Learning from the Best

In art school they tell you to get out into the world and observe. Only through observation and study do we become better at representing that world in our work. The funny thing is that we are creating art for virtual worlds, so what better place to observe than other virtual environments? One of my favorites is World of Warcraft, and when my son and I are playing it together he often complains that I spend more time “sniffing the daisies” then killing Orcs. I admit that I like to walkabout in computer games, but mostly I to try and figure out how they have created some of the beautiful effects and environments that seem to work so very well.

One such field trip took me to WoW's Iron Forge, where they have a splendid central steel mill filled with ore buckets pouring forth molten metal. I got to thinking how much fun it would be to try and integrate that into a furniture item, so I created the “Lava Throne”. Using a long 'lava” texture and an organic alpha map with irregular holes, I was able to map a continuous running stream pouring over the edges of the throne's miniature pools.


The real trick comes with Mapping the texture to the geometry. Since I wanted the molten flow to be thick and viscus at the top, then pull like taffy as it slowly oozed over the lip of the spout, I did some compressing of the mesh coordinates onto the Unwrapped texture. Once I animated the scrolling texture in the Previewer, I was able to get the effect I was looking for. Moving the coordinates for each stream gave them a random look, and avoided the telltale repeating pattern that can happen with tiled textures.