Character models and animation issues

Community General Discussion
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I’ve decided to adress my now obcessive issue with models and their animations that end up narrowing my race and gender choices on a very annoying level.
I’ll try to make a list of the various issues I’ve come across and I’d like Blizzard to take them into account and try to fix them. New character models have been out for far too long to not have these issues adressed and some of them actually got even worse!

Alliance
Human Male:

  • the running animation has had various complaints already and nothing has been done to adress it. For instance, the cloak is too fluid and clips through shields and various other items on their back and overall it’s considered a bit goofy (personally, i think this has a very low priority on my regard as it does not bother me enough)

  • this will be a recurring trend for this thread. I know blizzard wanted to keep the animations loyal to the original models, but if you ask me, i think that this phylosophy should change. My issue is with the casting animation making shoulders clip and shove the model’s face inside them. I believe that looking into how the shoulders are animated can fix this issue.

  • Human female

  • running animation too stiff.

  • weapons not properly sized. Need to be smaller.

  • Dwarf male (oh boy…)

  • running animation too bouncy, beating their head with their own weapons as they run.

  • overall, weapons should have their size adjusted to be a little smaller, same for the armor.

  • again, charge up and casting animation shoves the head inside the shoulder armor (this one is a major bummer).

  • Dwarf female

  • item sizing issues but overall negligible.

  • slight head shoved on shoulder armor on casting animation.

  • Night Elf Male (oh boy…)

  • while running, transitioning from a jump into running is extremely awkward. The model seems confused, the head tilts up for no reason and his footing feels like he’s drunk or made some sort of mistep. It’s laughable and once you notice you can’t unnotice.

  • bow animation. Like… What the f*** is that? Blizzard already wasted so many chances at fixing this. It makes no sense! No one shoots like that, he isn’t even able to aim like that. Even worse, you made the same mistake while making worgen males and copy pasted it into the nightborne. Come on Blizzard.

  • casting, head shoved on shoulders.

  • clipping issues with two handed weapon idle stance.

  • Night Elf Female

  • melee stances head/ shoulders clipping.

  • casting animations head/ shoulders clipping.

  • minor complaint, I don’t understand how they can confortably stand idle with that back curved like that.

  • Gnomes

  • I don’t play them but I think that overall they have a vast amount of clipping issues but it’s hard to do anything about it due to their size.

  • Draenei Male

  • there’s something wrong with the shields. They seem to be oddly positioned along the arm and, at times, oddly sized.

  • some head/ shoulder clipping issues, especially on two-handed idle combat stance.

  • why do they have permanently erected tails? They make cloaks look bad and make them seem quite off-blanaced. Is it to validate one or their /silly quotes?

  • Draenei Female

  • I don’t play them.

  • Worgen

  • not gonna bother talking about them as I expect you to fix them with the updated model. But pleeeeeeaaaaase, don’t keep that ridiculous and nonsensical backwards jump! It’s a physical crime! And so is their bow animation.

  • Kultirans

  • overall, great job, no complaints. Some very minor clips.

Horde

  • Orc male (oh boy…)

  • yea… Well… Orcs are big boiz.

  • several severe head/ shoulders clips in almost every animation stance and casting animation.

  • dual wield idle stance clips weapons/ shields

  • 8.1 running animation… You call that a fix? Or an improvement? Transitioning from idle to run is missing possibly several frames. The model simply switches animation without a transitioning animation whatsoever and this is the main reason I’m making this whole post. What the hell Blizzard? This is laughable, it’s amature… I can’t even. Plus you made it way too bouncy and now the model keeps banging his weapons against his head.

  • Orc Female

  • some head/ shoulders cliping issues due to the fact that the shoulder armor is set too near to the model’s head.

  • she has some very weird thick legs and makes most feet items too bulky and unproportional. Doesn’t make any sense to me that you’d keep this from the original model.

  • barely noticeable but there’s a frame missing when she lands after a jump and keeps running, in the transition.

  • Undead male

  • most of my complaints are of personal taste rather than poor design, like how hunched they are. One of the few models with no clipping issues!

  • Undead Female

  • casting animation head/ shoulder clipping.

  • Tauren Male

  • what’s that jump animation? It isn’t even faithful to the old model. He seems to be on a premature freefall.

  • again, he’s a big boi. It has several clipping issues which would require a whole skeleton rework. Honestly though, this is more of a personal critique rather than something on demand. It’s quite alright overall.

  • Tauren Female

  • basically, the same deal as the male.

  • Troll male

  • We want a less hunched option. It doesn’t make sense to make it an option for the orcs and not the trolls. Look at the females and the Zandalari. Even their run and the new idle cast animations support this

  • casting animation head/ shoulder clipping.

  • two handed animations clipping.

  • Troll female

  • like a lot of the female models, the shoulder armor is too close to their head, either make them smaller or move them further outwards. This leads to some clipping.

  • make the running animation as good as their jump animation somehow. The way they run doesn’t look like how a troll would run. She looks like she’s going on the last mile of a military running marathon.

  • Blood elf male

  • casting head/ shoulder clipping.

  • it comes down to personal taste. I dislike their two handed stance a lot and am not particularly fond of their animations in general. Again, personal criticism here.

  • Blood elf female

  • same deal with males. They’re not for me.

  • can someone confirm if they still have issues with their bow animation? I reckon they fixed most.

  • shield idle combat stance. They must be very protective of their virginity to hold their shield protecting her back side.

  • Goblins

  • again, like gnomes, there have to be some clipping and sizing issues but they’re understandable. Plus, like worgens, we’ll have to wait on the model updates.

Zandalari trolls

  • need someone else to hop on these ones because I haven’t tested them enough yet but I do believe they have some issues unlike the Kultirans.

  • Pandaren male

  • I. Don’t. Like. The. Floppy. Belly. While. Running. And. Jumping. I suppose Blizzard wanted to make them slightly childish and that really bothers me because they have some badass animations apart from those two.

  • Pandaren Female

  • the way their feet stand while idle has some weird efects on mostly “skirt-type-legs”. Personally, I don’t like it.

  • let’s be honest, there’s no real way you can customize her face other than changing the color pattern. Even males have some slight yet noticeable variations.

  • Monks in general.

  • where you’d like to sheathe your weapons should be an option, but I understand that this might be too complex.

  • tiger palm animation momentarily hides your fist-weapon. This is complex aswell. I can see some ridiculous animations with weapons such as kargath’s blade fist but this could be fixed with a glyph. Make a glyph like Tiger Punch, and make the hand go straight, that way it won’t turn it into an ugly animation and it would encourage people to transmog fist weapons.

  • several clipping issues especially noticeable with black ox idle stance due to shoulder positioning.

And that just about sums it up. I left some of the allied races out because they simply have the same skeletons as other races I have adressed. Please, add anything that you may find relevant or comment on my criticism.
The new orc running animation really set the last nail in the coffin for me and it seems like it hasn’t been brought up quite enough and I’m left wondering wether noone else seems to notice the animation skip it has! This is not the quality I expect from Blizzard’s art department. Same for thar night elf male jump/ run issue. That’s just… Unprofessional.

I hope this doesn’t come across as extremely superficial. All of this is a minor issue to the game overall but regardless I think that it’s worth calling out Blizzard to properly adress this sort of discussion.

Thank you all, in advance, for contributing to this thread.

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I’d like to add one. As a monk of any race, when using Tiger Palm your fist weapons temporarily disappear. It looks awful.

If I wanted to hit bare fisted I’d have it mogged. I hate this.

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I used to main monk and I completely forgot about their unique animations, I’ll edit and add them later. Thanks!

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4

How about you don’t try and delay 8.2 any further

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Of course there’s a lot of clipping with armor. All animations are made using a naked character with a cape.

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The models/animation then don’t need fixing, but rather you do.
They can’t account for obsessive behaviour, my friend, that’s your own responsibility.

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Just replace the Paladin Consecration already.
Wtf are these pixels on the ground , its 2k19 and we still have that ugly af skill …

You had 1 job to implement this and you failed…

At least make it as glyph so people can choose if they want this new or stay with that old garbage.

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Sorry, but this is not right.

I know Blizzard said they wanted to keep the characters’ identities intact. They said that. Chris Robinson undetook as follows, in the original Artcraft announcement

With the revamp, we’re completely overhauling every aspect of the player models, but our goal is to do so while retaining the core look and feel that has always made them your character. We’ll feel like we’ve succeeded if you see the updated version of your character and it still feels like you’re looking at the character you’ve been playing for the past however many years—only someone has finally focused a lens.

They didn’t do that. They didn’t even try. No professionals could be so incompetent as to make so many of the replacement characters so different without actively planning to screw them over.

I may be the least artistically competent human of all time, but even I can see how alien many of the new characters are to their originals.

The same is true of the animations. I cannot play a dwarf male on live. Cannot. I feel like one of those thunderballs, apparently defying our normal experience of action-reaction and gravity with every step. The Stress Test gave me the opportunity to demonstrate to myself that I can be comfortable with dwarves using their original animations. They would not have made that change if they didn’t want to make that change.

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one thing that I’ve always hated was that the male undead casting animation and the male human dance animation for whatever reason both have them doing devil horns that just makes the entire animation look dumb, especially since the dance it’s based on couldn’t be any further from metal of any kind

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I agree, I’m pretty obsessed with these things too. I can’t really play some races due to their animations (nightborne I’m looking at you, and I loved you SO much).

One more thing though, about male undead: most shoulders float or are kind of glued to the top of their shoulder bones. And, there are 2 clipping issues: 1 with long hairstyles and /beg: it shows them half bald. The other one is with their rear, it sticks out of that leather warfront set while jumping (darkshore one). It’s no big deal, but since it should be THEIR armor and probably in the future (and hopefully) we get more armors like those… Perhaps it’s something you’d like to look into

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Hah, u are just jelly of my sick moonwalking skillz! :sunglasses:

that +OP spinnjump makes me kite ally noobs atleast twice as good.

2 Likes
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How does this have anything to do with 8.2? Most of these issues can basically be hotfixed and Blizz is adressing the Worgen and Goblin’s new models in 8.2.5 so I think this is an appropriate discussion and your remark is utterly uncalled for.

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It wasn’t a totally serious comment, but Its pretty easy to understand what I was trying to get at, thus YOUR question was uncalled for

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Obcessive behaviour? I’m tryng to give constructive feedback on actual what could call “bugs”. I’ll admit some of them is me just nitpicking, but you can’t say that what I said about both orc and nightelf male animations is wrong and that it is working correctly. You probably didn’t even read it all.

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Why do you write this long list when you don’t even know the issues?
They changed the animation. The best part of the whole race. There.

I guess this is just some personal nitpicking list.

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It’s exactly the opposite. The new undead male casting animations are definitly not as cool as they were, especially how the arm looks at the end of the casting animation. But they are not bugged, or clipping, it’s just the way they designed it and I didn’t think the opinion we both share was something a lot of people would agree with.

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When they introduced updated models several years ago, I anticipated the same characters but in a suit of better textures. I’m still not too happy with how they turned out. I have a bunch of complaints about them, most already mention above.

The main issues for me are:

  • Night elf males are still way too humpty-dumpty
  • Human males have a sloppy stance, the old one was way more rigid
  • Capes go all over the place, it’s annoying
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You used the term yourself. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

Well no it’s not wrong because it’s an opinion.
But that doesn’t make it true either though.

I have a limited interest in several races and their animations, so I skimmed those. :upside_down_face:

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It’s not an opinion, it’s a fact. Look it up, the orc doesn’t have frames to transition from idle to running animation.

Also being obsessed about something doesn’t imply an obcessive behaviour. Plus, one could and should see that as a mere exagerated expression.

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Why is everyone spelling obsessive wrong?

1 Like