Question from one of our players in China:

Is it possible to upgrade the engine rendering? Many mobile games now support PBR (Physically Based Rendering).

Yes. Personally I love lore and crossover skins. We have plans some crossover skins. There's this one. It's really cool, we'll show you later. BfA Jaina is a highly requested skin and we want to do it.

We're always looking for the clarity of spells. Moving forward we are taking harder to read spells as lessons learned. Going back to these assets to change these FX for clarity on one specific map takes away from the possibility of a new Ragnaros skin. For newly created FX we looking to make more clear spells.

Hi Vambaqe, I answered a similar question here. https://www.reddit.com/r/heroesofthestorm/comments/b930id/heroes_developer_ama_art_design_april_4/ek1xbfx/

Think of it this way. A hero has an average of 3 abilities and 2 Heroics. That's 5 FX assets except that each FX asset may have 5 more FX assets attached to one ability. With an average hero you now have 25 give or take FX assets that need to be created/modified. With a hero like Ragnaros, he's a walking FX model. Now those Hero FX have to work with his animations. The time it would take to go change an old FX model for clarity on one map takes away from the time it would take to create a new skin for Ragnaros.

We've done it before. e.g. Azmodunk, Janitor Leoric. We're open to doing more community skins. A couple of weeks ago I asked the Reddit community to bubble up their favorite skins and to come to a consensus on what they felt like the next community skin should be.

https://www.reddit.com/r/heroesofthestorm/comments/aw9z4i/blizz_pls_skins_that_community_wants_to_see_a_lot/ehnhby9/

The interesting thing about creating art for a Hero that was once a sprite in a near 20 year old game is that everyone has their own idea of what that character looked like. Over the years there's been many variations of Blizzard characters. "We want Mephisto!" Cool, which one? There's a ton of fan made images, there's one of my favorite versions from the Book of Cain. Some are more gory than others. Heroes of the Storm is a teen rated game that has to meet ratings requirements around world, so that makes some decisions more challenging

With that said, I would like to see if we could get closer to the D2 version.

Lets talk about Arthas. What we've heard from the community is that you guys want an updated model. This is the work that needs to be done to get that to you. Concept to fit the Heroes art Style. Modeled and textured. The character will need to be rigged. All animations will need to be redone (probably about 50 different animations). FX will then need to be redone (which could be as much animation work as animation, depending). Design and QA needs to look at it, playtest it throughout the entire process to make sure that it reads like Arthas in our game and is recognizable from a design standpoint. If there are corrections we may have to go back as afar as the Modeling portion and update those things and push that through the process again. This isn't a small amount of work. This is the same amount of work that we would do for a new hero. So heroes like Brightwing which we've shown in the past requires this same pass. We still want to do this. Figuring out where to slot this into the pipeline has been challenging because there is also the demand for brand new Heroes. We have a long list of awesome Heroes that we would like to bring into the Nexus

Thanks for the question TheRealZooplankton. We will be continuing to put out some really fun Event Skins and mounts and Heroes.

In the game: I still love Zul'jin's base model. Riding him on the Amani War Bear is the best. Phill, Ted and Ed nailed it with those models. Real life: I was a big fan of Cam de Leon growing up. I have A "Rubber Cow" print hanging in my office. I also have a print called "Brick Watcher" hanging in my living room. The name of the artist has slipped my mind.

It depends on what exists. If it's humanoid I generally grab a biped and kit bash what I need to get the rough shapes. If it is more monster I will sometimes start in the same spot. Blocking a character out is usually pretty quick because I'm just looking for masses and shapes. Sometimes I'll start with just forms and rough out the shapes with primitives. It just depends on where I feel my destination should be and how much time I have.

If you type Red, Blue or Green in the field for your Collection you should be able to filter skins already. Is there a place where you are not? Is this not working in our Localized clients?

That said, I think it's important to keep in mind that the computer is just a tool! Most of your art fundamentals can be learned traditionally, and that doing so will ultimately benefit your understanding of what softwares are trying to replicate. <3

So much this.

My family would tell you that I have natural talent. I would say, if by natural talent you mean I had access to a pencil and paper at an early age and did nothing but draw every day up through College. Then sure, I have natural talent by the way of lots of practice.

As for me I went to a small Art College back home. The thing about College for me was it wasn’t so much about what they were teaching me, I had a pretty strong drive to learn. I was already deep into online art communities and trying to learn as much as I could through people in the gaming industry. College for me was more a networking experiment where I was able to find jobs through my instructors and eventually got my foot in the door to making games by sheer luck.

Apply, improve, apply, improve, apply some more. You’re going to get turned down for jobs. This is a highly competitive industry. Don’t let it get you down. Do your best, fail often and learn from your mistakes. The difference between someone who has a job in the industry is they’ve failed more than you.

The FX and Model are some of the oldest assets we have in Heroes. There's a lot of things that change over a games development time. Assets created at the beginning of a games life cycle are quite different than assets created 6+ years in. This would also be an opportunity to give more flexibility in changing or modifying FX for future skins as well as optimizing the FX to be more efficient.

Not everything is an aesthetic change.

Question from one of our players in Germany:

How far does the basic concept of the nexus and the game mechanics influence the implementation of the art style and what are the biggest problems? Is it the midground with the Style-FX or rather the background to keep everything in the same theme?

Question from one of our players in Germany:

Me as a geek and huge art-fan would love to see more details or design background information’s on how heroes evolve in the design process, especially in regards to concept arts (for example I imagine that Murcablo had a ton of different concepts and styles). Can you guys maybe release a little more details on that or even create some sort of short videos to show the process from hero concepts to final designs?

Question from one of our players in Germany:

I am a huge fan of the Comics. Are there any plans for new ones and in what way will they drive the story and the Nexus forward?

Question from one of our players in Germany:

In general art styles are and should be timeless. Still, from my personal point of view, there is something missing in the Nexus that sets it apart from everything else.

In what way are you guys working on something, to make the Nexus even more special? Are you have any plans for the HUB (the main menu where you spend all the time between games), to make it more attractive, entertaining and user friendly?

Question from one of our players in China:

We’ve seen some new contents in the community. Do you have any further plans to release contents collaborating with “World of Warcraft”? For example, we all want Grand Admiral Jaina!

Question from one of our players in China:

Why have you created so many Skins for Stitches whereas many other heroes have only one Skin? Any plan tp create Skins for those heroes who have very few skins?

Question from one of our players in China:

There are more and more colors of Skins and Mounts. Have you considered the function which allows players to filter Skins or Mounts by their color? Such as the most common color of Red, Yellow, Blue, Green, etc.

Question from one of our players in China:

Although a Skin already has many colors, we want DIY coloring like the game “Colouring Book”. Have you considered it?

Question from one of our players in China:

We can see many excellent Skin designs in previous event Spays, such as Azure Dragon Orphea, Samurobot, Swabbius the pirate Probius, Greyfin's Curse the Shark Greymane etc. Any plan to put them live?

Question from one of our players in China:

1. The Spring Event has gone live, and all of us love the Jigoku Cyber Oni Butcher. But like many other legendary skins, it provides only cool apperance; the skill effects remain the same, which doesn’t match its rarity. WE WANT MORE EFFECTS! On the contrary, some purple Skins have full sets of voices and skill effects. May we know how do you think when designing these Skins?