hangman
almost-scientist
I'm finding that I'm much faster at working with meshes in Blender than getting units into Civ5, so I'd like to start a thread for unit graphics modders who may not be as skilled with Blender, but are still adept at rigging units for use in Civ5.
There are still a TON of Civ4 units that have never been converted to Civ5. Danrell's unit packs probably represent something like 20% of the better quality ancient units available in Civ4. Not only that but danrell (for unfortunate reasons) has not been around since before BNW was released, which means there are no ethnic unit sets for BNW civs (as well as some others that weren't in Civ4 at all), even though the units do exist.
Many of these units can be found in the History Rewritten, Varietas Delictat, Caveman 2 Cosmos, and Sword of Islam mods. To view these, you will need Nifskope as well as FPAK, a tool for extracting and compressing graphics files in Civ4, but you don't actually need to have Civ4. For those who do have Civ4, some ethnic units also exist in the BTS expansion pack. Bakuel has also recently released a massive collection of historically accurate Indonesian units. Finally, there are other units of varying quality scattered throughout the Civ4 modding community.
So with that, I'd like to form a unit graphics team, where duties are based on skill level. I think it would be best to break down these duties into segments, so team members can perform the duties they are best at. By keeping it broad, we can also bring in people who are not as skilled, but can perform time-consuming duties as well as anyone else. If you would like to join the pipeline, please post here, and I may set up an SVN or dropbox or something if we get a few members. I can also link to some tutorials if needed. NOTE: Modders who are capable of adding Civ5 units from start to finish (i.e., basically all current unit artists) are classified as "high skill" here. As you can see though, there are important jobs for less-skilled community members!
Here is an outline of what to expect for each segment:
Importers: (medium skill)
Goal: to fix broken or messy NIF files for importation
The animations for the mesh should be decided at this point.
Meshers: (high skill)
Goal: to make Blender file ready for ready for rigging and export. Also, this stage should include baking one texture per final mesh (usually one).
Riggers: (medium skill)
Goal: to rig the mesh to an existing Civ5 model.
Exporters: (high skill)
Goal: to export and correct models
Coders: (low skill)
Goal: to facilitate exporters by writing code snippets
There are still a TON of Civ4 units that have never been converted to Civ5. Danrell's unit packs probably represent something like 20% of the better quality ancient units available in Civ4. Not only that but danrell (for unfortunate reasons) has not been around since before BNW was released, which means there are no ethnic unit sets for BNW civs (as well as some others that weren't in Civ4 at all), even though the units do exist.
Many of these units can be found in the History Rewritten, Varietas Delictat, Caveman 2 Cosmos, and Sword of Islam mods. To view these, you will need Nifskope as well as FPAK, a tool for extracting and compressing graphics files in Civ4, but you don't actually need to have Civ4. For those who do have Civ4, some ethnic units also exist in the BTS expansion pack. Bakuel has also recently released a massive collection of historically accurate Indonesian units. Finally, there are other units of varying quality scattered throughout the Civ4 modding community.
So with that, I'd like to form a unit graphics team, where duties are based on skill level. I think it would be best to break down these duties into segments, so team members can perform the duties they are best at. By keeping it broad, we can also bring in people who are not as skilled, but can perform time-consuming duties as well as anyone else. If you would like to join the pipeline, please post here, and I may set up an SVN or dropbox or something if we get a few members. I can also link to some tutorials if needed. NOTE: Modders who are capable of adding Civ5 units from start to finish (i.e., basically all current unit artists) are classified as "high skill" here. As you can see though, there are important jobs for less-skilled community members!
Here is an outline of what to expect for each segment:
Importers: (medium skill)
Goal: to fix broken or messy NIF files for importation
- Can fix NIF files for importing into Blender if they are broken, messy, or poorly structured
The animations for the mesh should be decided at this point.
Meshers: (high skill)
Goal: to make Blender file ready for ready for rigging and export. Also, this stage should include baking one texture per final mesh (usually one).
- Can create and texture new meshes in Blender, if necessary
- Can edit vertices, edges, and faces in Blender to clean up unnecessary vertices and reduce polygon count where possible.
- Can join meshes in Blender
- Can bake textures in Blender
- Can apply teamcolor (basically alpha in GIMP/Photoshop)
- Can create a dummy bone for local effects, and edit .ftsxml files accordingly
Riggers: (medium skill)
Goal: to rig the mesh to an existing Civ5 model.
- Can create vertex groups and assign vertices to vertex groups
- Can translate/rotate/scale meshes
Exporters: (high skill)
Goal: to export and correct models
- Can identify and correct Blender issues
- Can export to NexusBuddy and import into Civ5 successfully
Coders: (low skill)
Goal: to facilitate exporters by writing code snippets
- Can make .sql snippets
- Can edit .fxsxml files (basically ctrl+c/ctrl+v)
- Can edit ftsxml files (medium skill for adding nonlocal effects and sound)
I mean, it's not like I have him doing custom animations lol. But yeah, I've set this up so that you can come and go as you please. My idea is that if you have a spare hour, you can work on it, upload it to SVN, and be done.
