I think the golden mask is creative (even if it looks a bit weird). I think my biggest critique is the 'pterrodax' itself... It's unfortunately too obvious it came straight from WoW, especially in the texture (but to a lesser extent, the animations as well). The style is just all wrong & very clash-y; the WoW textures are smoother & duller than the bright, sharp contrasts of the Wc3 texture (on the rider & some of the accoutrements).
Though I mostly agree with everything, the person who requested a dino rider gave the wow model to use for it. If I was making it from scratch for my own purposes it would be a lot different. Like if I make this triceratops someone asked for, I'll just use standard textures on a kit-bashed frame.
Personally I like the brown and grey ones better as colour schemes.
I tried to strike a balance with the '
accoutrements'; if you take the example dinorider from wow given in the request, it has a
LOT of bling. And to me WC3 models usually have minimal bling (relatively speaking) and something I always try to be mindful of is how the thing is going to look in-game versus in the editor. Firstly so you don't waste your time on stuff that has almost no impact*, but also because Blizz did a fantastic job on making models easily readable to make gameplay easier. Or the bling makes it look muddied and busy in-game. That's something I remember Grubby criticizing about Reforged. Oh and the more bling you add, the more niche it becomes in usage, imo. etc. etc.
My final
WeLl AcKxTuAlLy is the animations are almost entirely windrider, I only really animated the portraits. technically I also added a bone to make the dino's head frill clip less.
...
But the more I think about it and look at them, you're certainly right that wc3 textures usually have very strong highlights, like the troll's skin can go from near-black in shadows to white at raised spots. I admit I had that problem drawing for the geomancer.
EDIT--
* I've just been playing around with the priest/kotg/sorc missiles, and the animations change the scaling of the bird's wings on almost every keyframe. What a pointless waste!
Pending
but I didn't think it was noticeable in-game...
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