From the game's manual and "Prima's official strategy guide".
Fire Elemental sketch.Sketch of Druidess by April Lee, also can be found in MM6's manual. "The Druidess. Here is a sketch I did of the Druidess. All the animators were allowed to design and model the characters they worked on. This sketch, along with others, was also used for marketing and promotion."Early peasant variant, in a final version of the game he appears as "Q" - it's a reference to a powerful entity from the Star Trek series.ThiefAcolyte of Baa.Jackalman by April Lee.SwordsmanLizardmanEarly New Sorpigal sketch from 3DO website.New Sorpigal sketch from the manual.
Drake flying over an unknown town - it's very old screenshot, it probably shows even older outdoor area than early New Sorpigal from next images. Houses textures don't appear in vanilla version, moreover all of the party members were later scrapped from the game.Testing area that was removed from the game, it's most probably early version of New Sorpigal. It will appear on many promo screenshots below.Early New Sorpigal testing area.Early fountains in the vanilla version of New Sorpigal.In the final release "The Knife Shoppe" has only the weakest weapons. Moreover mace? or axe? in the middle is a bit different from what we can find in the game.Different font.
Castle Kriegspire with unusal fire effect below (unused spell animation?) and very weak encounters.Castle Kriegspire. Seems to be a mock-up of creatures renders and spells effects.Entrance of Abandoned Temple in New SorpigalLook on a Castle Darkmoor with shown invisible bridgeAbdul's Resort on DragonsandThe ArenaTomb of VARNDevil's OutpostSupreme Temple of Baa
Early, unused textures of a library from Ubisoft Pics (1997) Asset DiscRemoved dungeon containing long sewers, it can be also seen on an early trailer.|Advertisement and rare game covers. Entrance of Abandoned Temple with overpowered enemy.Joystick No 90 page 68. Devil inside unrecognised dungeon. Probably non-existent, but the step on the left isn't present anywhere in the game.Joystick No 90 page 70. Early New Sorpigal.Joystick No 90 page 70. Early New Sorpigal.PC-action 98-03 page 31. Early New Sorpigal.PC-action 98-03 page 31. Early New Sorpigal.PC-action 98-03 page 31. Early New Sorpigal.The first iteration of New Sorpigal. Less bright ground, interesting trees. Found in April Lee's portfolio. "The Dwarf. Here he is in a screen-shot. Looks like he’s taken care of one of Tracy Iwata’s minotaurs! I also did the Sorcerer, and other characters."Advertisement and rare game covers. Early New Sorpigal variant.Early New Sorpigal. On the front probably Thief's render, on the right unused female peasant, on the left at the back unused male peasant.Computer Strategy plus 11/97. Early New Sorpigal.Early New Sorpigal.Unused items from Ubisoft Pics (1997) Asset DiscComputer Strategy plus 11/97. Only alternatively colored red spell book is something new.Computer Strategy plus 11/97. We can see a trumpet that in final release doesn't have equipment graphic (only graphic for adventure map) in the chest.PC-action 98-03 page 31. Notice "Thievery" and "Lock" skills.Screenshot from manual presenting old turn based combat hand known from the game files.
"Graphics in Might and Magic VI were created in 3D Studio MAX release 1.0 and Alias PowerAnimator and utilized a full 24-bit palette re-sampled to an individual 8-bit palette per graphic at compile time."
Models from an old Phelan Sykes portfolio.
Creation of Goblin model by Phelan Sykes.Innkeeper model by Phelan Sykes.
"I made his entire body with Metareyes, and I animated him with Character Studio."Labeled as "Cockatrice". According to Steve Wasaff "Yeah.... I didn't know what one was either. He was animated with Bones Pro.""Done with metareyes and animated using bones and Physique.""The head, forearms and hands were modeled with surface tools back in the days of R1.1. I animated him with Max standard bones and Physique of Character Studio.""Obviously a spin off of the demon, and animated the same way too.""Practically made board by board with some Nurbs used for the sails. Cameo appearances in HEROES III and MM7."
"The Jackalman. I used MetaReyes for the head, I think. We were playing around with so many new programs! I just love Anubis, so this guy was a joy to model. Although his head was way-high-poly. The weapon is a sort of crook, although you can’t see it from this angle (naturally…).""Again, an early modeling effort. Hard-linked and ClothReyed. This may have started out as the Jack model in Max.""The Druidess. Here she is in 3D. OK—so hard-linking the cloak was obviously not an option. I used ClothReyes—which was totally overkill, since we were still doing sprite animations with limited frame-counts. But it beat putting in endless bones…! I think the hood and hair was hard-linked, so her head movement was a bit limited.""The Archer. I animated this character for Heroes 2, now I got to design and model and texture and animate her for New World Computing’s first 3D game. All the artists learned 3Dstudio-Max for this game and this was the first character I made. I used the Jane model that came with Max as a starting point for the Archer. We had Character Studio and Physique, but I cheated and usually just hard-linked my segmented model to the biped. Physique tended to oddly distort my model more than the deformation was worth!"
Advertisement for M&M1-5 series, used in a back of "New Sorpigal Training Grounds" cinematic. Dragon model was also used for Ros the Dragon known from the game's intro and in HoMM2 - for a victory screen and for a dragon enslaved by Archibald in his campaign
Some of the earliest HoMM3 screenshots contains a minimap (here zoomed in), that looks like a map of early Castle Ironfist, however it differs from the final version. In vanilla it can't be zoomed out to this extent, it shows green dots of friendly NPCs inside strange arena on the southwest, it doesn't contain buildings sections, so the Castle Ironfist hill looks preety empty, however there are the same roads as in final release. There are also blue and red dots behind the boundaries of playing zone and a few hills on Northwest missing. A small path of water on the North is not present.
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Artists put a lot of effort to make every detail looks gorgeous - models of darts used in one of interiors.
Closer look on brains in magical shop.
Promo Poster.
