Nexus Buddy 2 - Granny Editor for Civ 5 2.5.3

Cool. I'm also confused why people are still baking textures since the Overwrite from BR2 makes it possible to do multi-mesh/multi-texture conversions. Not having to bake textures should make the conversion process quicker.

It would, and I don't bake textures every time. But it seems that a mesh assigned to only one vertex group (like a sword or a spear) is occasionally classed as "rigid" by the game and becomes invisible for whatever reason.
Also I don't like dealing with more than 2 textures if I don't have to, and baking textures lets me reskin them more easily.

Civitar said:

But it seems that a mesh assigned to only one vertex group (like a sword or a spear) is occasionally classed as "rigid" by the game and becomes invisible for whatever reason.

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Yeah, I saw somewhere that Nomad posted that each mesh needed a minimum of 2 vertex groups per mesh which would mean you would have to add an extra dummy bone for weapons to get them to work.

Deliverator said:

Yeah, I saw somewhere that Nomad posted that each mesh needed a minimum of 2 vertex groups which would mean you would have to add an extra dummy bone for weapons to get them to work.

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Dummy bones just to export? That could cause issues but I guess its a decent work around.

Thanks, by the way. I guess it had been a long time since i converted and forgot to overwrite with br2.

Deliverator said:

Yeah, I saw somewhere that Nomad posted that each mesh needed a minimum of 2 vertex groups per mesh which would mean you would have to add an extra dummy bone for weapons to get them to work.

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Didn't think of that.

I rather prefer baking now that I can, y'know, actually do it. Just personal preference speaking here.

WEIRD. Last week I was messing with some gr2s and tried the broken ones (marine, WW2 Infantry, Great Prophet). The ones you can't open with NexusBuddy and for some reason it gave me a handle exception and let me continue so I was able to save a few of them to normal gr2s. Now I'm kicking myself because I didn't do all the broken ones (WW1 bomber, fight, infantry) and haven't been able to replicate it.

Ekmek said:

WEIRD. Last week I was messing with some gr2s and tried the broken ones (marine, WW2 Infantry, Great Prophet). The ones you can't open with NexusBuddy and for some reason it gave me a handle exception and let me continue so I was able to save a few of them to normal gr2s. Now I'm kicking myself because I didn't do all the broken ones (WW1 bomber, fight, infantry) and haven't been able to replicate it.

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Yeah, pressing Continue and then doing Save As works for me. Just tried with the WW1 bomber and the model looks fine in GrannyViewer.

Deliverator said:

Yeah, pressing Continue and then doing Save As works for me. Just tried with the WW1 bomber and the model looks fine in GrannyViewer.

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How did you get the exception? I don't get continue any more I just get "look online for solution" or "close" now.

Ekmek said:

How did you get the exception? I don't get continue any more I just get "look online for solution" or "close" now.

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I'm on Windows 8. What OS are you on? Had a quick google around and you could try disabling 'Check for solutions' see here.

I'm on win7. Thanks for looking. I messed with settings and all it does is just give me a button to close the program.

It happened again. Seems when I click on an older leader gr2 and try to have nexusbuddy open then load the broken gr2 file I get the exception. Weirder is that my saves don't let me go back to it. So this time I exported all the nb2s to have. But getting in there I know why they are broken. For some reason nexusbuddy doesn't see their materials so the materials is referencing something that is blank in nexusbuddy.

One of the things I wanted to improve on was the support for 3D Leaders. Up to now the meshes created by performing Overwrite Meshes from BR2 didn't create vertices with Tangent and Binormal vectors. I suspected that this was the reason why the normal map textures weren't applying correctly so I had a go at adding these additional values. This has definitely lead to normal maps being applied to BR2 sourced meshes in a way that much more closely matches the quality of the vanilla leader.

Here is the vanilla Casimir leader (although with different scene/lights - I was playing around!):



This is the closest it was possible to get with the Blender 2.7x BR2 script and Nexus Buddy 2.1. Notice that due to the normal maps not appearing the beard, clothing and metal crests lack texture detail:



I've updated the BR2 export script to calculate new Normals, Binormals and Tangents for each vertex and then updated Nexus Buddy to read in these values and write them into the .gr2. After hooking up the original materials you can see the normal maps now appear for the beard, clothing and metal. As well as removing the crown I also upscaled the sceptre to prove I've modded the mesh in Blender. There a few differences due to the amount of processing and calculation involved in getting the model to and from Blender, but these are fairly minor and the texturing of the model is significantly improved.



There's some tidyup to do, and then I'll release a new version of the Nexus Buddy and the Blender 2.7x scripts. After that I should write a little tutorial to pull together all the info on 3D Leader modding.

Very cool. Makes my old stuff out dated.


Blender 2.7x has a lot of advatages. The only bummer is that it doesn't do nifs so I don't think we'll be able to get a civ4 leader nif converted to a civ5 gr2 like we do for units.

Well, you could import it into 2.49 first and then open it in 2.7x... unless there are things in Civ 4 leader nifs that would be lost by doing that?

Typhlomence said:

Well, you could import it into 2.49 first and then open it in 2.7x... unless there are things in Civ 4 leader nifs that would be lost by doing that?

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Yes, you can open 2.49 .blend files in 2.7x just fine. Also you can use File -> Append to pull elements from other blend files into your current Blender session. So the method for pulling in Civ 4 Leaderheads would be:

1) Import Civ 4 Leaderhead from NIF in Blender 2.49 and save to .blend.
2) Create Civ 5 Leaderhead template from Nexus Buddy > NB2 > Blender 2.7x (better to use 2.7x for this as the skeleton data is more reliably imported).
3) Use File -> Append to load in the Civ 4 meshes from the .blend made in step (1)

A couple more tests showing how the modded Casimir model looks using different lights/cameras/scenes.

With Ashurpanipal lights/scene:



With Askia lights/scene:

A couple of demo screenshots from testing the new Nexus Buddy 2.2.

First I wanted to test importing elements from Civ 4 Leaderheads. I successfully added the helmet from this Civ 4 Alexander model to Civ 5. I had adjust the hair mesh quite a bit in Blender to make sure there was no hair showing through the helmet.







Also I tested a reskin of Casimir. The limitation with reskins is that we can only access the lower resolution DX9 textures and them only via Texmod. If uMod adds support for DX10/11 then we might eventually be able to get the higher resolution textures.



I'll upload the 2.2 Nexus Buddy on Monday and aim to have the tutorials up by the end of July.

cool. It would be great to get the texture features added. Fun to see that Alexander head again, good times working that one!

Anyidea if converting civ4 leaders to fxsxml to gr2s has any chance of working. I'm really thinking its in the animation and how it interacts with the camera gr2 that is the problem

Ekmek said:

Anyidea if converting civ4 leaders to fxsxml to gr2s has any chance of working. I'm really thinking its in the animation and how it interacts with the camera gr2 that is the problem

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I take it you mean FBX -> GR2? I would think that the same process described in the Lion conversion tutorial should work. The skeletons and animations should be reliably converted via FBX and then you can use the BR2 overwrite to get the meshes converted intact. camera/animation interaction could be an issue, but I guess if you can use one where the leader is looking more or less straight ahead that could work.

A new version of Nexus Buddy 2 is now uploaded.

Latest Changelog: Nexus Buddy 2.2 - 8th June 2015

Changes to support 3D Leader modding:
* Added support for reading in vertex binormals and tangents from .BR2 (see latest Blender 2.7x scripts) - in order to create meshes than have binormal and tangent data you need to check the 'Leader Format for Overwrite from BR2" checkbox before performing the overwrite. The purpose of this is so that the normal texture layers appear correctly in game for Leaders - see here.

* Texture file paths are now automatically pruned to just the filename.
* Fixed issue where you couldn't assign a material when there were multiple materials with the exact same name e.g. Alexander.
* Can no longer open a BR2 file directly. Added Ovwr. BR2 button to the header - this is the only reliably way to import mesh data.
* Remove several old redundant features.

Latest Version: Nexus Buddy 2.2 - compiled under Windows 8.1

Latest Scripts for Blender 2.7x: Nexus Buddy 2 Scripts for Blender 2.7 - version 2