Using WoW's art assets to visualize your character

[Asmor]

This is something I thought of a while ago, but kept forgetting to actually look into...

There's a program called WoW Model Viewer which lets you take the models and textures from World of Warcraft and basically play with them like a paper doll. It does require World of Warcraft to work, but you can download that for free by signing up for a 10 day trial.

With that program, you can put any equipment on any of the following races:

Blood Elf
Broken
Draenei
Dwarf
Felorc
Forest Troll
Gnome
Goblin
Human
Naga
Night Elf
Orc
Scourge
Skeleton
Tauren
Troll

It's worth noting that not all of the equipment might work right on the NPC races (i.e. anything that's not actually a player race). You also get to look at all of the other models and art assets in the game, which is pretty cool.

 

[Asmor]

Just as an example, here's something I made real quick to try and illustrate a warforged wielding a maul.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Neat idea, thanks for suggesting it!

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think this idea works best if you're not a WoW player, and your players aren't either, and thus don't have any baggage attached due to WoW*, and also if you don't want anyone who is of normal or athletic build, especially males, but rather prefer extremes.

If that's the case, then this could be valuable, even inspirational.

* - For me it's impossible to not see the S1 helm, and to not recognise that hammer from when my Paladin had it pre-TBC.

 

[Merlin the Tuna]

This looks like it could be really useful, with the possible caveat of "I hope you like giant shoulders." It certainly looks like it's much more flexible than making custom Fire Emblem sprites like I've been doing.

 

[Asmor]

This looks like it could be really useful, with the possible caveat of "I hope you like giant shoulders." It certainly looks like it's much more flexible than making custom Fire Emblem sprites like I've been doing.

There are shoulders of all sizes... Personally, I like the huge crazy looking ones, if they fit the character, but they've got everything from giant metal spiked pads to tiny wing tips and shoulder pads. And you can always choose not to use shoulder equipment at all, too.

 

[Asmor]

* - For me it's impossible to not see the S1 helm

I really didn't want to use that helm, but there aren't a whole lot of helmets that completely obscure the character's face, and it wouldn't do to have my "warforged" have actual eyes.

 

[Zinovia]

I had thought about using the WoW female draenei model as a tiefling by recoloring the image in Photoshop. I'll have to try that in my copious free time someday (after WorldCon).

 

[SweeneyTodd]

Very cool idea. This is one of the only MMO character building options I can think of that you can use without having to subscribe to the game, so it's pretty darn handy.

And yes, folks who've never played WOW at all may very well get more use out of this than people who have, since they won't have any preconceptions of what a given graphic should represent.

 

[egarvue]

I have a player in my group who uses this to create character portraits. It helps that he's a Photoshop god, but even with just the basic program, anyone can turn out some pretty good looking art.

He has a dragonborn paladin in our weekly game- unfortunately there are no lizard races in WoW. He got around this by photoshopping a Naga upper body onto human legs...pretty slick, IMHO.