Major Mesh/skin release possible...with help

[BentonGrey]

Once we get the basics worked out on how/if everything can be converted from these various games, I think it might be a good idea to compose some running lists of what's available so that we can focus our efforts on what's most useful to the community.

[Randomdays]

Good idea, but some of those are going to LONG lists. NWN has just about every D&D creature known , plus animals, buildings, scenery, skies, etc. I don't have excel but I could make a text file up with item and game name if someone wanted to take the time to put it in excel to make an easy searchable list. Everything static should convert easy, it's just the kfs that are proving to give us trouble.

[Xenolith]

I think i can get it to work out okay. 

Speaking of NWN, are any of the community built critters usable in the game?  I'm think of stuff on the Neverwinter Nights Vault.  http://nwvault.ign.com/fms/TopRated.php?content=creatures

There is also a modern d20 community expansion.  http://nwvault.ign.com/d20/  Maybe some things coudl be pulled from this, as well?

[Randomdays]

The scorpion is custom built, pulled from the CEP. It's not an official release. The CEP takes tons of custom made items/creatures and organizes them into a package for installation, this prevents any conflicts from different custom downloads.

Anything custom built in the way of meshes should be able to be read in Gmax. You just need the Gmax scripts to recognize the mdl file types. Textures are a special type of dds but there's a converter to turn them into a standard
tga. The converter also rotates the image so it will have to be rotated back.

From what I 've seen, most NWN meshes are not single meshes, but many parts. I think the scorpion had over a dozen pieces. I'll have to test more to see how standard this. They do combine into a single mesh under gmax, but when I tried, it messed up the built in animation. Instead of moving/attacking, he just shook like he was paralyzed and trying to move.  Bearded would probably know a lot more about this.

There are some Blender scripts called Neverblender, but I couldn't get those to work. So right now its mdl into Gmax and nif back out.

[bearded]

finally got the rat working properly. it was the power setup that was messing me up. i did notice it needs to be moved up a tiny bit with nifskope.
edit instead of double post:
would anyone like the rat max file? someone could tighten up the physiquing and animations if they wanted.

[cmdrkoenig67]

That's great that you got him to work correctly, B.  Congrats!

Are you going to re-release him?

Dana

[bearded]

no, i meant that it was my fault, his powers weren't created right. the only thing he needs is a little boost up with nifskope, his feet and tail drag into the ground some. it's an easy fix tho, i could do it and re release.

[cmdrkoenig67]

My bad, I misunderstood.

Dana

[BentonGrey]

Good idea, but some of those are going to LONG lists. NWN has just about every D&D creature known , plus animals, buildings, scenery, skies, etc. I don't have excel but I could make a text file up with item and game name if someone wanted to take the time to put it in excel to make an easy searchable list. Everything static should convert easy, it's just the kfs that are proving to give us trouble.

That's a good idea.  I suppose we could also just put together a general list, like "NWN: Medieval buildings, D&D monsters, etc., Zoo Keeper 1: Copy and paste list from wiki, etc."

[Randomdays]

I've just completed a very long list of everything in WP 2 in a text file. Animals, buildings, statues, people, scenery and items. The only thing not available is the plantlife, as it is an unknown filetype.

Anyone interested, let me know. Maybe someone can host it in their group to make it easier to get to.

I'll be adding ZT2 next.

Someone mentioned a while back a making an fx of fish attacking for Aquaman.This might work



There's also another one of fish circling - this could be an fx of some kind of protective field around him.Anyone want to try working with this?

[Randomdays]

Weekly update, for those who are following.

Bearded released a nice rat after working on the keyframes for it. He's also working on a scorpion, a crocodile and some seated civilians to go in the cars I've converted.

Dana has over 20 houses to work with on some of the maps he's working on

I've converted over 20 vehicles and a dozen ships. The vehicles need a driver, resizing, destruct models and bounding boxes. The ships need resizing and bounding boxes. I was able to get a handle on bounding boxes this weekend and the complete nifs should start coming out soon. The WW2 submarine is almost ready.

[Xenolith]

Can any of the bipedal monster meshes from NWN be placed over existing meshes using nifskope?  I have a vision of placing a troll over the shurale mesh.

[Randomdays]

Stilll learning but I think if the skeletons are close enough that the kfs would work. When Bearded got the crcodile, the kfs for the raptor were close enough it would animate at least partially. If the skeletons aren't close, I think you would either have to reanimate it step by step like Bearded is doing with the scorpion, or remove one skeleton and fit the other one in. I don't think you can do that with nifscope, but I've got a tutorial somewhere on how to do it in Blender.

[cmdrkoenig67]

I have NWN and I was thinking it would be cool to get some of the things into FF, but I had no idea how to convert the mdl files to nifs.

Dana

[Randomdays]

Not sure how many different ways there are, but I installed Gmax, a free gaming version 3dMax. Then I found some scripts on Neverwinter vault that allow you to inport/export NWN mdl's into Gmax. The animation is buit into the mdl. Last, I found some nif import/export scripts for Gmax. They allow you to export for a number of games that use nifs, including FF1 and FFVTTR. So I import the mdl into Gmax and export the nif back out. Buildings, scenery and such are easy since they have no animation. Creatures would be harder.

If you need help setting up, let me know and I can walk you thru. After the first one it should be easy.

[Cyber Burn]

Weekly update, for those who are following.

Yup, following very closely. Thanks for the updates. 

[Amazo Version 2.2]

i just started reading this thread. youguys are doing some killer stuff hear. what your're doing will open a whole lot of doors for new maps,mods, and meshes.

[BentonGrey]

Could someone send me that alligator mesh?  It doesn't have to be rigged or anything, I just need the mesh itself.

[Randomdays]

Is the one that Bearded posted in his Yahoo group still there? If not, I can send it to you when I get home.

[BentonGrey]

Ohh, I completely missed that he posted it in his Yahoo group.  I can't seem to find it.  Which one is it in?

[Randomdays]

It was posted on Dana's animal request topic
that this was started in.

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/beardedinlair/files/testing%20area/

If it's not there anymore, let me know

[BentonGrey]

Thanks RD, I got it!

[Randomdays]

Another weekly update. Dealing with what I've learned and still learning, sent a WW2 submarine and a modern fishing ship for Dana to check out for his maps. Worked a lot with Blender, bounding boces and making things solid and have a better idea how things work on that end. For a machinami I'm working on, was able to get a classic Ford trimotor plane from sketchup into both FFVTTR and The Movies game, so I would say that the sketchup library might be open for use with FF.

Haven't heard from Bearded for a while so I took a look at animation. Converting kf's from either Blender or Gmax isn't working for me.They convert but don't work in character viewer.Still over my head in most things for building or converting. I was able to get the scorpion to shimmy and ahake in character viewer once his pieces were joined into a single mesh, or have the pieces do normal animation if not joined, but some of the pieces were misaligned, no list of actions on the kf list and trying to mess with it locked up the character viewer. I think I might be able to replace a skeleton and use the new skeleton's kf and have it work. I'll try to replace the snow leaopard's skeleton with big_cat_versatile or Bearded's rat and see if what happens.

I would say that unless there's something already out there with kf's like a fish or dolphin that I can switch with, those might be out of reach for awhile or some more help arrives. The good news for Dana and any other modders/map builders is there appears to be countless new buildings,scenery and vehicles of all types that can easily be imported into the game

[bearded]

i'm still around, randomly busy, random projects. i was thinking if you released the parts seperately, they could be of use to the community. different animal heads and things.

[Randomdays]

No problem Bearded. Even if all you did was the rat, that's already been a big help to Dana. Any help is appreciated.
As for heads/parts I haven't looked into that at all, but it looks like if anybody wanted something like that, the NWN meshes would be the best source for that. If the scorpion is an example of how thing are put together, you could probably grab a claw and put them on a characters arm and get a crab like creature.

It's lucky that the meshes are so easy to work with and unlucky the kfs aren't

I've tried looking over the simple kf for the Whale from EE3, which uses version 20 nifs, comparing it to a FFVTTR kf, and I can't see a difference. It works fine in nifskope, but using it in character viewer with a converted nif doesn't work. tried it with the unconverted kf and with the kf converted to FFVTTR from Gmax and Blender and still no good.

Sigh.

[bearded]

i put a lot of energy and effort into converting keyframes, and really, the easiest solution is using already made kf from ff. if you could use the different parts from nwn to skope onto the big cat, or the wolf, or even the godzilla, dragon, or voltron you might get some working animals.
i've started back on the croc. the hardest part at this point is the physiquing.
gonna make a squirrel next, i can see it being based on the rat with a bigger tail and some new animations.

[Randomdays]

I thought of that, but was going more for replacing the skeleton and then doing bone weight painting, but since I've never really done that or skoping, I'll have to see what happens when I can sit down and find some time. I have a good tutorial for for the first that I had bookmarked.

And unfortunely, I think that will work for a lot of animals, but not something like the scorpion which is pretty unique, or the fish and dolphins which have no ready made analog as far as I know. I was hoping that if I could get a simple kf for the whale, I could base other sea life off of it.

For the squirrel, ZT2 has a nif and skin if you want to take a look at it.

[cmdrkoenig67]

I thought of that, but was going more for replacing the skeleton and then doing bone weight painting, but since I've never really done that or skoping, I'll have to see what happens when I can sit down and find some time. I have a good tutorial for for the first that I had bookmarked.

And unfortunely, I think that will work for a lot of animals, but not something like the scorpion which is pretty unique, or the fish and dolphins which have no ready made analog as far as I know. I was hoping that if I could get a simple kf for the whale, I could base other sea life off of it.

For the squirrel, ZT2 has a nif and skin if you want to take a look at it.

Well, at least with the scorpion, Beard might be able to use the keys from his NWN spider conversion for most of them.  All that might be needed are some claw and tail/stinger animations (oh...And a fall animation, since the spider doesn't have one).

Dana

[GogglesPizanno]

I know bearded is working on his experiment in Unity right now, but did Dana or Randomdays ever get the static objects working in game? I was more interested in that over the animals -- no offense to Benton and his need to make Aquaman seem cool by giving him control over a deadly schools of goldfish

[Randomdays]

I've been working on a few things, but static objects seem to work fine. I took a WW2 sub from EE2, added a bounding box from a FFVTTR mesh, took it into  Blender, resized it and shaped the bounding box to the mesh. I exported it back to FFVTTR and placed it on a map and the nif was completely solid with the pc character walking on it and jumping onto the tower. I don't know if its normal, but the bounding box, while invisible in game, acts solid to the characters. If I left it as a box, a flying character would land on it and appear to be standing on thin air.

For damaged versions, I' m trying to take some of the game damage decals and resizing them to fit the mesh and applying them to the skin, so it looks like the item is damaged, holed, etc. but is still the same shape.

I'm unable to get FFEdit for FF to work on my XP machine or my WIn7 laptop so I'm only able to work with editing for FFVTTR, which works fine on both.

I've got about a dozen ships I'm finishing up, but the main thing with the static items is which ones to do? There's probably over a thousand buildings, plants and vehicles than can be converted and added. Probably a lot more since I figured out how to convert sketch models as well as the game models. I'll probably work on the ones I need for the projects I'm working on, plus any that are requested, but I think there's just too many to just convert them all.

So if anyone needs a item from a certain age, region or culture, I can most likely supply it. The original item probably wouldn't be too hard, but then you would have to add in resizing, bounding box and damaged version which complicates things.

As a partial list, I've got the following that seem to work importing/ exporting out of.

Sketchup
NWN
Zoo Tycoon 2
Wildlife Zoo 2
Empire Earth 2 and 3
Civ 4
Xplane
The Movies Game

Games like Sims 2, NWN2 or Morrowind might work but I think the polycount is probably too high for FF. I think a car for Sims 2 I looked at was about 15,000 polys.

For Benton's fish, there's a simple swim kf for the dolphin form of one of the Beast Boy/ Changling meshes. If I can grab that and attach it to a true dolphin mesh, it would at least have a swim action to it.