oniram177

It is true that Tactibunny and his friends had onced dined together in Venice around the time of the Ignition event - Riot was contacted by Tactibear and Tactisquirrel recently after launch to tell us of the nefarious plots that Tactibunny had in store for the world. Obviously we want to stop him before he causes any trouble. This scene that you see is a depiction of Tactibunny's last moment before he was known to turn on his friends, we like to remember him as the good natured kind soul that he once was and this area is a reminder for us all that even those who may have fallen into darkness were once standing in the light.

hello from that other guy :P

that one was a multi-person effort. one of our 3d artists suggested a graphic animals skinline and when it came down to the execution and subject matter I put a board together for our concept artist to start on the polygonal style. He was the one who chose a fox as the final animal to go with. I think before that we tried something like snakes or something else. It all kind of came together in the end as well because the graphic depiction we had chosen to do on the gun itself was pretty different than where it landed in the final version. Once we saw the buddy and the playercard come together we went back and reworked the guns to match. Glad you like that line!

glad its appreciated! we have a ton of fun coming up with crazy stories, worlds and such that unfortunately dont really make their way into the game beyond the weapons but its moreso just inspiration for us to come up with creative executions.

not entirely no :P the general inspiration for it did come from a lot of manga inspired mechanical creature-like designs. the general idea being how do you take this sort of organic and maybe even grotesque life form and cover it up with plating in a way that makes it feel way more advanced than it would otherwise appear.

We've internally called this one Fury

you can find some already uploaded renders of the guns on artstation :) the base 3d models and skins have a few uploads already from myself and another artist on the team:
https://www.artstation.com/marino

https://www.artstation.com/chrisstone3d

Anything's possible! If players really dig a thematic that's reason enough for us to bring it back someday :)

YUS!! Haha there's not a lot of shorty skins in general because its sort of a niche gun that doesnt have as much love as the others, but we're glad that this one turned out so well and glad that you like it!

i was about to say "ill give you the slashes but that ADS is totally centered" - but i checked and its literally ONE PIXEL OFFCENTER!

yep! it was a tough secret to keep! weapons had generally been in a decent spot since 2017ish. we refined our art style and such throughout the years and had to revisit some executions but we generally got started working on and exploring skins in 2018.

we had a lot of learning to go through before we could get to the point of delivering what we we considered high enough quality. safe to say a we also through out a lot of things since then too

i get pinged on these so ill see them and if there's something i can respond to ill try :)

for community skins, i dont think we'd ever just take something thats made by the community, but its very possible at some point in time we would make something with the community. League did a similar thing where they had a tristana skin that the community voted on and it was basically made with the community's input.

for the twitch drops and such im not sure on that one since thats a strategy well beyond my realm. we're always down to support content being made for events or new methods of acquisition but its up to the folks who actually run that to handle that part of the planning of it

we use substance painter, but its a mix. probably around 80-90% of the textures are procedural using our own existing smart materials. lots of mask editors using position, curvature, and worldspace normal to just get some color and gradient variety. most of our general surface detail is also just tiling stylized splotch textures, and then we go in to do that last little bit by hand to hand place alphas and such along edges or in certain areas of interest to create variation

yeah ideally at some point when there's enough we've talked about splitting up or making a collections filter to categorize them that way. also at some point that carousel is generally gonna get too big anyway :P

nah elderflame is its own thing made separate from Reaver. there are always going to be some similarities between skin animations for key points of contact on the guns.

the melees are still something that we've never really explicitly talked about but the way we internally think about them is sort of in an archetypal format. in the same way a skin like the luxe vandal or aristocrat ares adheres to the base animations and vfx, traditionally a melee would do the same unless we built it to do something it wasnt meant to do.. sort of how we take the Prime Vandal and give it a transforming reload animation.

rather than limit ourselves to using the same 1 melee slot and finding different ways to fit new shapes and features into the same motions, we created archetypes to fit into new versions of a melee so that some can feel like a fresh take. this way we dont have to make everything from scratch every single time. like i mentioned with the guns, we do redesign the shapes...

i posted in another thread but ill copy my response here

This is 100% my fault - im sorry.

Context: The lv1 Elderflame Vandal has a pose that makes it so you dont end up clipping the magazine through the arms on reload. In the collections page it looks kind of weird, like this odd T-Rex choking itself kind of thing :P

I wanted to default the pose to something more neutral, but in this case that pose broke where the buddy should be (its on the plates on his mid section behind the arm). It does position itself correctly when in game, its just on the collections view for lv1 and 2 that it is misplaced.

Ill fix this in the next patch

i posted in another thread but ill copy my response here

This is 100% my fault - im sorry.

Context: The lv1 Elderflame Vandal has a pose that makes it so you dont end up clipping the magazine through the arms on reload. In the collections page it looks kind of weird, like this odd T-Rex choking itself kind of thing :P

I wanted to default the pose to something more neutral, but in this case that pose broke where the buddy should be (its on the plates on his mid section behind the arm). It does position itself correctly when in game, its just on the collections view for lv1 and 2 that it is misplaced.

Ill fix this in the next patch

This is 100% my fault - im sorry.

The lv1 Elderflame Vandal has a pose that makes it so you dont end up clipping the magazine through the arms on reload. In the collections page it looks kind of weird, like this odd T-Rex choking itself kind of thing :P I wanted to default the pose to something more neutral, but in this case that pose broke where the buddy should be (its on the plates on his mid section behind the arm).

Ill fix this in the next patch

very cool! all the bolts and rivets and such add a really nice touch to this - the main blitzcrank chest piece thats on the side is really well incorporated. you're definitely getting the blitzcrank vibe from this and the modeled in lightning is a great add!

one thing to note when it comes to the valorant style of texturing is that we dont rely so much on grunge maps or and such to give this overly detailed look. a lot of the work we do in texture focuses more of softer gradients going across the weapon from front to back or top to bottom, using your AO as a color mask to add some variety (like some purples, blues, and greens mixed in!!) and really focus on highlighting the main forms and shapes of the weapon, with occasional larger roughness hits or edge markups.

probably at one point. i mostly called the frenzy the bb