Does anyone want to help rig this leader? Alaric, of the Visigoths

About 10 months ago I was working on a "top secret" project about making the first custom animated leader in Civ 5. It was an ambitious as hell project, but I went with it, and spent hours on this guy.

The thing is, when it came to rigging, the fact that the scripts available give no support to 3dsmax made my life hell, since the skeletons for leaders are 1000000x more complicated than for units. So I eventually gave up.

I don't want all my effort to go to waste so I'm lowering the bar a bit (well actually, a lot). I just want to see this in game even if it is using some leader's animation.

The thing is, I can't use Blender for the life of me, and apparently to do this the sane way, it is needed. So I ask for your help. Can someone who understands something about rigging leaders do this?

You can leave everything art-related to me (textures and backgrounds and stuff).


Here are some screenshots, note he was based on Attila so that's the leader that I want the animations to be based on.



Clearly you can see this is a work in progress. He has some textures missing, like the one on his teeth, and I'm going to redo those horrible boots, and tweak around some other stuff.

Here is the .obj file in case anyone wants to help. The bad news is, this contains no skeleton (so one would have to be grabbed from attila) and I'm pretty sure I cannot export any rigging previously done so this has to be rigged from scratch, which I understand if it's too much to ask.

But anyhow here it is: View attachment AlaricWIP.zip


ATTENTION: If someone out there wants to do this, do not start rigging this yet! Just post your willingness as a reply. I still have to touch some things, and do some textures, so there is work to be done still. I only need to know if someone is up for the task, and if doing it using this .obj file is possible.


Thanks in advance.

Holy crap, this is good.

It using Attila as a base, Will it require GK?

DoctorMcGann said:

Holy crap, this is good.

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Thanks man. But let's not get too excited, let's wait to see if someone is willing to help me rig this first.

Warden123 said:

It using Attila as a base, Will it require GK?

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I assume so? I don't know. Probably.

Wodhann said:

I assume so? I don't know. Probably.

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I hope not, but I fear so. Best of luck, I am still figuring out how to make a civ so I won't be of any help. But know that I shall be one of the first down loaders.

Looks incredible; I'd offer, but I doubt I'm skilled enough to be much help; SO MANY BONES ON THE FACE.

sukritact said:

Looks incredible; I'd offer, but I doubt I'm skilled enough to be much help; SO MANY BONES ON THE FACE.

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Which is exactly the reason why I couldn't do it in 3dsmax. Imagine that amount of bones, but converted to a bunch of tiny squares and sloppily parented (because of the scripts available to 3dsmax). I spent hours and hours trying to figure it out and rig this properly, but it was useless, it was monstrously messy.

I understand the support for Blender and such but 3dsmax is the only 3d program I really know how to use, and all 3d programs have such a heavy burden of knowledge to use.

Well a "quickie" way to do would be to export it as an OBJ and rig the bigger items like the clothing & helmet which are easy to rig. And rig it to the Attila model. Then modify the Attila face by adding the beard and reshaping it.

Anyone that has done units in blender could do that part.

I'd volunteer but as you can see I haven't even had time to do the leaders I want to do. If some one could get the OBJs and rig it in blender then post the blender I could help with the export and nexusbuddy part (which is different than units because it uses so many meshes).

Ekmek said:

Well a "quickie" way to do would be to export it as an OBJ and rig the bigger items like the clothing & helmet which are easy to rig. And rig it to the Attila model. Then modify the Attila face by adding the beard and reshaping it.

Anyone that has done units in blender could do that part.

I'd volunteer but as you can see I haven't even had time to do the leaders I want to do. If some one could get the OBJs and rig it in blender then post the blender I could help with the export and nexusbuddy part (which is different than units because it uses so many meshes).

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Can you tell me which parts are difficult to rig and which ones aren't? I spent a good deal of time on this and I want to keep as much as possible.

It's sad to see that you are so busy though, I don't think besides you there are people here who can do this, so this is as close to a shattered dream as it can get.

Hardest stuff to rig are those that move the most - hands and the face. The rigging isn't hard its getting them to move right that is. It takes multiple bones in the right spots or they all get distorted. On the other hand putting a helmet on usually just involves selecting all and rigging it to the head. A cloak to make 4 or 5 bones.

I want to get back to leaders, I'm hoping this summer I get time to get back in it again.

I see. I was fiddling around blender 2.7 (as far as I know it's not hard to move back and forth between versions) and the whole sculpting tool thing might make it easier for me to replicate Alaric from Attila's face.

I'm going to try to keep as much from what I already made as I can though, especially the clothing since it was the hardest part in the process.

The biggest concern here is the beard. The mustache needs to be bigger but it also needs to move with the mouth. The bottom of the beard also needs to not clip through his chest. So I'm not sure what to do here, do I make the beard a separate object or do I try to use what Attila has on his face? He doesn't have much of a mustache though.

Ekmek, can you do me a favor? Can you post a .blender file of a properly imported Attila, with the skeleton in the right places and everything? When I do it the skeleton is positioned all wrong, with the right parts affecting the left parts and etc.

Here you go. Good luck!

The skeleton looks weird in my end, the same way it looks when I import it. The bones for the head are upside down and inverted. Is that how it's supposed to look...?

might be your blender version. I use 2.49b

Same here.

It looks like this:

Skeletons can look like sticks, dots, or decahedro-whatevers.

It looks good though since they appear to be lined up.

you may want to do an export before you get heavy into it to make sure that is working.

Hoop Thrower said:

Well, given that the Alaric leaderscene theme as been touched, whatever happened with the 3D model for it?

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Hoop Thrower would like know to what happened to the 3D model.

You don't need to ask questions for him...

May i ask what happen?

Sorry for the delay in answering.

What happened was I didn't get any volunteers to help me rig it and I didn't get time to do it myself. As Ekmek said the face/hands would need to be redone.

The offer is still up, though. I'm up to diving back into this, but if I have to do this by myself I don't think it will happen.