World of Warcraft’s female Night Elves get a makeover

With the fifth World of Warcraft expansion, Warlords of Draenor, releasing this fall, races are receiving a visual upgrade. Blizzard has already shown and detailed changes to Orcs, Dwarves, and Tauren, among others, but today they showed off the new female Night Elf model.

Lead character artist Tyson Murphy discussed the changes to the female Night Elf model in a post to Battle.net.

Of the changes, he said:

As with all of the updated character models, our goal is to keep everything the original model accomplished intact, while using the additional fidelity to realize characteristics that we weren’t able to fully represent with the lower polygon counts and texture resolutions. Overall, we’ve made her new model a little more defined, made some of her proportions a bit more realistic, and added a bit more muscle tone. We wanted to visually communicate that she is a fully capable warrior huntress, and small details like muscle definition help highlight that. We also put additional focus on her hands and fingernails, giving a very slight point to her nails to provide just a hint of a more feral nature.

Last but not least, the all-important Night Elf ears. In the original model, these were quite literally separate pieces of geometry effectively tacked onto the head of the Night Elf. In the new models, we’ve taken care to fully integrate the ears into the geometry, which leads to a far more natural and high-quality look.

The new models will be coming with the next expansion, Warlords of Draenor, this fall.

You can follow Senior Editor Lance Liebl on Twitter @Lance_GZ. He likes talking sports, video games, movies, and the stupidity of celebrities. Email at LLiebl@GameZone.com

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