Major Mesh/skin release possible...with help

[bearded]

here he is, a completed project. there are a few things not quite perfect, but a good start. nothing noticeable ingame, anyway.
all i want to request is some different colors, black, white, grey, brown, etc.
http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/Beardedinlairmeshes5/files/animals/
rat.zip

[Randomdays]

Boy, that was quick. He's great Bearded ! Thanks so much for helping with this project.

[cmdrkoenig67]

Holy rodents!  That new rat mesh conversion is great, Beard!  I might make a few skins for him, B.

Dana

[bearded]

are there any scorpion nifs? also, any fish for aquagrey?

[Randomdays]

I think there is a scorpion. Will look when I get home. Tons of fish. Both ZT2 and WP2 came out with an aquatic animal addon pack. Sharks, dolphins, walruses, octopus, etc.

[bearded]

the rat still can't hit anybody with his melee...his str is normal and the damage is low, that should register, that's not the problem. it's not size, cause i made him bigger. maybe the range setting on the melee power? i have it at 1 5, just like everyone else, maybe something different?
also, my friend mentioned that melee_3 looks  like he is sneezing, so now i'm imagining a range, cone, or area with disease as damage.

[Randomdays]

maybe check out and see how male_tiny works in game and see if he can hit with melee. if he can, maybe copy his setup

I have a scorpion that someone imported to The Movies from Fallout 3. It's about 7000 polys, but it was turned into a prop - no skeleton



On a possibly brighter note, Being a big D&D fan from 1st edition on, I've got a full install of both NWN 1 and 2 on my laptop. NWN 1 is close to FF in polycount, but uses a version of mdl mesh and tga for texture. Not sure about what the animation files are.

Bearded, you said you have Max? If you look here;

http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=GlobalSearch

and do a search for mdl, you'll see a bunch of plugins for max to open mdl files.

The best is probably nwmax, which has a version for gmax and another for 3ds max

I'm downloading gmax and the gmax version of nwmax to see if I can figure it out

I've converted the Fallout 3 mesh to a nif if you want to check it out, plus i've extracted a bunch of different sized amd textured scorpions from NWN if you want to try the max plugins and give it a shot.

[BentonGrey]

Great work Bearded!  I just tried out the converted mouse from the other game, and he works perfectly.  Not only that, he looks great.  You were able to adapt the raptor's keys, hmm?  How did that work?  Was it easy to convert them?  If so, then we should be able to use those basic keys for most biting-type animals. 

I'm excited about this, having a useable rat model in the game means that the Rat King finally has some minions...now all I need is a Rat King!  Also, Liberty Bay's future story arc involving rats has minions that can be scalled to various sizes.  Excellent!

[Randomdays]

I was able to get gmax up and running, installed the scripts to read Neverwinter models and was able to import a scorpion. For exporting, I've got the obj scripts and I'm trying to set them up, but is there anything easier? I tried tempest, but it errored out - I guess you need Quake 3 installed for it to work.

Edit - may have found the answer. niftools has a max plugin for nifs. If it works, I could go right from gmax to nif.

[Randomdays]

Bearded, I couple of thoughts. On the rat, maybe try making a hero rat and put him up against another rat and see if they can hit each other. If not male_tiny, take some other mesh, like the raptor, and shrink it down and see if it has the same problem.

If you're still working on the male civilian in a car for me, can you send a seperate nif of him in the sitting position with hands up in the grab wheel position. I could just take him and plug and play him into the other vehicles. The only one that ought to be different is the army jeep. It would probably need a soldier in it.

Thanks and good luck with the rat. Hopefully I should have some scorpions by tomorrow.

[bearded]

benton, does the rat attack properly for you?
i'm going to make a driving animation also, and export it with that included.
if you can send me nwn scorpion, i can use the shape and the animations, i just have to write the animation sequence and make sure they are set for the proper keyframes. it's quite a chore, but can be done. my original plan was to take the shape and apply it to the ant keyframes, and custom make the tail movements.
the rat animations did come from raptor, but i had to adjust a lot. size, shapes of the bones, and the movement, all the front leg run movement is custom. the hardest part is the physiquing. the good news is, every new animal i make, i can base on the rat keyframes and improve as i go, each better than the last. the way i like to do projects. the bad news is i have to physique each animal. oh well. anybody want a squirrel next?

[Randomdays]

Bearded, How would driving animations work? Since vehicles have no kfs, would the driver be a seperate nif in the car nif, riding along inside? If so, and he's scripted like the civilians in game, he could panic and run away, which would be great if he could get out of the car, and strange to see him struggling inside the car.

Also, if not too much trouble, could you do the same for female civilian? Either as passenger or driver.

For the scorpion, I have to get home and see about installing the max plugin from nifstools and finding what the animation file is in NWN. Do you want the original mdl file with its anims to work with in gmax, or the converted nif files if I can get them?

[bearded]

all i need are the mdl files, animations not really necessary, but i could add them. i was talking about making the animations for driver and exporting them as part of the character nif, not as seperate animations. you should be able to simply skope the nif into the car, and the animations will remain intact. think of it like the animated fx that's been created, like the various golem attacks.

[cmdrkoenig67]

anybody want a squirrel next?

Uh oh...Squirrel Girl fans will go nuts....Groan, I didn't just say that, did I?  You did a great job on the rat keyframes, B.

Dana

[laughing paradox]

This is really exciting stuff and a great way to inject new life into the game! Great going, you guys. I'm really looking forward to the things you're able to create using this new information.

[Randomdays]

Thanks LP

Bearded, a rar with various sized scorpions is on its way. Doing some lookup on NWN, I think the animation might be stored inside the mdl file.

Not sure if you're familiar with NWN in max or not, but this is what i've found so far.

When opening in Gmax with nwmax installed, it will ask for nwnmdlcomp.exe . This program turns a regular mdl into a ascii version that GMax can use. I can't get gmax to see the file, so i'm having to do it manually. I had to make a directory, put nwnmdlcomp.exe in it with a front end and convert there. Once I did that, Gmax accepted the converted file.

I'm having problems on my computer using any version of niftools nif max plugins past 2.15 - any version past that cause a crash. Latest version I could find is 3.5.5

Testing now to see where I get.

Edit  - the scorpion looks good in gmax with 4 different views. Don't know how to combine all the parts into 1 nif. Tried to export as a nif with a single kg and it crashed the program. tried without the kf and it worked, but nifscope and blender showed it as a bunch spikey parts, nothing close to a scorpion

Any help?

[cmdrkoenig67]

I think Bearded can handle it, RD...I think he ported his big spider mesh from NWN a few years ago.

Dana

[Randomdays]

That was him with the spider? cool.

Wasn't sure if he had ever worked with NWN files or not, so that's good to know.

But trying to learn as much as I can also. Bearded's by himself so far and if I can help then that could speed things up. Since the last post I've already learned a few more things and was able to export a complete scorpion nif out of GMax. Not textured yet, but working on it. He's about 1200 polys and looks like a good fit for FF.

Learning is fun!

[Randomdays]

Bearded, looking over the scorpion files I sent you, the dds files turned out to be portraits. The textures turned out to be in a different hak file. They've been found, converted to tga with a nwn converter as it turns out NWN's dds are different from normal ones, and unrotated, as the converter rotates them as it converts. Besides the normal skin, there's also 2 alternates - red and green

I've done some learning on Gmax and can do a few things like joining, texturing and converting into a FF nif. I notice though that the nif doesn't appear to have a skeleton and the animations in Gmax seem to work only before joining the parts together.

It looks like converting an animated creature from NWN to FF is as complicated as the other games, but if there's something easy that can be done that can speed up conversion let me know. Though once again it looks like converting static objects, buiilding and scenery should be easy.

Dana, there should be tons of medievil items for you to use from NWN, considering what type of game it is.

[BentonGrey]

Alright guys, what's the status of that gator?  I've got an offer from a skoper to take a crack at Leatherhead, and he wanted to know if the gator might be useable in a skope.

[Randomdays]

The gator is still over with Bearded.

[bearded]

my weekends are usually tied up. i know what to do with the gator, i just have to make time for it.

[Sioux City Dynamo]

a squirel would be awesome! I am a huge fan of squirel girl!....hmmmmmm

[BentonGrey]

No hurry.  I'm not entirely sure what the skoper wants to do with it, so it might not need to be animated or anything.

[Xenolith]

Regarding rat skins.

The orignal skin is a repeating fur pattern.  It looks fine.  However, I started a black rat last yesterday, making a wiremap in Nifskope, and there seem to be a weird thing going on with the tail section where the tail meets the rats body.  Now, I think I can work around it, but out of curiosity, is there a way to redo the skin layout on a mesh using Nifskope?  It would be better if there was less stretching in certain areas.  If not, I'll have to change the approach I first took and go with something more like what the orginal skin looks like.  The same thing happened with Arnim Zola, I started skinning him but couldn't figure out what the wire map was showing me.

[style]

Nope it does not need to be. 

[Panther_Gunn]

For the scorpion keyframes -- take a look at the two Brood meshes.  I'm fairly certain that one of their melee movements makes it look like the tail over the back is moving in for a hit.  I think it was based off of the ant, and it might be adjusted in a way that it could make things easier on whoever works on it for a scorpion.  Would still need something added for claw attacks, though.

[bearded]

i appreciate all the kind words. important to me.
just created a new fx, shotgun blast. it uses a cone shaped particle system. and it made me realize, if there a small animal, like parina, i could easily make a particle fx with it, for a ranged attack, or maybe even an area attack. aquaman surrounded by a cloud of biting animals? i think i can even make them have a whirlpool effect.

[Xenolith]

The particle cone would be awesome for Porcupine alone.  I was never really satisfied with my cone effect.

[Randomdays]

For the rat, NWN has at least 3 different types that i remember; giant rat, sewer rat and dire rat. They're for a differnt mesh, but I could send the skins over if anyone wanted to try to cut and paste them on

For the squirrel, I think I have two different meshes, WP2 and NWN. Will have to check to make sure. The WP2 would be a 20.0 nif and NWN a mdl that would have to be worked in gmax or converted over.