View source for Gameplay Panel Blizzcon 2010

==Demon Hunter Modeling and Animation==

'''Paul Warzecha - Lead Character Artist'''<br><br>

[[Image:Gearing up.png|left|thumb|250px|Gearing Up]]
I'm going to walk you through the modeling, texturing and animation of the Demon Hunter. So right off the bat, we have this concept and we thought, this character, she hits the mark - yeah, there were like two guys that got that joke there. She was kind of a sexy character. I know Christian didn't get into that too much but at this point you've got the [[Monk]], this holy monk, a creepy [[Witch Doctor]], you have the [[Barbarian]] female if you're into that sort of thing, awesome but we wanted someone that was physically attractive and for the ladies in the crowd, don't worry about it, we are working on a male Demon Hunter now and are trying to make him as equally attractive. <br><br>

So, she hit the ranged archetype obviously but we also wanted to have a character that has a much darker because, like Christian said, you've got a Holy Monk, a flamboyant Wizard and, honestly, she just looked plain cool at this point. So it's time we start asking ourselves how we gear this character up, how do you upgrade a cowl. We got to start thinking how do they caps work and we start to think what makes this character visually distinct from the rest of the classes so the character team keyed in on three big things. Number one the character has a scarf. When you are running with the Demon Hunter, out the corner of you eye you might see that character's that just a little way away from the crowd, she's got this flowing cloth and right away you know that the Demon Hunter is there. From game cam you are also going to be able to see this character's legs unlike the wizard and the monk. We also keyed into this arm guard which helps her silhouette 'pop' a bit more.<br><br>

[[Image:Posing.jpg|left|thumb|250px|Naked Posing]]The first thing we do on the modeling side is we create what we call a 'naked look'. We do this for all our classes, this is the look before you have done any gearing up. We put this together and we hand it on to animation and they came up with a bunch of poses that really captured the attitude of the character. The cool thing, at least for inside the team is that this is the first time you see a character and you get the attitude of this character, that she's kind of pissed off, she's angry. She's got a lot of attitude. So based on that we build a geared up version of her.We were conscious of things like her silhouette, we want her to read really quick we want to reinforce the attitude and most importantly in Diablo, at least from the modeling standpoint, is this talk of readability.<br><br>

[[Image:Silhouette.png|right|thumb|250px|Readability]]So a character like this is very strappy, she's kind of gadgety, you can see there's a lot of stuff going on but when you zoom out to 30 feet above her head you want to be able to see that stuff and read the character so we grouped together and colours and values and that sort of thing.<br><br>

[[Image:Tool posing.png|left|thumb|250px|Body poses]]At this point we have a model we are happy with and the animators are going to take that and start filling out her animation suite with all the cool things that a Demon Hunter does and start putting together some of her tools. Obviously she's going to use bows and crossbows, she's also the only character who can dual wieldPistol Crossbows. You can see the fruits of everyone's labour. We've got a character that really takes advantage of her pose to pose action. Pulling a trigger is probably not as exciting as swinging an axe of a sword but they really reinforce her character by just the full body poses that she takes when she shoots stuff and also taking advantage of her skills.<br><br>