10 réponses à ce sujet

[ZugothNDeadly]

are you able to export the model(world of warcraft model) with its existing animations to the game engine or do you have to make new animations.

[Randomdays]

As far as I know - every game has its own way of animating. NWN and WOW have a different model base and animation style. If you import a WOW figure, you'd most likely have to use the skinmesh method pointed out before and tie the new mesh to an existing one, using its animations

[Mecheon]

I've had a lot of experience modding WC3. Finally, a question I can answer

 

In short? Its possible. However, it'll be hard

 

WoW, like WC3, uses a Bone system of animation, basically the opposite of NWN using the pieces.

 

Now, I've seen the opposite of this done. I can't find it, but one hell of a talented WC3 modeller, Cookie, actually converted quite a few models over to WC3, complete with animations. The Iron Golem, the Air Elemental, the Bebilith, the Green Dragon, and I believe he used the staff animations from a_ba for a hero unit.

 

The issue, of course, is you'd need to know a lot about the animation structures of both games to ensure everything works fine.

 

So yes, its possible. But you would be covering new ground effectively

[ZugothNDeadly]

I've had a lot of experience modding WC3. Finally, a question I can answer

 

In short? Its possible. However, it'll be hard

 

WoW, like WC3, uses a Bone system of animation, basically the opposite of NWN using the pieces.

 

Now, I've seen the opposite of this done. I can't find it, but one hell of a talented WC3 modeller, Cookie, actually converted quite a few models over to WC3, complete with animations. The Iron Golem, the Air Elemental, the Bebilith, the Green Dragon, and I believe he used the staff animations from a_ba for a hero unit.

 

The issue, of course, is you'd need to know a lot about the animation structures of both games to ensure everything works fine.

 

So yes, its possible. But you would be covering new ground effectively

have you actually exported any wow models into nwn

[NWN_baba yaga]

What i found very problematic using other rigged models for nwn is the scale. Once you scaled the model into the correct size you have to resetX form every single piece and dum didum the skinmesh modifier went buggy after that. I dont know how others have done that in scaling the new creature with the applied skin modifier without encountering issues later. so i just skipped that part and rigged the model again myself after everything was ok in it´s size.

 

and i know that we can save and load the skinmesh but whenever i scaled or resetX the bones all went messy anyway. So I always scale everything FIRST and then work on the rig. Anyone did it differenty?

 

I also have one human wow model in use but i ripped the model apart into 5 separate meshes and rigged it myself. I had to alter the model quite a bit so it is useable with the givin sets of "bones" the a_ba uses. It´s quite some work!

 

But the idea is cool i know that. There are many cool creatures from wow but the work always made me say no sorry. I better rip it apart and do the NWN magic later by myself because that way is always save and will work later on. Lord of worms had some wow models in his AF PW, the shambling mound mushroom creature... but he only used the model and no animations! And LoW is gone, he´s not around anymore!

[Carcerian]

Aww....

 

(Adds ol' Wormy to the list of ppl who deserve a proper tribute statue then  )

 

[KlatchainCoffee]

My default stance is staunchly against using anything from WoW in NWN... for various reasons.

 

But I have to admit that if there was one thing that would actually tempt me  - it would be the dance animations for various races.

[OldTimeRadio]

@Zugothsss - It is technically possible to export WOW models to NWN and keep existing WOW animations.  Here's a video of one of the proof of concepts that I did, showing just that.  However, the chief complication is how the animation keys come into Max when imported from the WOW model.  For lack of better terminology, there are "regular" key frames and "baked" animations.  All NWN models (except the horses, AFAIK) are/were hand-animated and so have very few keyframes per second of animation.  This is where an animator took two spots on a timeline and animated between them.  For instance, in keyframe zero the shoulder might be rotated so that the hand is at the model's side and at keyframe 30 (one second later) they have another keyframe (at frame 30) which rotates the shoulder joint by  90 degrees.  There are only two keyframes in this example, just to be clear.  NWN interpolates the position based on the start and end for every frame inbetween.  This is called "tweening", BTW.   Very low memory consumption with that method.  However, some games bake their animations which mean instead of two keyframes, one at the start and one at the end of a range of motion, there would be 30 keyframes in our hypothetical example, one for each frame and each defining exactly how much the shoulder would be rotated in that frame.  This eats up a lot of memory.  Memory usage for animations is not the hugest deal in the world but if you had a lot of creatures each using unique, baked, anims for their full range of anims, there might be a performance impact.  I believe that imported WOW models come into Max with thier keyframes baked.  I could be wrong, but that's my recollection.  If that's the case, in many ways it's easier and more tempting to just use existing animations for something similar that already exists in the game.  After all, for the most part, animations are just rotations along either an X, Y or Z axis and only something like the root dummy would have position animations.

 

@NWN_baba yaga - Spot on about the nightmare of scaling with bones and skin mesh.  I can't give a more thorough description of the solution at this time, but I was able to work around the issue the following way.  Performing these modifications on models which do not have animations is very important.  Just supermodel them into the model you wanted the animations from.  I also want to include the tidbit that, while it probably won't come into play because NWN doesn't generally use Max bones for bones, there are interesting tools to help with the scaling of Max bone object in the "Bone Tools" tool in Max.  Very, very handy and very obscure but, IIRC, it allows true scale resets on bones in ways that NWMax can't cut with its methods.  Again, though, I do not think that bit will really come into play for you or me or anyone else except in rare situations but I wanted to provide it for completeness.

[NWN_baba yaga]

@OldTimeRadio

 

thanks for the explanation and for the link. Pretty interesting stuff... you see you never stop to learn some new things One thing about max bones is i remember some codi creatures that used them i´m sure. Maybe it was that elephant mutant creature or so. But the bones looked exactly like our max ones. Man,

way back i didnt even checked all these things myself out...

[OldTimeRadio]

Good call, Baba!  Whomever shortened the legs & arm may have used the Bone Tools I referenced, because that's just the kind of thing the Reset Scale button helps with.

[Michael DarkAngel]

@NWN_baba yaga - Spot on about the nightmare of scaling with bones and skin mesh.

 

Since v5.04.27 of NWMax Plus, "Reset X Form" is no longer performed on skinned meshes.  Like I stated in the release notes, and I haven't done any testing, I'm not sure if this was the correct thing to do.

 

I would be interested to hear the results if someone does test this.

 

 MDA