RTW -> MTW2

[TSD]

Hello! This is my first tutorial here. Attached in a zipped word doc. This is a step by step tutorial on converting a RTW cas to a MTW2 mesh and setting it up to function in game. Would like any experienced modders to take a look and offer feedback, especially on any statements I make that may be false, as I based them only on my personal experience with this conversion process. I decided to do this, since I couldn't really find any coherent single source for converting RTW units to MTW2 and would like to save others who want to get Roman units in game, but are not experienced modellers the headache of a fruitless search.

Huge thanks to Knight Errant, else I would still just be dreaming about RTW units on the MTW2 engine.

Of course, below an example of the final product. (I ended up spending a week completely overhauling byzantium changing the UI, unit cards faction symbols descriptions banners and now have a fully immersed roman faction)

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Link to supporting document

[J@mes]

This will come in handy good work, how long does it take in time wise to port a unit in.

[TSD]

This will come in handy good work, how long does it take in time wise to port a unit in.

A single unit can probably be done in about 15 minutes. Not having to map the textures in ms3d really helps. Ive converted so many rtw units at this point, I can get it from cas -> finished mesh in less than a minute. Then its just heading to the modelDB and pointing to your new mesh and new texture (if your replacing an existing units model) Then some tweaking if the model your using doesnt have the same weapon load out of the unit you are replacing in the descr_unit and modelDB, but this is pretty easy to do since, you can just copy paste attributes, from units that do have similar weapons.

Another thing is, which I did not include in the tutorial but may add, is that your standard legionaire doesnt hold his shield right with the standard mtw2 animations. When hes guard he will hold it horizontally. I fixed this by adjusting the shields default position on the model in milkshape. Below is an example of what I did.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

This is how the shield sits on the model by default


This is how I altered it so it looks how a legionaire would carry his shield when your in game, you will see what I mean when you get a unit in there.

I created a whole Roman faction from byzantium, Symbols, ui, banners, all units from RTW, unit cards the whole shebang, only problem I have run into is getting strat map models converted to MTW, but I retexed them to look more "roman" so I dont think it will bug me too much. It took me about a week, a few hours a day, to convert and set up all those units and alter all the UI aspects of the faction.

[daxter]

well amazing good work! this would come very in handy for a mod!!!!!!!!

[Riannorix]

EXELLLENT!!!!

It's more thime 2 year i succeed to make it, and i was succeeding but if my mesh got an animation in game, some part of the body were invisible!

but one thing you forget in your tuto:

For animation, i think the unit must be restructured by reaging! it's mean to assign the bones to group!

ifnot very nice, your work! +rep (shamme! i though i'll give you 100)^^

[Rorarii]

Excellent work .. can you convert meshes not found in M2TW like chariots, slingers and wardogs .. and what about texture quality, do they need revamping to M2TW quality?

I'll download it now and have a quick look .. but I'm no modeller/skinner expect.

R

-----------

additional, looks pretty straight forward, will give it ago tomorrow.

Thanks

[TSD]

EXELLLENT!!!!

It's more thime 2 year i succeed to make it, and i was succeeding but if my mesh got an animation in game, some part of the body were invisible!

but one thing you forget in your tuto:

For animation, i think the unit must be restructured by reaging! it's mean to assign the bones to group!

ifnot very nice, your work! +rep (shamme! i though i'll give you 100)^^

not sure what you mean here. Pretty sure I included everything I did in the tutorial, and it worked. But feel free to elaborate here, if its something that will enhance the finished prodouct. Currently I am working on resizing the units, as you will notice (it took me a little while) the roman units are ever so slightly smaller, than their MTW2 counterparts. I am currently working on fixing this.

[Rorarii]

Apart from something wrong the normal map (shinny armour but dark faces) .. here are my "children of the night" - Barbarian Headhunting Maidens!! .. and they prefer heading knights!! .. Err, i mean, BEheading knights.




As you can see the textures are poorer quality than M2TW and probably need redoing but apart from that small point .. ETRUSCAN CHARIOTS, HERE WE COME!

R

[Eothese]

From the downloaded tutorial...

Open the tool by selecting the GameObjectApplicationToolbox python file

How do I do this part?

[midnite]

I have the same question as Eothese. I don't see any executable file. Does the extension of the GameObjectApplicationToolbox python file have to be changed. Thanks in advance.

[Rorarii]

".py" is a python file, no EXE required, just install python. Then access GameObjectApplicationToolbox through a desktop icon.

Download here -

http://www.python.org/



R

[midnite]

".py" is a python file, no EXE required, just install python. Then access GameObjectApplicationToolbox through a desktop icon.

Download here -

http://www.python.org/



R

Thank you sir!

[midnite]

Hello! This is my first tutorial here. Attached in a zipped word doc. This is a step by step tutorial on converting a RTW cas to a MTW2 mesh and setting it up to function in game.
[/spoiler]

Thanks for your tutorial. I have had some success and also failure.




???? missing textures ???




I am not sure what I missed in your tutorial???

[TSD]

Thanks for your tutorial. I have had some success and also failure.




???? missing textures ???




I am not sure what I missed in your tutorial???

The missing body parts (I assume thats what your talking about) have to do with the group comments. aparently a good chunk of your groups belong to the same class, they need to belong to different classes or else it will randomly decide which members of said class to show.

group comment looks like:
----------------------
body
legs
0
----------------------
Body is the class, make sure each group has a different class in milkshape. and this is explained in the tutorial, in slightly more detail.

[midnite]

The missing body parts (I assume thats what your talking about) have to do with the group comments. aparently a good chunk of your groups belong to the same class, they need to belong to different classes or else it will randomly decide which members of said class to show.

group comment looks like:
----------------------
body
legs
0
----------------------
Body is the class, make sure each group has a different class in milkshape. and this is explained in the tutorial, in slightly more detail.

Thank you sir for your answer

[Rorarii]

Ok, I just tried to convert a RTW greek chariot and got this ..



And Sythed Chariot ..



Obviously a bug ..and wheres the horses .. and the charioteer?

KnightErrant ... HELP!!!!

R

[Riannorix]

i believe that the chariot and the horses are two part arent associated ^^

if not, i mean you must use the rigging, because you import a skeleton (from med2) into the model of rtw to get the same structure that any unit from med (i speak about bones and group comment)!!

[KnightErrant]

@Rorarii,
Thanks for answering questions while I was on vacation. I never tried
the converter on chariots (or war dogs, pigs, etc. from RTW). The problem
is that models and animations are so intertwined. RTW supported chariots
but M2TW doesn't. Bwian had a lot of chariot threads from last fall about
this. Without a specific chariot animation family you have to go with what
the game gives you, which is basically horse, camel, or elephant.

So let's say you'll use the horse family to animate your chariots. You can
look in descr_skeleton.txt to find which anims the game supports, run,
walk, charge etc. If you don't go to extra bone skeletons then you have
to make your models use a single horse skeleton with animation, but offset
your models left and right to use it. Bottom line is two horse chariots
possible but four horses no way, the offset is too large and the z-components screw up the animations.

Wish I had time to draw a nice picture in Photoshop for this, but pretend
you have a picture of the horse skeleton centered on the origin with the
head facing out along the z-axis (Milkshape coords). A two-horse model
would have two horse meshes offset left and right from the origin. As
the skeleton is animated, mostly by x-rotations to make the skeleton
legs move in a walk or run, the offset meshes will also move. Any
z-rotations though, will be amplified by the distance that the left and
right meshes are offset from the origin. So basically, you need to make
a model (maybe based out of RTW) that has two horses, a chariot mesh,
and then there's the whole CaozSceneCustomAttibeNode string in the
animation .cas files where the rider is attached to the horse that might
need adjusting to make this work. Bwian and I never got this to work
so this is in the speculation stages only.

I know I didn't address the problem of the model not converting properly,
but I thought it was best to point out all the other problems down the
road about chariots. It's always the animations that govern whether
a unit can be put in-game or not, not the model itself.

If you really want to pursue chariots, I'd try this as a warm-up exercise.
Convert a horse and then select the mesh (meshes) and move them over
to the left. Then copy and duplicate and move over to the right. See
how they move. Then copy the chariot from RTW and plunk it in and
assign it to bone_saddle or whatever the root bone is for a horse.
This is the thing that has to be animated realistically to get it to work.
If you can make it walk, run, charge, etc. (especially turn and so forth)
then you've gone further than Bwian and I did. That's all I think of on
the subject right now.

[Rorarii]

Thanks KE .. my b'wain exploded when trying to understand that 3rd paragraph.

If better people than I tried and failed then I won't push it any further. Romulus will just have to conquer latium on horse-back!

Thanks all for their effort in bringing RTW units into M2TW.

R

[KnightErrant]

@Rorarii
You're very kind, but my intent was not to dissuade you, but to entice you.
The chariot problem is one of those "pick the hill you want to die on" problems
that would be so cool if someone got it to work. I'm just going to post a
couple of screenies of the problem, and leave it there. If someone is
interested, there's more research to be done. If you convert a mount and
offset it a bit you get this picture:



Now do a animmerge with the walk animation and you see this ugly anomaly:



That's the z-rotation problem that Bwian wrestled with. This can be solved
by minimizing the x-offset to reduce the problem, and also by converting the
animation to text, reducing any z or y rotations, converting the animation
back, and trying again.

The next problem that will be run into is making the chariot. If it gets assigned to bone_saddle_a it will bounce up and down as the horse moves.
So you need an extra bone skeleton, call it bone_chariot. If you don't do
anything else, the wheels won't move, so you need two more bones,
bone_rwheel and bone_lwheel, so the wheels revolve as the chariot moves.
So now you're down the path of extra bone skeletons. But this isn't bad,
King Kong did Mumaks which are super large elephants, Bwian did the dwarves, etc. so that isn't an unsolvable problem.

The main thing never resolved is, how do riders get attached to mounts?
Horses only have one CaozSceneCustomAttribNode in their .cas files so only
one rider can be attached. Elephants have five nodes so maybe chariots
have to be animated with the elephant family if you want a driver AND
a fighter. There's some floats around these strings that probably tell
how the rider gets attached and where but never got to that point.

Another thing, when horses turn, they turn about their root_bone. This
works for horses, but it apparently looks silly for chariots, so the root_bone
needs to be moved backwards to be at the center-of-mass of the chariot
or it won't turn realistically. You can tell from this that a lot of experimentation has to be done to get chariots into the game. Even
if it never worked, there is an awful lot of things that would be learned
along the way. (Sorry, that's my hook, kind of weak at the end.)