Okay. A lot of people want to see some new graphics, perhaps for their own heroes, or for creeps. As much as I like to consider myself capable of doing some 50 character conversions right now, I can't. I can't keep concentrated enough to do it. So, if you want to lend a hand to speed things up, or provide more incentive to get your suggestion bumped up on the to-add list, there's a way to do it.
However, you will need to own WoW to do this.
There are many WoW conversion guides out there, but none of them are any good and none of them cover what exactly you need to do in regards to character conversions.
I'll try to provide the most of the programs you'll need to do this work. However, I obviously can't provide photoshop or WoW.
Introduction
First off, you need to know what exactly you're trying to do. You're converting a 3d model from World of Warcraft to function in Wacraft 3. Since WoW is basically wc3 with some bells and whistles, this isn't as complex as it sounds. You don't need 3ds max, you don't need to be an expert modeller, all you need is the two games and some useful 3rd party utilities. One of these utilities happens to be in russian - don't be alarmed, I'll walk you through it.
First off you need winmpq. Grab it from
http://www.shadowflare.samods.org/.
You also need a WoW model viewer. Grab the latest wowmodelviewer from curse-gaming.com, or from my rar file.
Now. You've played WoW. You've got a character idea in mind. You might think it's as simple as exporting something from a viewer, but it isn't. You'll need to convert through several formats and use photoshop to mesh together your character's body gear. Shoulder armor and helmets are completely unique models I add to the model through the Sphere ability. More experienced mdl editors would merge the models, but I don't know how to do that and know one will give me a straight answer so that's not an option right now.
Let's say you want to do a mage in Magisters, like I'm about to do for my Arcane Division. She'll look a bit like this when she's done.
http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/1076/tut00qm1.jpg
I haven't yet decided on a weapon set for her, so we'll worry about that after.
The first step is already done. We've got an idea what to do. We already know the magister's gear is probably in the patch mpq of WoW, since it was added in a patch. The first mpq we check for stuff probably added in a patch is obviously this mpq. For the Burning Crusade, all of the standard mpqs including the vanilla patch mpq were merged into one massive archive and it seems winmpq cannot open this file. Some model viewers apparently can, however, but most are confused by the new file structure and won't function.
http://img246.imageshack.us/img246/4307/tut01it1.jpg
As my pink text states, I used winmpq's handy listing function to display just what I want - Dungeonmage_A_, which is the arcanist stuff. The purple versions are Sorcerer's, which doesn't really fit in the Loladin theme of bright goodness and may later be used in an Evil counterpart.
The _F and _M extensions on some of the files stand for Female and Male. Clearly, we're after the female-related textures.
Editor's Note - You actually need the glove texture under Hand, and the Robe Sleeve and and Arm Lower instead of the bracer. Otherwise the magisters will look really weird in the arm area. I didn't realize this initially.
All of the blps are obviously parts of a single big texture. WoW alphas these and places them on a single character texture, which we'll get to in a bit. First we now need the character model.
In the patch mpq, list the m2 files. At the very top will be the characters. Get the human female file.
Now, open up the older mdlvis in my file package. The old one has a black icon. Use the folder button and navigate to the location of your character's m2 file. Make sure you are viewing m2 files and open it. Don't do anything yet. You might get a popup window of some kind in confusing russian speak. Just click "Okay!" or the russian equivelent. Next, go to the place where file would be and locate the third selection, like this.
http://img183.imageshack.us/img183/2986/tut02ly6.jpg
Now, close that mdlvis, and open the new one, the one with the pretty purple icon. The reason we don't do the whole operation in the newer mdlvis is because it completely screws the bones of the model and it animates in a horrible screwy fashion. However, the new mdlvis makes and otherwise 4-hour job quite simple for us.
Now, first off there's something to know about these m2's. They are actually containing about 250 different models, each called a Geoset. Wc3 will put these together to create our wonderful little magister, but there's a slight problem. First off, about 230 of those geosets we don't need because there's a geoset for virtually everything the model can possibly have, robes, legs, bracers, gloves, you name it. You'd better have your model viewer still trained on the mage, because you're gonna need it soon.
To simplify things for us, the new mdlvis has a button which will nuke the majority of the geosets which are actually duplicates caused by a material glitch in the converter. This will reduce the number of geosets to generally around 50. If you're only doing a monster or other mob and not worrying about characters, this is the last real model step you need to do. You can save and go on to textures.
http://img120.imageshack.us/img120/9355/tut03nc6.jpg
However, for our mage here, more must be done.
Glancing at the modelviewer image high above, you'll probably tell a big difference between it an our model. Well, first off, we can't see anything but the verticies. Now, read the text in this image to understand what to do next.
http://img120.imageshack.us/img120/4357/tut04ne3.jpg
Now we get to the fun part.
As you may have guessed, the numbers with checkboxes next to them bellow the second function we just disabled are the actual geosets. With the function off, we can display only the ones we have checked. Now we can compare our shaded (Or textured, if you did the texture part already) model to the one in the viewer. We will click these boxes off and on to locate the pieces of models we want to keep. Leave the ones we want on. It should look like this when you're done.
http://img240.imageshack.us/img240/3223/tut05bo0.jpg
Now, select the boxes one by one from first to bottom, including the ones we have selected. That means we should have all of the boxes we didn't have selected, and the ones we previously had selected to be unselected.
http://img183.imageshack.us/img183/5836/tut06mc4.jpg
After having nuked the vertices you don't want, the editor auto deletes their corrisponding geosets, leaving us with just the stuff we want. Press the save button, and the majority of the model editing is behind us. If we happened to have deleted something we didn't want to delete, we can redo these steps easily enough.
You might be asking, "but there's no shoulder or helm stuff!" That's right. The character models have attachment points that WoW uses to attach them. Usually Wc3 can use these same points, too, but sometimes the character doesn't convert with attachment points set to the right areas and this costs us quite a bit of time to correct.
Now we have a character model almost ready to look at and begin diddling with. Now we can move back to the textures. Where ever you saved your textures and shoulders/helm, there is a big mess of directories. The easiest thing to do here is to copy all of those files out of their individual little holes and stick them all into one place, then slide all of the blp files onto the blp2totga exe, which will auto convert them to 32-bit tga files and toss them in the same directory they originated from.
Make note this batch conversion process is not perfect and sometimes the converter will anal some files, and photoshop will give an error when attempting to open them. Simply reconvert that particular file alone and it should work fine.
Before we can use these files, we need our character base file. This is where mywarcraftstudio comes in handy.
MWCS has the advantage that it can see the texture files before you export them, but the exporter flips them when it exports them and can do other weird shit at times. Run it, open the texture.mpq, and navigate to our logical folder - the human texture area. Immediately you're bombarded with a huge list of blp files. Each of these is a facial feature or body texture or face, with each type of color variant. WoW needs to dig through this every time it loads a character!
Grab hair00_05 (Right click it, extra to), then go into the Female area. Grab HumanFemaleSkin00_04.blp. It may not be the exact color of our preview, but it'll be close enough. If we want to grab a different face texture, grab one with **_04 in it, to match the color of the base skin. Be sure to grab both the face upper and face lower versions.
Now, we have our textures. Run photoshop, and be prepared for the biggest and possibly the most confusing (for newbies) step.
If you have some photoshop experience, this will be fairly straight forward. If not, you could be in trouble. If you use paint shop pro, you can still do this, but you can't do a 32-bit conversion (at least no psp version I know of can.) It NEEDS to be a 32-bit tga in its final form or else the blp conversion will anal it.
You probably know what to do, now. You've got a body texture, and a boatload of gear textures, each for a place on the body. We get to play doctor, in a way, sticking each piece of armor to the appropriate location. I'll use my noob photoshop skills to try to explain where each piece goes. It's best if you have snap on, so the pieces will "snap" together, and make your job easier.
First off, open your newest tgas besides the hair, the ones extracted using wc studio, and flip them vertically with rotate canvas. Select all in your face parts, copy them, and paste them on your base skin. Move them into position as you can probably figure out on your own. Snap will make this easier.
Now, I'll make a big picture to show the next step. You are basically copying and pasting pieces of armor, using the magic wand tool to remove any otherwise transparent parts. It'll be up to you to figure out which parts are originally transparent or should be. Usually they are a single base color, usually black.
Here is a big image to display this process a bit easier.
http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/2450/tut07ju1.jpg
Editor's note - As previously mentioned the sleeve textures and glove textures I used for this particular example are the wrong textures, and should have been from the robe and hands sections respective, so they'd look a bit different and more uniform, like the example bellow.
Once done your skin texture should look like this.
Save a psd and a 32-bit tga. You'll have a psd with all of the layers to come back to later for whichever reason, and a tga that we will soon need.
Now, open the hair graphic, flip it, and resave it. Open wc image extractor II, use open image, open these images, and goto save. Save them as .blp files with the names -
Magisterskin.blp
Magisterhair.blp
With 100% quality.
Now, open your new .mdl file in Notepad or another text editor. Use Control F, or Find, to find "Textures", and find a section of text that looks like this.
Code: Select all
}
Textures 3 {
Bitmap {
Image "HumanFemaleBody.blp",
}
Bitmap {
Image "HumanFemaleHair.blp",
}
Bitmap {
Image "HumanFemaleCape.blp",
}
}
Change it to look like this.
Code: Select all
}
Textures 3 {
Bitmap {
Image "Magisterskin.blp",
}
Bitmap {
Image "Magisterhair.blp",
}
Bitmap {
Image "ponies\LOL.blp",
}
}
Ponies\LOL.blp is the blank alpha file used to blank out things or just to stick in place of textures that we're not using but can't be assed to remove the material for. This file is included with your package. LOL PACKAGE. Make sure all of these files are in the mdl's directory, save LOL.blp, which should be in the Ponies directory. Save the Mdl, and open it in wc3 model editor.
So everything seems pretty sharp after I fixed my texture files (My sleeves and gloves were the wrong files initially). The majority of the work is behind us. All that's left now is animations and the shoulders/helm.
I'm pretty confident you can do the shoulders and the helm yourself, now. You've got the m2s, you've got the blps, and you know what to do with them. For human male and human female, you won't need to resize the shoulders. However, for larger characters, like Orcs and Tauren or Drenaei male, it's a good idea to give the shoulders a rescale of at least 1.2. Do this by entering the model editor, selecting all of the vertices and going into scaling under transformations.
Make note you
can just convert the shoulders and helms using the newer mdlvis, since there's no animations to worry about it breaking.
Also note if you decide to do weapons and shields, the reflects can be alpha'd out since wc3 doesn't seem to support the dynamic movement of the textures, like WoW's "cubemap" emulation does.
For now, though, we need only worry about the character's animations. Open both the sequence manager and the animation controller under Windows.
Now there is a few things to keep in mind.
This unit will be a ranged caster. The attack animations will not suit its weapon. We should rename all of the attack animations to something wc3 won't read, like "aaaaaa". It doesn't matter if these names are duplicates because wc3 will never read them.
Wc3 reads most anims with "stand", "attack", and "spell", and will mix them with others. This isn't good when you have about 20 stand animations, none of which are any useful for idle standing (various stances and such). Rename these as well.
The normal walk anim is actually walking. We want the running animation. So, rename walk to something like wwwwww, and rename walk fast to walk.
You can use just about any animation for any slot. To make priests dance randomly, I renamed their dance cinematics to stand animations. However, make sure they have "non looping" selected, or it'll cause glitches.
Rename the animations according to what will look proper for each slot. Note that special text, like "kick", wc3 won't read and I won't be able to use it in the game.
Wc3
will read "Stand, attack, slam, throw, channel, spell, work, alternate, morph..." and probably some others I don't know about. It will sometimes read sequences with these names and an unusual name with them, like stand fifth, but this doesn't seem to be very consistent and I don't know if I can use it to my advantage. Be absolutely sure to rename all decay animations. Rename the portrait talk animations so you don't get that annoying portrait constant talking thing.
As for giving the models sound events, that is currently beyond my knowledge. I can add a sound event, yes, but to actually determine when it will play is currently beyond the scope of my know-how.
Use Stand Ready to name a sequence for the "in combat" attack stance that is used between attacks.
You can place alternate at the end of names to make alternate versions. For example, you can make the dancing anims alternate so that some kind of morph ability can take advantage of them. You can also do this for some kind of weapon switching ability, say from two hander to a dual wielder.
After a bit of inspecting you will discover making a character use a bow would be ultimately impossible to make look right without merging animations. Merging animations is something far, far beyond my current know-how and I'm afraid I can't offer any advice.
After you've got your models ready to go, convert them to mdx by using war3fileconverter.
After you've got mdx's, working blps, and have tested it by importing it into wc3 and making sure it all works, give me a ring and let me know you've got something ready. If you've got any questions or comments, feel free to tell me on AIM or post here.
Program package -
http://www.upload.campaigncreations.org/goatporn.rar
HKS has a more streamlined method to doing these things, and there's probably a lot I've forgotten that could make it a bit easier or a bit more simple. This is just to get you started, and I'm sure he'll point out my blatant mistakes soon enough.
