@Dairy
What makes you think that witchking left modding community when he is leader for lately introduced Heavenly Forge?
I use Blender for everything. If I can't get job done with texturing inside software I use cgtextures to help myself.
As for communicating, dude - that game is pretty old, you know?
Our current plans are to make few mods with alternative units, neutrals, artifacts and so on. Let's call it a "base". So basically base will contain several mods with different content. It is up to group responsible for town which of them they want to be necessary to run their town. For now only Oasis and Forge will use it, as Bastion and Grove are not yet graphically on the same level. Of course this "base" will contain only high quality projects which have "neutral theme" for heroes 3, and by saying this I mean that you won't meet the last neutral from Forge (alien) or any of forge-themed artifacts in base, same thing goes for genie lamp from Oasis (so there is also a place for exlusive content) as you may not want to have any of those towns as well. I hope that my english was enough to explain this
@Haregar
As for reintroducing creatures from other games in M&M lore: of course it is always worth trying, as some of them have made appearence only in one entry from series, but there must be a reason behind it plus it must fit to H3 style.
For example as I was trying to make Pixie from Heroes 5 I've quickly understood that color palette is too saturated to do so.
So instead I've tried to inspire a little by dryad from H7, mix it with my personal taste and POOF here we have it (model is still in a design phase)
So..there are no plans for creatures you mentioned, but it will never be 100% copy anyway
Btw. This dryad is trying to make it to alternatives but it is not sure yet. Anyway I should make new topic for different projects and I won't post more not Oasis-connected things here anymore