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IronStylus on the pricing of the new Zyra skin

BruisingPrune·10/17/2013, 1:31:39 AM·1 votes·600 views

Heres a quote from the parrot:

Quick, straight from the mouth of our Lead Character Artist:

"Zyra is probably the most work-intensive and challenging champion to make skins for."

Now, back to me.

Zyra is.. no pun intended on the new Harrowing skin for her.. a nightmare to make skins for. Every single plant, vine, spell, etc, is a new particle, which in and of itself is a new model, with new animations. That's.. what.. like 5 models with 5 animation sets/effect on them at least? I'm not sure how many assets are in her file.

We have a pile of concepts sitting around for Zyra, there are also great community skin ideas, but they area daunting task to be made.

I'm not a pricing guy at all but I will speak for Art when it comes to how intensive a skin is to make. Other characters which constitute big challenges are champions with different states, transformations, etc. So, Udyr, Swain, Shyvanna, etc, are basically two champions in one. If we want to make the transformation, or other states be a different animal, or creature or whatever, we have to model that, animate it, do a VFX pass, all that.

VFX alone has had huge scope creep in the recent years because now instead of just being a static effect, we have huge animations coupled with whatever the effect might be, whether it's a spell like Zyra's orbs, or animating spirit models like SG Udyr.

I'm not belittling the issue of price, but I do want to provide a peek into what sort of production goes into skins like these. It's basically a Legendary skin amount of work.

Hope that clarifies things.

This all roughly translates to: "It was really really hard to make this car. All of the parts had to be custom made to get them all to work together and it took several people a huge amount of time to install them all. Also the interior and exterior all had to be custom made and it was really hard. It runs like an '85 Yugo but we're pricing it at $100,000 because of how hard it was to make. It was so hard."

Poor parrot getting whipped by yung Hippalu$

2 Comments

Linna Excel10/17/2013, 2:16:31 AM4 votes

More things to model is harder to work on. That's just common sense. If you don't believe them, get a copy of a 3d modeler and see how hard it is to do quality models.

Some champs just need to have more work put into them, so it's fair for Riot to ask a little more on those few champs.

Splininka10/17/2013, 1:48:39 AM2 votes

This might be ignorant, but is there a specific example of a car that was pretty much 100% custom built that isn't highly priced? Obviously you aren't a fan of how it runs, but if the intention of the vehicle was more towards functioning as a float in parade rather than drag racing, everything about it from the way it runs to the pricing sounds appropriate.