Unit Pictures

[ManjiSanji]

Oh man, your original Archon *_*

*Sigh* If only.

Everything looks great, nice job!

[TheProgramer]

Don't know how to resize to a smaller size sorry : (

[Robear]

Thanks, Manji! Yeah, the armorarchon was definitely not a surprise, oh well.

Re: TheProgramer:
It's really quite a privilege to be included in a list of (much better artists') names like that. And from the credits you can't tell that my work is the stuff stuffed into Appendix C or whatever, heh, it's really great to be on equal footing with them.

Will you be making an updated online version with the extra units?

Yes. I'll definitely be uploading a version very soon with all of the SC1 and SC2 multiplayer units, which are the ones that have the slightly more polished art. Will include units like the Dark Archon that didn't make the book.



This one was never going to be in the book chart, so I did its revision independently of Blizz feedback. Incidentally, at one point they did have the Brood War queen on the list for units to go in the scale chart, then it vanished. It does have a great illustration on its main page though. I really love that they embraced that retro look, and included it in the LotV campaign.

More Protoss art updates:



-Wayyyy too small to see, but I originally drew the DT with feet more like Artanis' loincloth model from Brood War, and at the time I wasn't giving any of my Protoss claws, so for the version to submit to Blizz I replaced elements like the toes with my drawing of Zeratul's. I changed the DT crystals to green, but was told to change the eye color to green as well for it to be accepted.
-Disruptor is new. Not my most interesting/detailed drawing of all time.
-The dragoon on the left was actually approved, which was a HUGE surprise to me, since its legs are asymmetrical front to back, like the BW version but unlike the SC2 version. Like the corsair I also made a version with some LotV model add ons, because I didn't have time to draw the LotV model properly. The version on the right is the one they went with but I actually think it's a little bit ugly. The spinny thing on the bottom is much improved but the back leg and part sticking up are worse imo. Like I said, really surprised they let me keep the legs asymmetrical like that.
-At some point I had made some kind of random immortal additions. Minor changes, nothing wrong with 'em, nothing notable.
-Mothership edits I talked about a page ago. Random detail pieces added to try and make it feel big, no time to redraw any of it. The revised energy shield looks really good on a dark background, I'll post that too.
-Metal pieces inside the mothership core now have some blue light reflecting on them, and the shape of the ghostly blue floating pieces is more defined. This is an ugly drawing but it's so small since it's on the capital ships chart you'll never see any ugliness.
-The oracle was rejected for not matching the shape of the actual unit correctly. Which was absolutely true, the old one looks really malformed now.

[KaiserStratosTygo]

Arbiters were seen.

Life = complete.

"-Old arbiter was rejected, new arbiter drawn which matches the LotV model more closely. (So, sorry, KaiseStratosTygo, I've known all this time and had to keep quiet!)"

Arbiters are Arbiters, they all look great to me.

[Robear]

Arbiters are Arbiters, they all look great to me.

Oh I just meant about me knowing they were in LotV. When you made that thread here before it came out all down about not seeing them in any trailers or anything and thinking they wouldn't be in the game, it took a lot of willpower not to pm you. :P

Additional Protoss art book updates:



-Phoenix has improved proportions and colors.
-Ditto for the scout. Mostly just color improvements, but also the engines are a little longer.
-The front 1/4th of the Spear of Adun.

So, right off the bat I knew they wanted the Spear of Adun, and we established the ~74/75 km length very early on (at this point they had already put out that April Fools image showing it with a tiny pixelated carrier, and on page 106 you can see Shadow Archon came up with an estimate of 68 km independently, but that was based on a 1.2 km-long carrier, whereas the official size for the carrier in the book is 1420 m). Obviously at 74 km long, and with the image fitting on a page of a book, every other ship would be too small to see any details.
Also, I knew that drawing it would be intensely time-intensive, similar to the Leviathan (which I drew over about 30 inches of paper irl to get the necessary level of detail.) So my idea, which was what happened was to just draw the front third of it at high detail, poking into the chart with the rest of the ships. Then an inset featuring a smaller-resolution version of the Spear's true length could be included, making it clear that the portion shown was only the front. Then, if I had the time, at the end I could draw the small version of the whole thing, or they could just use the silhouette of the official model. Here was the final mockup I sent them, which then they had on display on a wall at Blizzcon:



Of course, the other ships are still too small. In the final book it's all grouped together, and a chart with just the normal-sized capital ships is on the opposite page from the one with the Spear.

I never drew the entire Spear of Adun. I still could, of course.
They sent me a ton of reference material of high resolution images of the model, more than I actually needed, (it was the same reference folder that the artist who drew its incredibly detailed picture for its page got) so I might sometime. It being so enormously huge compared to everything else definitely presents formatting challenges.

-Stalker. I knew from the LotV trailer that they had a high detail stalker model and asked to see it. It turned out that a few parts of it were similar enough to mine that I didn't have to redraw the entire thing, just edit some proportions and draw a new hip platform / leg attachment area. Turned out very nice!
-Void Ray. This was one of the super early drawings from when I was kind of redesigning/making up my own details for units. The new LotV high detail model is really a work of beauty, very alien and cool. It's a huge shame imo that we didn't get a space battle scene with them in the campaign!


I think that's about it it for major changes to individual artwork. That's all the new artwork!
Something else that's nice in the printed book though is that the people at Insight, in addition to formatting things and adding labels in their nice fonts and putting it on neat page backgrounds, also did some color correction that really makes all of the art more uniform and pop more. I assume it was them and not someone at Blizzard, not 100% sure, and it may have just been a decision to make it read better when printed, but it looks good. The Protoss units especially have a nice gold look to them, and in my artwork some of the saturation and contrast isn't entirely uniform between units because of course I did them over a period of years. So that might be a thing I want to emulate for my own next version.

[Nolanstar]

The void ray is like a klick, wow. Guess I cannot really use it in my lore-accurate mod now

[Robear]

Yeah, the void ray was one I tried to go back and forth with them on, but they were pretty firm and specific on the size they wanted it to be. The one in the book is 635 meters long, bigger than I expected. That said, so much of that design is empty space or extremely slim sections of the ship. There's very little of that length that would be usable for traditional ship decks and things, and they referenced that Void Ray short story where it's a large ship with a whole crew.

[KaiserStratosTygo]

"Oh I just meant about me knowing they were in LotV. When you made that thread here before it came out all down about not seeing them in any trailers or anything and thinking they wouldn't be in the game, it took a lot of willpower not to pm you. :P"

Hey, i'm glad you didn't.

I had real, and honest joy when I saw them in the campaign as I watched some dude's let's play (I jumped and clicked my heels like a leprecaun, shouting YES in a loud manly as fk manner)

[Nolanstar]

Will you be adding some LotV campaign units?

[Robear]

Yes. I would like to draw the hybrids and Xel'Naga at least. And units like the Dark Templar Shuttle should definitely get art.
I don't plan to do all of the Tal'Darim and Purifier variants. It would be a lot of work to redraw units like the sentry several times, with very little payoff, even though a Tal'Darim chart would look cool. This is also a problem with the primal and HotS campaign zerg variants, though I may also get around to doing the unique primal units.

Here is a chart with the official sizes from the book and a few slightly-less-than-official sizes for the multiplayer units that weren't in the book. Like, the 560m minotaur battlecruiser is in this version, which is not something that was officially approved, and the shuttle was never in the book so it never got an official size, etc. But the units that were in the book are the Blizzard-approved versions. Here they are:

This version is missing the Liberator. I should have time to edit it in tomorrow.



Imgur also extensively lowers the quality of an image. The version I upload tomorrow will have twice the resolution and much less compression. I have the original files at 4 times the resolution of this imgur version, so if you want to see more details of the infantry section or something I can do that.