What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy!
So we’ve made a lot of What Could Have Been videos in the past, but a topic we haven’t
really touched much is skins.
Just like champions, Riot goes through a ton of iteration when it comes to perfecting skin
designs, and a lot of your favorite in-game skins could have ended up looking a lot different!
Since Riot has been really transparent with showing off some of these skin iterations,
we decided to pull them all together in a compilation to bring you this What Could Have
Been episode, focused on some of the best skins in game!
The first skin we wanted to talk about today is also the one that could have ended up being
the most different - Dark Star Thresh.
It’s easy to guess that a skin like this could have ended up looking pretty different,
but in fact it goes in further than that.
Riot knew they needed a Legendary skin for Thresh as players and pros love him so much
- but they didn’t have a definite concept in mind.
The skin development team received a request to design a Legendary Thresh skin - one that
would amplify his sadistic characteristics a hundred times over, and really help players
live up to Thresh’s own twisted brand of evil in game.
Around twenty people submitted pitches, in fact there was even a much loved Beekeeper
Thresh concept that was rejected because it didn’t really get the evil feels across
- instead, one concept was voted as the winner almost unanimously, Dark Star Thresh.
From this point forward, it was a case of iteration and refinement - Dark Star Thresh
could have appeared in a number of different ways, all with different styles and colors
in an attempt to bring the concept to life.
The concept artist Hellstern had drafted one particular concept that featured the galaxy
around his head, and although everyone loved the idea, there was a lot of concern if it
could be made to look as awesome in game.
A few tests later, it proved to be possible and Riot continued iterating on his designs,
along with remodelling and redoing animations until Dark Star Thresh was finally brought
to life.
Our next skin is Project Ekko - and Riot were a lot closer to the mark with their initial
exploration this time, since they knew from the start it would be a Project skin.
The first concepts were pretty diverse and attempted to highlight different parts of
his design.
For example, one of the concepts is focused on his genius, as shown by the lab coat, and
others are more directed at showing him as being a kinda punky youth.
One really sweet concept that didn’t make it into the final design was a hologram mohawk
- essentially it’s just about detaching one of Ekko’s key features and turning it
into something that would be really represent what Project was all about, but they decided
it was kinda weird and didn’t really make sense from a thematic perspective - it’s
usually the weapons and visors that are holograms on the project skins after all.
Every detail was iterated numerous times - different gloves, different shoes, hood vs no hood and
changes to the hairstyle of course were important as they are all key to Ekko’s image.
They managed to narrow things down to two concepts - one was rejected because the mohawk
wasn’t really quite what you would expect to see on Ekko, so they went with the other
and continued to flesh it out until they ended up with the perfect mix of Ekko and the project
theme.
Next up is not just one skin but ten - of course we’re talking about Elementalist
Lux, the latest Ultimate skin available in-game.
Unlike the other skins featured today, we actually don’t know a lot about how the
skins themselves could have been different, after all Riot just picks 10 elements and
then iterated those specific styles until everything looked right.
Interestingly, this wasn’t the biggest issue when it came to Elementalist Lux - the main
issue was finding a way to get around the huge memory problem that Riot had encountered
when it came to developing a skin with 10 different appearances.
Normally, one full skin takes about 20 megabytes of in-game memory, up to a maximum of 30.
Because Elementalist Lux has 10 parts that are equal in size and scope to a normal skin,
that would mean her Ultimate skin alone would be 200 megabytes, or 0.2 gigabytes.
That’s actually a huge amount of memory, especially just for a cosmetic, and it would
be a nightmare for players with slower PCs so there was no way Riot could go ahead with
the concept without fixing that issue.
The first step towards fixing this issue was to compress a lot of the animations, and reduce
as many polygons on the model as possible.
They had to remove a bit of artistic freedom to make sure textures were small too, all
in the hopes that they could vastly reduce the size of each skin without sacrificing
quality.
The big issue that remained was in the form of visual effects, which have their own textures,
animations and sounds.
There’s also always a lot of VFX on each skin, and in Elementalist Lux’s case, we’re
talking about 10x as many as normal.
The solution here was to reduce the sizes of the textures by ‘grey packing’ them.
So for example, let’s say you’d normally have one particular particle texture, and
have 10 copies of it all in different color schemes.
With grey packing, it would just be one particular texture, with separate color channels - red
green and blue.
That way, the artist can just pick from a palette to add color or brightness, effectively
allowing them to reuse the same texture and just change it’s appearance for each form
of Lux’s skin.
The same went for gradient maps, which were used to add colorful tints to the simple textures.
Basically instead of using say, 100 different particle textures, Riot would only use 10,
and just filter them in different ways.
This saved a ton of space, and combined with some tweaks to the effect system to stop wasting
memory, ended up making it possible for Riot to load 10 different skins for a single champion
without compromising on memory or skin quality!
Arcade Ahri is next up, and we’ll only touch on this briefly as we have actually mentioned
it before.
As with Project Ekko, the Arcade theme was decided beforehand so Ahri didn’t end up
getting a ton of different concepts thrown around before settling on Arcade.
That means Riot could get started straight away with coming up with references.
Since Arcade skins are meant to be a kind of celebration of retro video games, they
start off each Arcade skin by looking at different sources, whether they be original arcade video
games or even fan arts and cosplayed created by the community.
Arcade Ahri had four different main concepts - one that was similar to Princess Peach,
a super jazzy retro skin and a more sci-fi concept too.
Riot settled on the concept that was more similar to the style that other Arcade skins
had added to the game so far, rather than having another theme running parallel to the
arcade theme.
Again, it’s just a really cool example of the iterations that Riot go through while
they narrow down which parts of a skin they like and don’t like, so that they can take
their favorite bits and put them together until they end up with a finished product
that just looks awesome!
The last piece we wanted to share today is not about any specific skin, it’s more about
groups of skins.
When Riot develops skins for a skin line, there’s usually two ways it works.
Occasionally they will release single skins that slot in nicely to already existing skin
lines, but recently there’s been more of a focus on releasing groups of skins together
and giving them a shared ‘teamwork’ splash art.
Designing these splash arts is really important because it has to highlight all the best parts
of each separate skin, while also making sure the scene does the skin line’s them enough
justice.
The League of Legends Artbook had a really cool example of this using the Arcade skin
teamwork art, which features Miss Fortune, Sona and Riven all together.
They experimented with a few different concepts with different poses and backdrops, before
finding one that really suited the Arcade skins by putting them in the middle of a battle
against their rival skins, Battle Boss Blitzcrank and Final Boss Veigar.
You can see a few other examples of these teamwork splash arts with some of the other
skin lines, such as the Pool Party splash featuring Draven, Rek’Sai, Zac, Lulu and
Mundo - every skin shows off it’s key features, and there’s a lot going on so it really
draws your attention.
The same goes for other teamwork splashes - like the Prehistoric, Project or Guardian
of the Sands skin lines.
It’s actually pretty impressive that Riot manages to capture the special features of
all the different champion skins in the same amount of space that a conventional splash
art takes up, and it really helps tie together the skin line and makes you want to collect
them all!
Anyway that’s gonna wrap things up on today’s video on skins, how they are developed and
how differently they could end up going.
Despite being two very different departments of Riot, both the skin and champion development
teams share very similar processes, where they focus on reiterating concepts until they
find what really stands out.
It’s a huge part of why Riot are so effective at churning out insanely high quality additions
to the game, because they take the necessary time to perfect an idea rather than just fleshing
out the first concept and hoping that the players will like it.
Make sure you leave us some comments and let us know what you thought of the different
skin concepts - maybe you liked one of the other iterations better or thought Riot should
have gone in a different direction to what they eventually released, either way make
sure you let us know!
And it looks like that’s gonna be it from me, if you enjoyed the video drop a like,
subscribe if you want, thanks for watching, and I’ll see you guys next time.