Talk:Ao Shin/@comment-12904660-20151025185918/@comment-27199803-20151112080757

I'm not an animator myself but as far as I know it depends on the goal. Overall to make a model itself isn't that many man hours. A week to two weeks. The hard part is to animate it. And the harder part is to animate it good alongside Riot contemporary standards. There are several techniques on animating. From procedural (where movement of different parts of model are calculated programmatically) and mocap (transmitting movement from a human actor) to hand-made animation (where artist animates model frame by frame by moving different parts in editor). Don't know maybe there are smth new in this field nowadays.

Obviously Ao Shin cannot be made with mocap. And procedural animations are pretty bad since they are calculated by algorhitms and don't look that realistic. Which doesn't live us much choises.

Hand animation is really time-consuming. Judging by the quality of character animations in game, Riot has pretty awesome animators but still they have to make many animations: idle, attack, using abilities, taunting, dancing, etc. And it goes through long process of polishing in many cycles. Maybe they do a bunch of different animations at begining for one action and see how they look, how they interact with objects, hot the character plays. So they encounter some limitations like "Ao Shin is four legged and his turning animation is too slow, he feels clunky, but if you just speed it up it will look abruptly" so they need to remake whole animation. Or "what happens when you speed movement or attacking animaton - does it still looks interesting and comprehensive?!"... Well. It's a looooong process. So it is possible they started working on the character and let concepts spread as a teaser. Or maybe they realeased concepts to see community reaction and decide whether making Ao Shin worth the time put into him.

In addition they have to make it playable on all hardware. One of advantages of LoL is that you can play it on pretty old PCs and the game still looks amazing. So after scultping tools like ZBrush they have to de-poligonize it which is additional work and time. But it's not the harder part as I said above.

P.S.:

It doesn't really matter whether you're using Maya or 3ds Max. They pretty much the same AFAIK.