To piggyback on what Lana said, Localization also affects modeling as well. For example, Janitor Leoric and Cuddle Bear Stitches' text is localized across 12 languages. All these languages need to be communicated then checked and cross checked then validated and potentially corrected once in game. This is a large task among many departments but I want to talk a little bit about Janitor Leoric and what this actually meant for this skin from an art perspective.

The patch on the back of his work suit is raised up like a patch. What this means is for each of those languages there is a unique Color map texture (some people call this the diffuse), a unique Normal map texture (makes things look like they have details that pop off the surface), a unique Specular/Gloss Texture (controls how light interacts with the model and defines materials) That's 36 unique textures for one Skin (48 if you count the Gloss as a separate texture which is usually an Alpha channel for us) . For Cuddle Bear Stitches it says something different on each tag which means there's a unique texture for the Color map and Specular/Gloss Texture. These textures take time to modify and it requires a meticulousness and organization that is unexpected. Anything that requires a new Normal map means that the high poly details need to be modified or re-sculpted. This can be a lot of work because it requires planing and approaching the sculpt in a smart organized way. So there you go, that little bit of text that you can read on a model took almost a solid week of work for Janitor Leoric alone. In comparison Janitor Leoric took about 3 and a half weeks for just the model and his color variations. That extra week was tacked on after the base model and variations were completed. A total of 4 and a half weeks on Just the modeling and textures. This Isn't counting what our friends over in animation, tech art or any of the other departments involved in getting a skin out to you guys. We love being able to serve our players who play our game in other languages.

Hello Jiggywatt64!

1. First off, nice start! Did a quick paint over to show you where I would take this. https://imgur.com/a/M7WTB22. Generally things just need to get bigger. His Nose, Buckles, Goggles, Bracers, Belly, Beard, Belt loops. You have a lot of opportunity to really push the look of tight leather that doesn't quite fit on Olaf. Giving him a bracer on both arms will also allow the modeler to mirror the arms since there's no huge benefit to giving him a bare arm. Any interior details like the pockets and zippers need to be thicker. The beard could use more plumpness towards the lip. Have it bellow out so there's an arc from the side. The only thing that could go a bit smaller is the tire.

One of the harder part of sculpting is doing stylized folds. Remember your Diamonds, Zs and sideways Vs. Think about cloth folds like this. Where there's a pinch in the cloth you're going to get a taper out. This cascades and creates a diamond shape in parts where there's lots of folds. If it's a larger fold it will taper out in either a Z or V. You have to decide whether the pants are leather or denim because they have different behaviors. Always grab reference. We tend to favor thicker folds and exaggerate folds that would normally be smaller.

1. Both are beneficial. Small warm-up throwaway projects are good if you focus on learning one specific thing and are doing it knowing you might fail. Starting over on those projects can be important for artistic growth. Longer projects that you complete are good to show potential employers because that's the goal, complete an asset to put into some sort of media.

2. Depending on the complexity of the skin it can take between 2 weeks and 5 weeks.

3. For some reason Grant Morrison's Arkham Asylum has been coming up in conversation a lot for me and I've been looking at Dave McKean's art in that comic again. I love his style in that book and hands down is one of the coolest looking Joker's I've ever seen.

Hey Pscythic,

We don't have any plans to revert the nerf to healers in the past. This was done intentionally to drastically limit the effectiveness of double healer compositions so that they are exceptionally niche for a variety of reasons.

When healing becomes prevalent, a variety of "good plays" are wiped away. If a Li-Ming lands a great Magic Missile+Arcane Orb combo, healers can remove that. Mana is a limitation here, but it's difficult to run a double healer team out of Mana in any reasonable amount of time.

If double healer is the norm, we need to start balancing healing around it. That means that people that play a healer solo will likely start to feel less powerful.

There's also typically less people that want to play a support type role than not (to each their own), so expecting about 40% of the players to play it isn't ideal. We try to match what's fun with what's effective.

Hi Subsourian!

I just fixed this yesterday (for you). This will be in the next major content release patch.

Hey Riokaii,

This is a cool idea, and one that would be interesting to test. I think that you are correct in that the Gnoll camps are relatively safe to take, but part of this is intentional.

We like to have a variety of Mercenary camps, and having a mix of some that are easier and some that are harder to take is important. That being said, it doesn't mean that any camp should be unable to be challenged, and the gnoll camps might be too far in that territory.

The complication is that we like to keep objective locations relatively isolated from one another. Now turning the camp around in those locations might be enough, but thing to test would be if that area begins to feel a bit claustrophobic.

It would likely require a few other layout changes, which aren't really easy to do. Our art team pours a ton of attention into Battlegrounds, and changing the layout around can require a lot more cleanup and polish that you'd think. Not that it isn't do-able, but it's a matter of priorities and cost/benefit here.

It's a cool idea though! Would be interesting to see how that would play out.

She isn't?

Hey Malganyr, thanks for the question.

One of the original intentions with Hanamura was to create a 2 lane map, where the "third lane" were the camps in the middle of the map. So it's intended that there's a greater emphasis on them than most other maps.

It's also probably okay if the map objective isn't as powerful as other objectives. It shouldn't be ignored, and it shouldn't be more valuable to take camps over and over instead, but it's okay if it isn't a "drop everything you're doing and come here immediately" type objective.

We're still having discussions on what changes to make going forward. We agree that it isn't playing out exactly the way we want. There might be some smaller tuning changes (like the increased respawn timer on the Samurai camps), or even slightly more creative ones.

Where did you get that shirt?

There are no current plans for user generated content. However, there are many avenues to getting your concepts seen by us. Just recently u/Jackice1714 created a poll with a bunch of community ideas for skins that they ran on reddit. We are paying attention to the highest desired skin ideas from the community and would like to do another community skin like Janitor Leoric and Azmodunk Azmodan.

This is a good suggestion. It has a lot lot of ramifications that I'm unaware of at the moment. For example, Taunt animations are usually a little more unconstrained in the hands of our animators. So, what does that mean for a hero that steps out of frame of the normal camera? Does that mean they step in front of another player? The next steps would be to go through our 86+ heroes and figure out where it breaks. This is the kind of thing that we need to explore before we're able to implement something. I'll poke around and see if this is an option.

Thanks for the feedback qortkddj90! These are all cool flavor hits! Best I can do is look into what is required to do these things and weigh it against our current backlog. If it is something that we can justify doing next to some other things that are there then it sounds good. If we can't I hope there won't be any hard feelings. Also, we have a lot of things we would like to do and time is always a big factor. If you can figure out how to add more hours in a day I'm game to explore everything.

There are some contenders for sure. Usually getting a skin made and prepped can take between 5 and 10 months. If we were to choose a community skin today and I started modeling it when I got back to my desk you would probably be looking at a spring or summer release next year. If we were to choose a skin and announce it 8 months ahead of time is that too far out? What do you think is a good time frame to announce something like that?

Major patches usually mean hero and/or skin drop.

Fascinating. Thank you for educating me!