Outerend, Wielder of the Great Dark

[Mitron]

Swap it with rogue starter dagges and lets lul !!!! xD
Rly awesome work o.o dont like the universe there... but something thats good with it is that it makes this "untouchable" thingie even better :P

[Bloomfalls]

Thank you for the words everyone.

This is really legendary.. Keep on doing such amazing work +Repped
Also.. I made a video preview.. A crappy one perhaps, but better than none

Thank you for the video. I just put it in the OP.

Really nice work on the weapon but maybe you can make a test without the planet i think the staff would be better that way, But that is just me

Thank you for the words but I'm gonna have to say sorry on this one. The planet is the central theme and took me ages to get it right. I'm fairly flexible though, I noticed the universe wouldn't look cool enough because of the size, hence why I offered two versions... I'll be "discontinuing' the universe version afterwards, but no chance I'll be releasing without the planet, sorry.

This is actually really amazing, +rep for you. My only question is this: I should swap this for a two-handed weapon, right?

Ideally, yes. I don't think dual-wielding these would be cool, but who knows!

[Eluo]

Awsome? Awsome!

[Danne206]

Wow, I can't say anything. Insane mate, insane.

Awesome job.

[ximen]

Have some Rep cookies, I hope they taste as awesome as this model is. Seriously, I give Blizz 2 weeks before they call you to hire you. You're seriously a lot better than many of those fools <.<.

X-imen:3

[WoWFlame]

Send this to Blizzard now to make it the best caster legendary staff for cataclysm!

[Builtokill]

Oh wow, it's a lot bigger than I thought! I thought it was gonna be a smallish offhand weapon. It looks great! Could anyone upload their version of the patch for the model change, because every time I do it it screws up. I don't care which weapon, I just want it!
To make the Universe work I think you'd have to make it less round and make it look more like a black hole. It would have to sort of fade out instead of having a round ball shape.

[Tranquility [X]]

Yet again you amaze me... this staff is brilliant!

Will +Rep if i can, although i'm sure i've repped you lately.

[Confucius]

Wow your work is really amazing +Rep 4 even though you deserve a lot more. Such a superb job indeed!

[Xel]

I can't believe my eyes :O

You win the whole internet with this. Never seen a better custom model.

[Bloomfalls]

Thanks a lot for the comments and wow! The thread got to the main page, I'm very honored.

Have some Rep cookies, I hope they taste as awesome as this model is. Seriously, I give Blizz 2 weeks before they call you to hire you. You're seriously a lot better than many of those fools <.<.

X-imen:3

I appreciate very much your comments!

Blizzard DOES have excellent artists though. Hand-painting everything is a lot of work and to be quite honest, is much, much harder than making realistic props to a lot (not all) of next-gen games by just putting up photos into it.

My advantage here is that I'm not bound by the limitations that low-poly artists in Blizzard have. The polygon-count and textures in Outerend probably exceeds by a wide margin their guidelines, and with a good reason: If the entire game was made of Outerends, it'd be slow, very slow.

However, for a custom model showoff, a single entity is not (ideally) gonna affect your performance. My idea too as I stated in the OP was see how far I could go by customizing the materials, without worrying about limitations. For instance, this is how the planet was set-up:

Atmospheric Refraction/Water Specular:
Layer 0: A 100% white texture. (Diffuse)
Layer 1: An environment probe with black center and blue borders (Subtractive Environment)

Water:
Layer 2: The ocean (Additive)
Layer 3: The energy field in the bottom of the planet (Additive)
Layer 4: A series of waves that move around the planet. (Additive)

Terrain:
Layer 5: The terrain's shadow, pitch-black against a white map (Subtraction)
Layer 6: The terrain map, black background (Additive)

Clouds:
Layer 7: The Cloud's shadow (Subtraction)
Layer 8: The Clouds map (Additive)

Atmosphere:
Layer 9: A black environment map with a thin blue border (Additive Environment)

A lot of these can probably be optimized. I'm sure the ocean map can be ridiculously small (say 64*64) and there'll be no quality loss, though I'll probably do these optimizations for the next version. I couldn't get alpha on textures to work, else the terrain could be a single layer. Regardless, it was more of an experiment to see what you can truly do with an engine filled with such limitations. There are two very different materials in this object and they abuse of the same methods.

In an engine with support to Pixel Shaders you could probably do all of these and more with... very few maps actually, and some custom effects. I consider myself good with shaders though, I do enjoy writing my own pixel shaders, so experimenting with WoW's engine was an interesting puzzle.

Given how Cataclysm's water looks, we might actually see support for some interesting effects, although I'm not sure if they'll be appliable to our objects or just the terrains.

[predattak]

this is fantastic thx for sharing i love ya :P

[Alexial]

This is absolutely amazing! It turned out fantastic! I just have no words that can express how beautiful this model is. Excellent work!!!

[Zing!]

This is amazing.
Although this is over the top I'm sure having only rare legendaries with this model wouldn't matter. (Uldum Caster Legendary?)

P.S Is it normal to have to turn textures to low for the planet textures to work?

[Tocasiar]

...
(speechless)
+Rep
...

€dit: Mhhh, I've changed Thunderfury to this model... however everytime I equip TF my WoW crashes. Any help on that? This is my mpq: Click