Fantasy Unit Conversions from Kohan II

[Deliverator]

Most humanoids from Kohan are rather... Poorly done.

True, the textures are utterly crap in many cases, but even those units may be worth converting for the models and the new animation sets. I think if you removed all the units from FFH2 that used Warrior, Swordsman and Sumerian Vulture animations, you'd have lost a fair percentage of the units - so any new variety is good.

Although a large number of the unit textures are crap, the ones for the Portrait NIFs are good. It seems like their best texturing artists focused on these ones. Because we have these NIFs which correspond to the head and shoulder of units you could merge them with the unit mesh, and then upgrade the unit texture to match the quality of the portrait one. I did some of this converting Leaderhead elements into units in my Colonization mod. Some of these examples could work quite well:

Spoiler :

In particular - I'm definitely going to use the portrait head when I do the Fire Dragon and the using the Bone Golem head is also a must. Sijansur looks like he would merge pretty nicely too. The units themselves are a bit lower polycount than even standard vanilla so there is scope to increase the detail with these heads. Even without doing any modelling work there is the possibility of cutting and pasting elements from the Portrait textures into the Unit textures - I may try this will the Juggernaut.

At some point, I'd like to take even a really poor unit like Chandra or Divsha and see if it can be brought up to standard.

I'm roughly half-way through converting Golshan - should be done sometime on the weekend.

 

[Valkrionn]

......You know, even though I saw the portraits I had not thought of that possibility... That really opens up the humanoid units.

 

[Valkrionn]

Here's an updated version of my Duskbringer; I've got the torch using the bluemetal gloss. Just need to know how to make the flame black.

 

[Deliverator]

The Secret of the Black Fire

To make the Duskbringer's torch emit black fire we need to edit both the NIF and the fire textures. The fire particle effect is actually embedded directly in the NIF rather than being added via the Effects or Attachables methods.

We need to do the following NifSkope edits:

1. Under Engineer Compass -> Scene Root there are 6 emitter nodes that are parents to the particle systems that make the fire effect.

2. For each of the six we need to edit the NiMaterialProperty and NiAlphaProperty.
2a. For the NiMaterialProperty we need to make the Ambient and Emissive Colors Black (RGB all zero) and the Diffuse and Specular Colors white (RGB all one).
2b. For the NiAlphaProperty we need to edit the Flags so that the Destination Blend Mode is Inv Src Alpha rather than One. You can set the other values as show in the screenshot just to keep consistency.

3. There is one more issue, which I think must also be a problem with the original Lightbringer model, that is that the flame appears behind the torch when viewed from certain positions. If you look in the second screenshot you can see we can fix this simply by switching the order of the child nodes under Engineer_Compass so that Cylinder01 (which is actually the Torch) comes before Scene Root (which is our fire effect). Just delete the id 177 from child position 3 and enter id 177 in child position 1. The final image shows the model in Scene Viewer before and after the change. (Thanks again to the Coyote who taught me that particular fix.)

Spoiler :

The fire effect uses a few textures from the Shared folder as well as the fx_light_glow.dds one, namely fx_fire_03b.dds, fx_fireswirl_01.dds, fx_fireswirl_01b.dds, fx_fireswirl_02.dds and fx_fireswirl_02b.dds.

I've attached edited versions of these that I altered in Paint.NET to be placed in the unit folder. Here's roughly what I did with each:
1. Used Black and White (Ctrl-Shift-G) to greyscale the texture.
2. Twice applied Brightness / Contrast (Ctrl-Shift-C) with Brightness set to -100.
3. Layered up 2 or 3 copies of the texture to thicken it up. This can be done by using Ctrl-A to select all, Ctrl-C to copy and then Ctrl-Shift-V to paste into new layer. Finally, you can use Ctrl-M to merge the layers.

The NIF edits combined with the texture changes give the black fire effect. If you wanted to play with making different colours of fire. You could experiment with editing the NiMaterialProperties and the texture files in different ways.

 

[Valkrionn]

The Secret of the Black Fire

Spoiler :

To make the Duskbringer's torch emit black fire we need to edit both the NIF and the fire textures. The fire particle effect is actually embedded directly in the NIF rather than being added via the Effects or Attachables methods.

We need to do the following NifSkope edits:

1. Under Engineer Compass -> Scene Root there are 6 emitter nodes that are parents to the particle systems that make the fire effect.

2. For each of the six we need to edit the NiMaterialProperty and NiAlphaProperty.
2a. For the NiMaterialProperty we need to make the Ambient and Emissive Colors Black (RGB all zero) and the Diffuse and Specular Colors white (RGB all one).
2b. For the NiAlphaProperty we need to edit the Flags so that the Destination Blend Mode is Inv Src Alpha rather than One. You can set the other values as show in the screenshot just to keep consistency.

3. There is one more issue, which I think must also be a problem with the original Lightbringer model, that is that the flame appears behind the torch when viewed from certain positions. If you look in the second screenshot you can see we can fix this simply by switching the order of the child nodes under Engineer_Compass so that Cylinder01 (which is actually the Torch) comes before Scene Root (which is our fire effect). Just delete the id 177 from child position 3 and enter id 177 in child position 1. The final image shows the model in Scene Viewer before and after the change. (Thanks again to the Coyote who taught me that particular fix.)

Spoiler :

The fire effect uses a few textures from the Shared folder as well as the fx_light_glow.dds one, namely fx_fire_03b.dds, fx_fireswirl_01.dds, fx_fireswirl_01b.dds, fx_fireswirl_02.dds and fx_fireswirl_02b.dds.

I've attached edited versions of these that I altered in Paint.NET to be placed in the unit folder. Here's roughly what I did with each:
1. Used Black and White (Ctrl-Shift-G) to greyscale the texture.
2. Twice applied Brightness / Contrast (Ctrl-Shift-C) with Brightness set to -100.
3. Layered up 2 or 3 copies of the texture to thicken it up. This can be done by using Ctrl-A to select all, Ctrl-C to copy and then Ctrl-Shift-V to paste into new layer. Finally, you can use Ctrl-M to merge the layers.

The NIF edits combined with the texture changes give the black fire effect. If you wanted to play with making different colours of fire. You could experiment with editing the NiMaterialProperties and the texture files in different ways.

.... I love you.

Thank you for putting up with my questions! It's a massive help.

Here's the unit... Reskinned using Paint.net (and the plugins you listed ), gloss added using your tutorial, and now black flame using your tutorial and textures.

 

[Deliverator]

Thank you for putting up with my questions! It's a massive help.

No problem. It's good to share the knowledge.

 

[Deliverator]

The Golshan unit has now been uploaded to the database. See here. There's more I'd like to do with her in terms of Sound and Effects, but she works pretty well as she is.

 

[Ahwaric]

Here's a working version of the Juggernaut to be going on with. I still need to add the Fidget animations and the Hurt animation is a bit lame at the moment. Will release to the database once these are done. I've upscaled the textures from 128x128 to 256x256 but they are still a bit rough. I'm sure someone can improve on them.

The Golshan unit has now been uploaded to the database. See here. There's more I'd like to do with her in terms of Sound and Effects, but she works pretty well as she is.

Thanks a lot for both of them (and all other units as well)! Exactly what I needed for new Orbis version.

 

[The_J]

Man, this unit looks so evil...and fantastic .

 

[esvath]

Two thumbs up for Golshan! This surely looks like Pixie/Sprite/Dryad (HoMM V's Sylvan 1st Tier). Hmmm, will reskin it soon-ish

 

[Deliverator]

Two thumbs up for Golshan! This surely looks like Pixie/Sprite/Dryad (HoMM V's Sylvan 1st Tier). Hmmm, will reskin it soon-ish

Thanks. There is definitely some good potential for variations on this unit. I was thinking of making a more transparent version myself to make her look more like a spirit.

 

[davidlallen]

Here are some simple buttons I made for the drakes.

May I request a "fortify" animation for the drakes? Nothing fancy, just to stop the wing animation. I am starting a mod which has "sleeping dragons" until you wake them, and this would be helpful.

Edit: also, I don't have a good way to make high resolution screenshots from nif. I only know nifskope. Is it possible to make a leaderhead style static image of the drakes? I can resize, put backgrounds, etc, but I don't know how to get the base shot.

 

[Deliverator]

May I request a "fortify" animation for the drakes? Nothing fancy, just to stop the wing animation. I am starting a mod which has "sleeping dragons" until you wake them, and this would be helpful.

Not sure exactly what you mean. The drakes have a fortify animation that is distinct from the idle animation, although it is very subtly different - the feet are in a slightly different position for example. If the unit just freezes it would look a bit odd, as a "real" drake that stops flapping would just plummet to the ground...

Edit: also, I don't have a good way to make high resolution screenshots from nif. I only know nifskope. Is it possible to make a leaderhead style static image of the drakes? I can resize, put backgrounds, etc, but I don't know how to get the base shot.

For making static leaderheads, using the units is a problem due to the low quality of the texture when you zoom up close in NifSkope. Fortunately, you can use the Portrait NIFs that are also in the Kohan 2 original NIFs pack. These are effectively the same thing as leaderheads from that game. The Storm Drake does have a Portrait so I've made a couple of close-up shots, saved as TGAs with transparent backgrounds attached.

 

[davidlallen]

If the unit just freezes it would look a bit odd, as a "real" drake that stops flapping would just plummet to the ground...

Good point. I guess I was thinking of a dragon curled up on the ground, but that would be a whole different animation. I had the fortify animation done for helicopters in Fury Road, which is why I thought of it; but in that case all that was needed was to turn off the rotor animation and change the Z coordinate. Voila, an out-of-gas chopper on the ground. I have changed direction a little and I will assume that sleeping dragons are in a cave, hidden, so they won't be visible.

Fortunately, you can use the Portrait NIFs that are also in the Kohan 2 original NIFs pack. These are effectively the same thing as leaderheads from that game.

Awesome! Did you make the other three drakes by recolorizing the storm drake skin? I am not sure how to do that, exactly. I can do stuff in photoshop like drawing a selection and using "color variations", but that may not be enough. Is there a secret you can explain? This storm drake is way better than mine, and I can use it as a placeholder for all four leaderheads for now.

 

[Khanquer]

Excellent work Deliverator and kudos to everyone else for helping with the others!! I have a question about the Golshan file. Where is the magic fire effect file? I can't seem to find it in the download. Thanks in advance.

-Khanquer-

 

[Deliverator]

Portrait Merges

Back in this post I was talking about the idea of merging units with parts of the portrait graphics to help raise the quality of the crappier Kohan II units.

I've now done some proof-of-concept work and I think the idea is going to work pretty well. I've merged fours to test the idea: the Fire Dragon, Divsha, Sijansur and the Bone Golem. See the results below:

Spoiler :

What I'd really like is for a texturing artist who is more accomplished than myself to go over the remainder of the unit texture to raise the quality and give the units a more coherent polished look.

I've attached the four work-in-progress units. Each folder contains a file called merged.nif which is the merged portrait unit you see in the screenshots. Not all the animations are ported yet, but I've included some for each unit for test purposes (the ones with Bip01 in the name).

It would be great if someone good texturing skills could help me out here. I will continue porting the animations anyway, so if no-one volunteers to improve the textures I'll just release the merged units with their current skins once the animations are done.

The files can be downloaded HERE.

The original unit and portrait graphics are included for reference.

 

[The_J]

That's definitely an improvement .

but the main question is: Can you see that ingame?

 

[Annex]

Its nice to see someone still working on these conversions

Unfortunately I dont have the ability to really help out any