Converting models to Civ4

[Darthrafael]

Greetings!

I've been toying around with making my own personal mod for Civ4 for a while now, and several downloadable assets have sparked my attention, such as these:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/axis-allies-building-pack-2-banks-factories.11911/
https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/cruiser-mk-iv.22796/

They made me wonder if anyone has a guide on how to port models/knows how to port models from Civ5 and games that use the same engine or whatever as Civ4 to use in Civ4 so I can use them in my own mod to toy around with them.

Thanks in advance

 

[clanky4]

That depends largely on where you porting the model from. I know that there were tutorials on converting models from civ 4 to civ 5, while maintaining the skeletons/armature, but I do not know about the other way round.

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/convert-civ-4-units-to-civ-5-temp.511396/

https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...esh-and-skeleton-and-re-export-to-gr2.495207/

If it is another game with a somewhat coherent modding community you'd be best served searching there for how to export the model into a format that is readable by blender or 3dsmax, usually obj. As well as converting to the textures to dds without mipmaps, if needed.

For instance converting something from garrys mod requires 3 different tools. VTFEdit to extract the texture, mdldecompiler to extract mesh, and then an import tool for a later version of blender to import it into a program that can export it to work with blender 2.49b.

Once it is is obj format it can be imported into blender or 3dsmax where you can make the needed alterations to make it usable and movable in civ IV. For this step we do have a very good tutorial by The_Coyote:

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/tut-animate-with-blender-and-nifscope.296286/

It goes into some of the aspects of creating a skeleton, rigging, and animation. As long as the mesh isn't too outrageously different than any of the existing skeletons in civ 4 you should be able to rig it onto an existing skeleton/armature.