IWTE for Rome units and anims

[wilddog]

Posting a partial link here to the IWTE tool as it now supports RTW unit editing via Blender. The process is similar to the functionality introduced last year for Medieval 2 unit editing. As such it supports amendments to the full cas files (as per the format in model strat as well as the extracted skeleton and unpacked.cas files. It does not handle skeleton replacement and recreation of the unpacked skeleton file although it does handle the creation of new unpacked animated files.

Unlike other tools so far (at least to my knowledge) it does handle the Rome dual bone weighting system but that system is a parent child relationship only with several restrictions and is mainly used to support animated rotations.

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/downl...o=file&id=2741

[makanyane]

The instructions for this are being written up on IWTE - Units in Blender on the wiki.

The Cas Models page explains a bit more about the limited multi-bone weighting that is present in RTW unit cas models.


Please note if you're using this tool for animation editing we assume you're already familiar with the process of getting things into and out of game using XIDX or similar. IWTE will produce '.cas' files that will re-pack with XIDX. IWTE does not currently produce amended skeleton files, so your anim will have to match an existing skeleton.

BONE MOVEMENT:
IWTE does also allow (and read) bone pose movements (translations) on bones other than the pelvis/root - these are present in some vanilla files but not read or written by other tools, which only accept rotations. However, there are some flaws with using bone movements in game, if position data per frame is given for a bone, it also includes its distance from its parent bone, e.g. bone_head 'movement' in the animation will include its distance to bone_torso. This needs to be scaled at the same scale as the skeleton. If you have skeletons of two different scales attempting to use the same anim .cas which has position movements for the bones, one of them will be very out of line! If you'd like to see a demonstration of this give the Oliphant (4x scale version of a normal elephant) the elephant swimming animations, which have bone position frames.

The multi-weighted sections that are possible also do not behave well with radically moved bone positions, as they remain related to the original distance from the child bone see here.

[makanyane]

Latest version (IWTE_v21_05_B) supports the 2 bone to 1 vertex weighting that is possible for all body (not weapon) parts in Rome Remastered _lod0.cas level.