scaling skeletons

[oscarreeve]

Hi,
We have a dwarf model for Narnia Total War, but I was wondering how do u scale the skeleton so it fit’s the model, because of course the normal human skeleton will not fit the dwarf model which is smaller.
Thankyou

P.S I know forth age total war and Lord of the rings both have dwarfs so I know it is possible

[Publius]

It's mainly text based actually, if I remember right. I've never done it before though, so I couldn't tell you exactly.

[DisgruntledGoat]

Its purely text based. Well, not exactly, you don't edit text files. You have to create a new skeleton and then give it a new scale number. Your model cannot, I repeat, cannot be the thing you have scaled down. It has to fit the dimensions of the default CA bone structure (the bones you see in 3ds max when you import a model) and it has to be weighted to those bones. What the game does is take this model (which in reality would be out of proportion and too big in 3ds) and scale it according to the scale you set for the skeleton (the skeleton is seperate from the bones you see in 3ds max and is kinda like a listing of the animations etc for the bones to follow). This part has to be done by "hacking" the skeleton file. You need the xidx animation/skeleton extractor and the xidxshell.bat to do this. Extract the skeletons, then copy the type you want (say fs_swordsmen) renaming it (say fs_dwarf) then running the xidxshell.bat and type the scale command

scale fs_dwarf 0.75

This scale you give the skeleton HAS to match the scale you find for the unit in the descr_model_battle.txt

This was a real brief discussion on using the xidx tool. For a more indepth tutorial look at this:

http://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=53470

[oscarreeve]

Ok thankyou for the reply's.

I will test it over the weeked probabbly as the dwarf is still under construction

[Jubal_Barca]

I've got chaos dwarfs as crew for a WHTW hellcannon, and the above worked fine for me...

http://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=53470