Custom Leaderhead Development Thread

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.

I wonder if wouldn't be a nice idea to borrow the anims from Firaxis. From what I've seen on another games modding forums, gr2 is a b*tch but it has a nice modular structure to load animations. If we get to know the names of the bones (I know we will) it'll be nice to use them =D
 
True, but hey - if we're going to do completely custom meshes, with custom textures and a custom background, we may as well go the whole hog and do a bunch of anims too ;)

The other thing to bear in mind is that a lot of the characters are pre-posed. Like Alexander on his horse, Caesar on his thrown, etc. So you'd have to pick a character in the same base pose as the one you're making in order to nick its anims. Which limits choice and/or restricts modelling.
 
Right on that =\ I thought it as a productivity helper, but since new LHs will - at least seems that will be - tough to create and not so common I guess productivity isn't really an issue eh..

Anyway, just to update things about what we have been finding... we did some discoveries but right now I guess we are in a dead end =[ apart from investigations I guess we can't do much besides waiting for a possible update on Nexus. It should, at the very least, export something that could be imported ingame, which it doesn't (right? if anyone did it please tell us!).
 
True, but hey - if we're going to do completely custom meshes, with custom textures and a custom background, we may as well go the whole hog and do a bunch of anims too ;)

Or even make own game :p ;)

This (I hope initial) problems are frustrating (I can't even force Nexus to unpack .fpk), but when we'll figure out how the graphics works it'll push modding forward.
 
I wasn't going to post this until I'd finished, but my willpower failed me ;)

Work-in-progress, King Alfred the Great:

 

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I wasn't going to post this until I'd finished, but my willpower failed me ;)

Work-in-progress, King Alfred the Great:

Spoiler :

Oh yeah, go Alfred go! xD The normal maps are great, you risked yourself with a so close shot, I can only imagine the normal view, it'll be perfect! And he's expressive already without animation, great work Andy :thumbsup: let's search for the holy grail (granny has it) so I can beat Alfred ingame myself :D


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I think if you want to get a headstart on animating you could rig him to a Civ4 model and then use those animations.

That's actually a very good idea, since you have (apparently) all the know-how on LH for Civ4 :) I'll ask you to teach me something about it too (or point me to where the knownledge is), I started a LH here but without much motivation since all the fuss on Civ5 3d modding. If I can put him on Civ 4 it would be a good starting point.
 
Nice job everyone! I'm really looking forward to having custom LH's :)
 
Awesome to see that good graphical developement is already in progress in such an early stage :goodjob:.

Will the opening post get further updates?

Thanks chaps :)

Yes, I'll maintain the first post with information as we discover it so that by then end it will hopefully serve as some kind of guide. :)
 
I've got a question that is somewhat relevant to this thread.

Just how impossible would it be to tie in some code that pops up a window once you press on a Leader to be able to select different leaders for that Civilization?

Suppose you have two leaders, but only one which is currently active for a civ (say, bizmark and hitler for Germany). How much work would it take to write a script to pop up a window once the leader is clicked on to display a window with all available leaders, and patch the civ on the fly?

Having that sort of option would open many doors for Leaderhead mods, because they could be tied in with existing cultures, just with different special units/trait.
 
I've got a question that is somewhat relevant to this thread.

Just how impossible would it be to tie in some code that pops up a window once you press on a Leader to be able to select different leaders for that Civilization?

I may be wrong here, but from what I saw when I looked at the structure of the Civs / Leaders in the XML it's very similar to Civ 4, and just the leader's special abilities are just defined as a bunch of unique traits instead of a smaller selection of shared ones (Spi, Ind etc) and each leader only has one instead of two, so I suspect getting multiple leaders for one civ wouldn't be a big issue (i.e not ending up with two England AIs in the game) even if each leader was just in the main list.
 
Awesome. Se we'll have slightly different flavors of same civs :) Looking forward to it.

Also, that King looks amazing. Once it's done, I'd like to negotiate borrowing him, since I need a King-like figure. For now I'll be using Darius from Babylon, but this guy really hits the nail on the head. Great work.
 
Great leaderhead! Extremely detailed! How long did it take to get him like that?

Also, this guy would be great for a civilization I'm creating. :p
 
Hi Putmalk, and thanks! :)

Hard to say how long it's taken so far because I sort of dip into it from time-to-time and in between I've been mucking about with the Nexus Art Tools. But if I had to hazard a guess, there's probably a few days solid work there spread out over the last couple of weeks.

But of course, there's still a long way to go before he can be put into the game. Textures need finishing, he needs to be skinned, animated, exported, set up in Nexus (a big task in its own right) and, of course, to do that we need working exporters. :(
 
Progress here, of sorts.

I've been working with the Cap'n Binky tonight and I've managed to repair the Nexus 5k animation file bug by decompiling / recompiling one of the DLLs with a few changes. As such I'm not sure I'd be able to distribute the DLL itself with the fix, as it would probably be against the EULA of the tools. :( but even so, the fix in itself is not the end of the story.

It has shown us that the Nexus art tool is spitting out a gr2 containing the model and separate gr2 files containing each of the anims. The thing is though... these load and display in Granny Viewer perfectly. And the produced anims don't play within the Nexus art tool. Seems that only the root bone is animating within Nexus even though they play perfectly in granny viewer.

Since the game assets don't work in Granny Viewer, this leads us to believe there is some additional process required to turn the exported data from the Nexus granny FBX -> gr2 process to make it not only game ready, but working in the Nexus asset viewer properly.

As an experiment I did some more fiddling and managed to run Catherine's model gr2 and one of her animation gr2 files back through the process, as if she'd come from an FBX, and low and behold:



Looking at the binary contents of the two gr2 files for her model side by side they are massively different. So I think there's definitely another process that needs doing to these files that a) makes them work in the game and asset viewer and b) subsequently means they are no longer valid granny viewer files.

Will keep you all posted if we manage to figure any more out.

EDIT: Turns out Catherine's reprocessed model AND anims work fine in Nexus, so we just need to figure out why custom animations on custom models don't seem to work properly.
 
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