Limb Replacement

I just finished a round of tree limbs for our heroes:

"His bark is worse than his bite." -pun courtesy of Tim

"It looks weird at first, but he kinda grows on you." -courtesy of Candy

These had been in the queue for a while, and this week I finally veered away from the sky-high heap of user interface tweaking that we've been doing for the last couple months (whoa nelly is THAT a blog post of its own) to noodle around with the hero art.

Replacement limbs are fun, because they're wide open space in some ways, but really constrained in others.

What exactly does it like when your character grows a magical tree arm? I chose to stick pretty close to your standard Ent/tree-golem sort of limb. Starting with a quick scan of google images to get material loaded into my brain:

Then a few sketches on top of one of the rigs—I generally choose the male warrior first, since he's the biggest, and replacement limbs need to fit within that gray square from the first image. Tree limbs lend themselves well to mimicking musculature, but there was still a question of how much I wanted the tree hand to look like an actual hand. Also how smooth vs. pointy, how twisty, how chunky vs. thin, etc.:

Then once I've settled on a design and drawn it up on the male warrior, I go through the other rigs and make sure that I can reuse the limb without too much redrawing. For the tree ones, the arms were very reusable, but the legs had to be redrawn for warriors, hunters, and mystics, since their leg poses are so different.

Other things I need to keep in mind when drawing replacement limbs:

• What will go on top of vs underneath clothes? Arms usually go on top, and legs go under, but this isn't always the case. 
• For limbs that go over, I need to check all the different armors and make sure that the limb attaches in a passable way to the shoulders, no matter what the hero is wearing. 
• For legs, I need to make sure that the limbs don't stick out from whatever robe or vest or shirt the hero is wearing. (Mystics are especially tricky for this, since they're often wearing drapey fabric). I also need to make sure that the hero still looks relatively balanced with the new legs.
• Replacement limbs probably mean you're not holding a weapon, so it's nice to have a design that makes that apparent, so that the player doesn't suddenly wonder why they can't hold their sword with this perfectly-functional-looking hand anymore.

Then, after drawing, tweaking, checking and double-checking how the limb looks with each armor on each hero rig, and saving out each carefully-named PNG (Nate will hear me muttering to myself, "okay... warrior... male... replacement... leg... left... tree...boom. Okay."), we hopefully end up with a new, visually interesting way to mutilate enhance our heroes!

I AM BECOME FOREST. CA-CRAAAWW.