Inside Warcraft Arclight Rumble: Creating a Mini

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In this inside look into the creation of a Mini, Art Director Jeremy Collins shares some insights on what it takes to bring one of these fabulously fun units to life by taking a look at the Gargoyle— a flying fortress in Warcraft Arclight Rumble.

When creating the model for a Mini such as the Gargoyle, we go through a multi-stage process before the final character is added to the game.

This is the initial idea rendered to provide inspiration and reference to the character artist who will be modeling this creature. Often, the concept artist will provide multiple angles of a character — called a turnaround — to give the character modeler a better idea of what the creature looks like from the rear and three-quarter views. Having lots of information about how the character looks going into the modeling process is extremely helpful.

To block out a Mini, we lay down some of the bigger, blockier shapes to help us understand scale, material separations, and overall character proportions. These big shapes that are created in the blockout phase become the groundwork for the surface details we add later.

Once these first two stages are completed, we then bring the model into a digital sculpting program called Zbrush, where it is sculpted— much like working with digital clay. Surface details like eyelids, musculature, and hair are added. Once the final sculpt is approved, the model moves onto the texturing process.

The final skin (texture) is added to the Gargoyle by digitally painting on the surface of the 3D model. The character artist will use various texture maps to inform the surface qualities of the Mini’s materials, controlling properties like color, reflectivity, and transparency.

Once a Mini has gone through its initial modeling