroes like Blaze has the same size texture sheet as Hanzo.

Since Hanzo is quite a bit smaller than Blaze you'll notice that his pixel density (the amount of pixels to describe a specific area) is higher. If you were able to check out our Hero Deep Dive at Blizzcon we went over this a little bit when we talked about texture budgets.

Everything we do is for the game view. A side effect of this is that sometimes our larger heroes show a smaller pixel density in the store and character select.

Thanks for taking an interest about the detail of our models!

Different games. Different budgets. Different allocations. Different resources. It's not that simple.

That has to do with the way certain objects are mirrored and the surface area of certain areas. Also, with base skins we have to be a little bit more restrictive with our texture sheet usage to allow for expansion for skins akin to our master skins (if you remember pre 2.0).

New skins like ETC L800 which is an offshoot from the base gets to use the entire sheet.

Believe it or not Azmodan has some creative mirroring and his surface area to texture ratio is a bit smaller than Blaze. They use the same texture space.

Any skin that is not the base has had a portion of the texture sheet in preparation for expansion. This has always been the case with a few minor exceptions from early in the process (hammer might be in this area but she's also using creative mirroring). Warmaster Chen, Azmodunk is not a base skin and falls into the expansion territory.

We always want our assets to look as good as they can. But there is a limit at which most computers can handle. No game has unlimited texture area. It's a balancing act between a computer's performance and making that asset look great while giving each character the ability to have a skins.

The dragon is a special case. It uses the equivalent of two texture sheets. Because she's not on the screen all the time we were able to push this a little bit. But we had to make concessions elsewhere. The dragon has a lower polygon count than the Elf model since she's only seen in game and not on the character select or store.

With that in mind, the Alexstrasza hero needed to be under a certain memory footprint we had to make sure the Dragon and the Elf form fit inside those boundaries. Blizzcon heroes usually stretch the limits of our character allocations. It's a fun challenge.

That's a fun idea :)

It's not money. When we say budget we're talking about memory footprint. You mentioned engineering but we're not even talking about that.

Think of your computer as a freeway. All these textures and models need to fit in cars that flow smoothly through that freeway. You put too many vehicles like those big rigs towing houses down a freeway and your freeway doesn't move smoothly. The memory footprint that has been established for characters is so that from the older computers to the top performing machines will be able to run Heroes.

Alexstrasza wasn't upgraded the way you think she was. What I meant by that is that the dragon is considered an FX model so it is bound by a slightly different rule set. Kel'Thuzad has the same size texture sheet as Alexstrasza's Elf form.

Part of it is compression of the textures. If you're interested there are articles about texture compression on game art forums and game development sites. There are tricks that we can do to maintain some of that compression down through the lower resolutions but in some cases like this one it's harder to resolve.

You're right :) We try to avoid decals being used in a way that provides such a major influence on how that character looks (e.g. Pajamathur Abathur) because those decals will disappear on low settings and on our rag doll death models. Really nice solution for higher performing computers though.

You got me :)

Indeed. Breaking these terms down for a wider audience can be hard. Still working on that :)

It's the same texture sheet. It's about surface area. Some of the larger heroes don't have very complex armor like Firebat. When you have pieces that jet out or move back in on itself you'll notice that it increases the bits that need to be textured. Mirroring those things help but for the most part every surface needs something. Two texture sheets were used on the dragon because she was so long. Her wings also take up a good bit of space. If you ever get a chance to see under her wings it's the same texture as above. Even with her we had to do some creative mirroring.

I'm glad you are a fan of ARCHLICH OF NAXXRAMAS, ESTEEMED LICH LORD OF THE PLAGUELANDS, COMMANDER OF THE DREAD NECROPOLIS, MASTER AND FOUNDER OF THE CULT OF THE DAMNED, FORMERLY OF THE COUNCIL OF THE SIX, CREATOR OF THE ABOMINATION, CORRUPTOR OF THE SUNWELL, SUMMONER OF ARCHIMONDE THE DEFILER, BETRAYER OF HUMANITY, FOUNDER AND FIRST DARKMASTER OF THE SCHOLOMANCE, SCHOOL OF DARK ARTS AND NECROMANCY. CREATOR AND MASTER OF THE FOUR HORSEMEN. CORRUPTOR OF THE ASHBRINGER, HEARTSTONE ENTHUSIAST AND CARING OWNER OF MR.BIGGLESWORTH THE CAT, THE MAJORDOMO TO THE LICH KING HIMSELF.

There's room to give Kel'Thuzad more skins in the future. It's just a matter of when. :)

:)

We already do that. There's something called Mip-mapping and that's why the higher settings use the higher texture settings.

When you go up from say a 512x512 pixel texture to a 1024x1024 you're not going up in memory by 2. You're going up by a factor of 4. Which means that the size quadruples. There's a reason why games 10-15 years ago were less then 2 gigs and now some games are upwards of 60 gigs. All that fidelity takes space.

There is a group of people who would love higher resolution textures because their machine can handle it. This also takes more time for the artist to author them. Not every asset is authored at a larger size. With unlimited time and unlimited textures every game could look like real life. We like to see our families too sometimes :) Thanks for your question.

We use Zbrush for sculpting and Max for low poly to create 3D models. Photoshop and 3D Coat for texturing.