Campaign Creations

I need someone to help me convert the Defiler model in SC2 (in particular the version used in the Nova Campaign) to be useable in Warcraft 3. The only known reliable method to transfer the mesh and animations together uses a combination of some scripts for certain versions of 3DS Max which I don't have.

Transfering the mesh and textures is easy; doing it with the bones/animations intact is the tricky part which I don't have available to me and I would prefer not to have to try and re-rig the thing if I don't have to.

I can probably get it into 3ds max, at the least I'll try. I don't have experience configuring stuff for wc3 with Blinkboy's tools yet (I only messed with a Brazier so far). I don't have access to the defiler model, can you post it here or mail me it (malkor@gmail.com)? If you don't have it I can try to rip it later.

As long as it doesn't use an m3a it should be fairly easy.

IskatuMesk wrote:I can probably get it into 3ds max, at the least I'll try. I don't have experience configuring stuff for wc3 with Blinkboy's tools yet (I only messed with a Brazier so far). I don't have access to the defiler model, can you post it here or mail me it (malkor@gmail.com)? If you don't have it I can try to rip it later.

As long as it doesn't use an m3a it should be fairly easy.

I was under the impression that anyone with SC2 could get it, but then I remembered not everyone has access to Nova Covert Ops. Then again beside the skin I think the Covert Ops Defiler is otherwise identical to the textureless Defiler.

I included both of the generic death models in this because I don't know what the difference is (for whatever reason I can't view the animations in Galaxy Editor right now). The Acid and Fire deaths were self-explanatory so I left those out (who cares).

The textures I didn't include if only because I didn't think that to be too important, but maybe I'm blowing smoke. Converting the textures is easy.

The death animations may not work entirely if they are using particles. Those won't get imported (and wouldn't translate to wc3 anyways).

These are straight imports in max 2011 version which should be openable by anything later. They'll probably throw a spew of errors and you'll need to expand the timeline on the base model most likely, but they should "work".

I dunno if I have access to the covert ops dependencies or not, I would assume so, but finding them might be a bit annoying.

If there's any issues let me know and I'll see if I can fix them or not. One thing I remember is that sometimes taylormouse's importer likes to add some unusual keyframes to the end of the animation that warp the mesh, like translate it in a strange direction. Deleting those is usually safe once you find them, should they exist. That's because it can't handle GLStand and some other information.

Okay I probably shouldn't have been surprised that I couldn't open the max files. I don't have Max 2011 or the like.

I think perhaps the easiest thing is to try to export it as an mdx yourself (attached the exporter if you don't have it, it's supposed to work on your version of Max as well, but who knows?). I don't "think" there should be a problem with just straight exporting everything.

I'm not super-concerned about the particles (I know that they don't exactly translate) so if its easier to flat out remove them I'm okay with that. The most important part for me is the bones/animations being in a somewhat working order (deleting keyframes isn't hard even if it is time consuming).

Thanks.

Okay, it threw some warnings, but here we are. I changed the materials on the base model to standard materials just in case the exporter doesn't know what to do with the sc2 ones, but I didn't change the death materials. If they are broken I can change those (though most of them probably aren't used since they belong to particles that never got imported).

I left all settings at default so hopefully it exported properly.

That worked. At first I thought there was something wrong with the bones, but it turned out it was just the third party viewer I was using, they actually work fine. I think I can figure out the rest of this from here. Thanks for your help.

No problem.

Well you weren't kidding that the animations might be messed up, but I think a lot of it probably had to do with how Blizzard rigged it. The tail and the feet, for whatever reason, aren't linked to any bones, so naturally it makes some of the things look fucked up. In any case I managed to fix most of it (the animation for the tail for burrowing is really fucked up).

I also merged in one of the death animations which worked just the same way I did for the Viking a while back, so that wasn't so hard.

Only thing I haven't done is add any sort of particle effects, particularly for the burrow animation. It's otherwise mostly done.

I think wc3 has some controller limitations that may or may not be an issue for sc2 stuff, especially any of the newer/more complex ones. Though I do recall some of the feet looking weird in max. If they ever used physics/IK that undoubtedly doesn't get imported properly.