Extract GR2 to Blender with mesh AND skeleton and re-export to GR2

[Nomad or What]

Don't know what to say... hopefully this will get the dragon working. Please can I be first to try this on dragon (tomorrow)?

What??? Hey buddy, you've got a Kraken to fix! And I've been trying to get that stupid dragon imported for almost two years!

But seriously (which I very rarely am), be my guest with the dragon - sounds like a lot of work to me, which I care not to repeat yet again. Besides, I just discovered out why my custom unit city attacks weren't working properly - and I also have to finish all those units that were on the back burner because of this issue. I've already got my hands full!

So, good luck with Acheron; I can't wait to see him in Civ V...finally!

 

[Civitar]

The kraken will be easy, he's only got a head and six tentacles...and besides, I already drew up a list of animations to use. Thanks a lot though, hopefully I will have ingame screenshots by tonight!

 

[Civitar]

Thank you Deliverator!

Spoiler :

I know, I know - I forgot to run consolidate into one image so he has no eyes or proper spikes, but that is EASILY fixed. All animations are working.

 

[hugojackson18]

Nice one Civitar!

One question Deliverator. My unit of the Junkers-32 has more than 32 bones... And it's working fine. Is it just bones that have something skinned to them that matters? Because I've got loads of bones for fx_trigger, which are not skinning any geometry. Just wondering if you knew why we had that 32 bones restriction. It's obviously not a software restriction considering all the vanilla Civ5 units are respecting it too.

Just want to know why my unit is working fine with more than 32 bones

 

[Wodhann]

Civitar, did you remember to apply any smoothing groups? He looks kind of pointy right now.

 

[Civitar]

IDK what smoothing groups are...he's no pointier than the civ4 dragon was - he's got tons of spikes, but they are supposed to have a different texture, which I'll fix before uploading.

 

[Wodhann]

IDK what smoothing groups are...he's no pointier than the civ4 dragon was - he's got tons of spikes, but they are supposed to have a different texture, which I'll fix before uploading.

Not sure how to explain this, but it's a way to make meshes have a much smoother, less "blocky" look (and yes, it works in civ5).

It works somewhat like this:

Spoiler :

In 3ds Max all you have to do is select all polygons in a mesh and apply them to a smoothing group, I'm sure it must be similar in blender, just google it.

Trust me it's worth it just to give your models a much nicer look.

 

[Civitar]

I'll test it on the aquatic dragon OK? I'd rather not mess with this one now that he's working...

 

[Deliverator]

My unit of the Junkers-32 has more than 32 bones... And it's working fine. Is it just bones that have something skinned to them that matters?

Just want to know why my unit is working fine with more than 32 bones

The restriction is on the maximum number of bones that each mesh is mapped to - not the total number of bones overall. The chances are that your Junkers-32 has no mesh that mapped to more than 32 bones.

 

[Nomad or What]

Nice one Civitar!

One question Deliverator. My unit of the Junkers-32 has more than 32 bones... And it's working fine. Is it just bones that have something skinned to them that matters? Because I've got loads of bones for fx_trigger, which are not skinning any geometry. Just wondering if you knew why we had that 32 bones restriction. It's obviously not a software restriction considering all the vanilla Civ5 units are respecting it too.

Just want to know why my unit is working fine with more than 32 bones

Deliverator already answered this and I can confirm it. There was a lot of experimentation done with several different units and what Deliverator says holds true - only bones with attached mesh matter to the engine regarding the 32-bone count. I have a couple of units that have unmeshed bones as well and they work fine.

hugojackson18, I just wanted to also say thanks for your Mac Truck unit; it really shed some light for me on how to do special effects by applying bones to the .ftsxml file . I think I am getting the hang of it, but it still seems a mystery to many. Is there any chance a tutorial might be in the works?

 

[Deliverator]

Trust me it's worth it just to give your models a much nicer look.

I know what you are talking about, but this is one restriction with the BR2 export. I looked into it but there could no way to export the tangents and binormals for mesh vertices which are needed to create the smooth mesh. So, unfortunately any smoothing that relies on these things isn't going to make it through the BR2 export anyway. If you use FBX then it may well work, but then you have to deal with the near-unusable instability of the FBX import process.

In practice people don't seem to be to bothered by this. Once things are textured in game it's not too noticeable. Also the dragon is a particularly spikey model - I'm not sure it would look much different even with better smoothing.

 

[Wodhann]

That's weird, because all models I've made so far look about as smooth in game as in 3ds max with smoothing groups. I stand corrected then, but now I'm wondering why converted models don't look blocky if smoothing groups aren't a thing.

 

[Deliverator]

That's weird, because all models I've made so far look about as smooth in game as in 3ds max with smoothing groups. I stand corrected then, but now I'm wondering why converted models don't look blocky if smoothing groups aren't a thing.

Did you use FBX or BR2 format to import the meshes? As I say, I think the FBX import might do more smoothing. Overall, I think the Granny engine might have some smoothing built in because even models imported via BR2 look fairly smooth in game.

 

[Wodhann]

Did you use FBX or BR2 format to import the meshes? As I say, I think the FBX import might do more smoothing. Overall, I think the Granny engine might have some smoothing built in because even models imported via BR2 look fairly smooth in game.

I used BR2 in these models I mentioned, and yeah, that might be the case then. I'm wondering why it's not the case with some models like that dragon, but let's not dwell on the matter.

 

[Lord Tirian]

Many bones that are present on the Vertex Groups no longer exist (only the Bone_Mast_Flag's seem to have been imported), and all I did was importing this time; so something in between converting to nb2 or importing is doing something awry...

Did you ever figure out what went wrong here (or anybody else for that matter)? I'm trying to import the confederate ironclad and keep losing all bones apart from the ones for the flag (tried that with and without the top bone deletion option in the import script):

Spoiler :

As for why... I have a mesh ready to go, a completely retextured version of Refar's excellent Avrora (with lots of small mesh changes to make it look better on a small scale):

Spoiler :

 

[Ekmek]

Do you have the outliner open?

 

[Lord Tirian]

Do you have the outliner open?

That's... the outliner on my screenshot, no? (first spoiler block, on the right hand side of the image) I'll take a better screenshot later when I'm at my machine (and open all nodes).

I do have it open during the import itself, yes.

 

[Ekmek]

sorry, I saw it on a mobile and didn't see the outliner.

So am I seeing it right. the CSS Virginia mesh isn't under the armature? It might be a parenting issue.

 

[Lord Tirian]

Not just a parenting issue, otherwise I'd just armature as parent. It's that bones seem to go missing:

Spoiler Full Outliner :

As you can see, there are vertex groups without corresponding bones (including the root!), very similar to the issue Leugi described.

In any case, I'm going to experiment with other models - then I'll at least find out whether it's the Virginia or my setup messing up the import.

 

[Lord Tirian]

So, tried other models... and for others, it usually works just fine as shown here:

Spoiler :

So it looks like it's just some models misbehaving? Rather annoying and I wonder why Leugi saw the same problem, but wolfdog managed to export a working, bone-preserving version.