Custom Leaderhead Development Thread

Awww sweet, that's brilliant, Wira - mine's the same, the temporary file is perfect in the Granny viewer! Well, that's a start. Question is, what's cabbaging the final output file? Tool bug, or some sort of required set-up...?

More fiddling required :)

edit: I'll whack that link onto the "Useful Links" in the first post, since it's amazingly useful :D :D

edit2: That viewer confirms that 3DSMax Biped skeletons / animations are supported in the *.FBX -> *.gr2 transition which, frankly, is amazing news for simplifying the animation process :D
 
Ekmek said:
weirder still I finding that if i try to import a different FBX the nexus wont show a 3D view of it and then when it exports it has the previous model there (or atleast thats what appears in granny viewer).
Click to expand...

Yeah, I just had the weirdest bug similar to that. I have 2 files I've been using to test, a little guy skinned to biped bones, and a test sphere skinned to some max bones. I've been switching between the two for testing.

Suddenly, when I imported the test guy, he showed up in the 3D viewer, but the animation manager and model manager insisted that the sphere model and its bones were still there even though I could display the biped bone names in the viewer?!?!

Suffice to say, exporting utterly failed at this point and no amount of restarting the tool would fix it. I tried deleting the sphere's files, but all that happened then was that the Animation Manager button was greyed out completely :eek:

I had to completely uninstall and reinstall the tool to fix it. Weird.
 
gee... I wonder if they tested this tool, or used Nexus to export any of the official game models? (do you know Ekmek?)

Anyway.. I'm almost asking a friend that has access to granny to investigate something about these files. I have to go to college, when I'm back I'll do it, expecting good news :)
 
Wirapuru said:
gee... I wonder if they tested this tool, or used Nexus to export any of the official game models? (do you know Ekmek?)
Click to expand...

my impression is that they used it for the animation editing like the state graph and generating the fxsxml not actually importing a non-granny asset and making it in game.
 
Ekmek, do you or Kael have any suspicion of which specific stage could be preventing your static models to show up ingame? I mean, do you think it's an issue with the model itself (like, for example, maybe it needs some reference dummies or hardcoded names - or even it can be there but like, 10000 units away?) or with the loading process, maybe something about validating, veryfing hashs, any clue or pattern so far?

I'm right now going to try this process to put the simplest thing I can ingame and note down anything unusual.
 
nah, both of us are stumped. I thought it was the bone structure but its not. I thought itrequired an animation but I used for the pyramids. the two things I know is that even though the text is the same our fxsxml files are smaller than firaxis ones which is weird and the other thing is nexus hasnt had an update in awhile (worldbuilder & modbuddy probably takes priority)
 
help, i tried to use nexus. but there's an incorrect path error / directory does not exists... and i can't change the path. it won't let me do anything... i tried to uninstall it and reinstall and nothing changes.
 
allypower said:
help, i tried to use nexus. but there's an incorrect path error / directory does not exists... and i can't change the path. it won't let me do anything... i tried to uninstall it and reinstall and nothing changes.
Click to expand...

Here's your solution: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=385031 (please I don't mean to be rude or anything, but this isn't what this thread is about and I'm not trying to moderate, but don't help it to lose its focus - best luck)
 
Hmmm... Looks like what we get out of the tool in terms of gr2 animation files is just empty shells, regardless of what options you set in Nexus. Every anim comes out as 5Kb, and inspecting the file shows that that 5Kb of data is basically just the header. Even if it was possible to output the gr2 files via some other means as opposed to this Nexus tool, I'm not convinced that would help us, seeing as the unpacked game gr2 files crash the Granny viewer - just like with DDS files, they're probably slightly non-standard.

There's only a couple of anim-related options in that importer, I doubt very much at this stage that we've just failed to twiddle with the right one.
 
I agree. I'm in a stage that the perfect info right now would be a Granny Viewer that opens original Firaxis .gr2 files without crashing. Even if doesn't come up with the exact info we need to the current problem this will be priceless to compare in almost every situation we'll go through.

Imagine too see all the inside sctruture of materials, bones, animations - that Granny Viewer rapes the .gr2 and put all that on screen for us =]

I know it's a bit too much but I even tried to swap some .dlls between granny's and firaxis but obviously no luck.

I did find one curoius reference while you at the Animaton Manager:
Spoiler :

that file doesn't exist and won't exist at any point. Not before, neither after (well, not even during any process until the final export - I used ProcessMonitor to try to catch anything suspicious move but nothing, no references to this file). I tried to trick Nexus cloning the export.temp.gr2 (that it creates first on {user folder}\AppData\Local\Temp before exporting) and renaming like that reference was named but didn't make any difference either. It's possible though, to reload the animation contained in export.temp.gr2 to the no-animation-inside final exported .gr2, but I don't think this helps find much.

Anyway, I'm now to the mission of trying only to export something that shows up ingame. Enough on the filesystem labs and to the fields :D
 
Yeah, also on a similar note I found that say I had a model called "Sphere" and an anim called "Animation0000" upon export it produces sphere.gr2 and animation0000.gr2 and the parent fxml file. When you import that fxml file into the Asset Viewer, it's looking for sphere_animation000.gr2 so you'd have to physically rename the file (or possibly hand edit the fxml file) if you wanted to get it to load in correctly.

Not that that helps with no anim data in there, of course ;)
 
I didn't see that earlier, nice to know =] confirms that files generated by Nexus aren't really fond of Granny :D
 
I'm waiting to hear back on whether there's an issue with anim exporting from the Nexus Art Tool, because there certainly seems to be. It's fairly pointless banging your head against a brick wall at this stage, so I'll just proceed with the mesh work and await a reply and/or update at a later date.
 
There are two DLLs in the Nexus folder called GrannyExporterFBXWin32.dll and GrannyExporterFBXx64.dll. There both have a single exported function called ExportFBXFile. I don't whether this is used to convert Granny -> FBX or FBX -> Granny, the name might suggest the former. I know it is possible to write code to call functions in third party DLLs but this would probably be difficult seeing as the input and output of the function are unknown.

We'll probably just have to wait and see if Firaxis give us the tools to mod existing art assets. Firaxis have clearly made a decision to protect the 3D assets that come with the game by using encryption that is specific to Civ 5. The result is that 3D Art modding looks like its going to be less easy than Civ 4. I guess it is still early days though.
 
Thanks Deliverator. At the moment the main issue is with the animation exporter. For these Leaderheads we won't be modding existing assets but instead importing a completely custom set of mesh/textures/animations, so the fact that the game *.gr2 files are not in a readable form isn't an issue for us providing that the tools allow us to export them without error. Which, at the moment it would seem, they do not.

However, it would help if we could read them just so we have a frame of reference - being able to see what scale they used, whether facial expressions are done with morphs or facial bones, that sort of thing. So I will be following your thread with interest. :)
 
Well, 3d leaders seems impossible to make in civ5 right now (and probably it's true with the tools we have right now) - it's what I won't figure out, because my knowledge in 3d graphics is very narrow.
I'll start from making unit (using model from civ4), it should be easier to make (of course if possible), but definitelly I'll take a look to this thread. Good luck with the research - there's plenty of civilizations that deserve a good quality mod!
 
I did get to play some of the game this wwekend after so much time messing around with the SDK - so not many news here. I wish we had some knid of statement from Firaxis at least, we have to wait some update that will (or not) come who knows how and when. My tries on putting a single untextured and primitive cube inside the game didn't succeed at all, but I didn't try much since my frustration is getting a little too far where I use to work with when modding.

If we had only some information on dimmensions, scene references and restrictions on how 3d models have to fit inside the game I surely was modelling something now, since the export/import stage would be a matter of adaptation but right now I have the fear it'll be kinda a waste of time.

I wonder if Ekmek and Kael have discovered anything new?

EDIT: ah, and I didn't see all of the thread you created yet Deliverator, but seems a great step towards our succes. Going there now, nice job!
 
Concerning scene size, units, scale, etc...

The one thing I do wonder, is whether or not this will make any difference. I mean, the leader screens are completely stand-alone so since we can (presumably) set the camera position and target, as long as the leader is in scale to his/her own scene then presumably everything would be fine.

It'd be a whole other ballgame if we were incorporating the anims from other leaders, or their meshes or something, but since we'll be doing a completely custom scene with custom assets hopefully this won't be an issue.

It wouldn't hurt to be able to have a squizz at their assets though ;)
 
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