~Research into texturing and UV Layouts in popular games~

So In my free time I enjoy playing games with my friends. Most of my friends play a game known as World of Warcraft. I enjoy to play it with them from time to time, but I managed to work out how to export models from the game into Maya directly.

It imports the models, their UV lay outs and their textured completely. It really is useful because I can see exactly how they painted their textures, modelled their characters, and layed their UVs out. Now WoW is an MMO game (Massively multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) and so the specifications for character models are that they need to be uber low polygon as peoples computers need to handle a lot on screen at once. But still, I am glad I managed to do this because it has been very informative..

Here are some screen shots from a character:



So as you can see from the first screenshot, the entire character is an incredibly low 2,500 tri's. That is incredible. It really puts emphasise on the power of texturing. Even though the polygon count is low, the textures really make it look as if it is more. Now if they were to bring normal maps and such into the mix, it would look incredible considering.

Blizzard have some extremely good digital texture painters, they really look great. This was a constructive way to spend some time for me, because it really reinforced the importance of solid UV layouts and texturing. I say that Polygon counts are a structure that you can decorate in any way you see fit. But it is important for that structure to be a 'strong foundation' other wise no matter what you put on it, it will never be succesfull. This just reinforces that for me.

Any who, now everyone knows what a geek I really am :<