Basic modeling questions

[Red Harvest]

Ok, now that the secret to importing in GMAX has been revealed, I've been fiddling with a couple of small things on existing models. What I need to ask is if I make small discrete changes should they work without some sort of reskin, re-animation, etc?

Specific examples:
1. Deleting the shield of a unit (such as skirmishers to make them a chariot/elephant model.)
2. Stretching the Indian elephant's tower to the same size as the African elephant model now used.

In neither of these am I adding anything. In the first it is a simple delete. In the second it is a simple resizing of one portion, without changing the actual vertices count etc. So I assume the existing skins will still work without any changes.

I ask because the next step would be asking someone with 3Dmax to export the saved GMAX files for me so that I can test them in game.

[Monkwarrior]

Specific examples:
1. Deleting the shield of a unit (such as skirmishers to make them a chariot/elephant model.)
2. Stretching the Indian elephant's tower to the same size as the African elephant model now used.

In neither of these am I adding anything. In the first it is a simple delete. In the second it is a simple resizing of one portion, without changing the actual vertices count etc. So I assume the existing skins will still work without any changes.

I don't know how to model, but I did the first example for ITW 1.0.
Simply take the .dds texture of the skirmisher, select alpha channel and make the shield area black (transparent).
Save with another name and reassign the texture in descr_model_battle.

[tFighterPilot]

Deleting the shield shouldn't be a problem, but if you want to stretch the tower, you will need to check the weighting. The textures should be fine as long as you don't add or delete polygons.

You don't need to reanimate anything, the animations are in different files.