placeholder art for many civs can be very annoying but of course i totally understand that creating new unit models, animating & texturing them is a hell lot of work and the people with the skills are rare and obviously have their own life too. and they are doing a damn fine job already, there s soo many absolutely great looking units in FFH2 that it puts many "professional" games to shame.
Me and seZereth are starting to collaborate on replacing placeholder art. The beast of agares is the first. I'm slowing us down though, because I'm an annoying perfectionist and I want it to look just perfect
how "hard" would it be to use the vampire model for example, give him a spear as a weapon and "simply" accompany him with animals (as all hunter/ranger/beastmasters are) ? i.e. one wouldnt need to make a single new animation/model/texture but simply put together already existing models etc. and still get a somewhat civ-unique result that while not really original at least is more fitting than placeholders that many civs share and sometimes look really out of place for certain civs.
Usually not hard, although it does depend on the skeleton. If the animation skeletons used by the vampire, and ranger, aren't compatible, then the model needs to be re-rigged. Which isn't particularly hard, per se. but time consuming.
is that kind of stuff remotely easy to learn / can you do it with free software ?
Very easy, yes. Changing weapons and animation sets can be done with nifscope and notepad. but if the animation sets don't match, you'll need blender to re-rig it. All free though.
Disciples/(High-)priests: okay for human civs (though i d imagine a doviello following FoL looking different ^^) but when playing Clan of Embers, Dwarves and Elves they feel pretty weird - especially since they even have racial promotions but still look human. Again creating a unique model for each disciple/(high)priest of the different religions and races would be a hell lot of work and i doubt it ll ever happen .... using a basic orc model for clan for example and "simply" adding the religion-depending different "halos" on their heads + a staff for a weapon ... now thats more doable, isnt it ?
This is something that really needs done, actually. Since it would be changing mesh data and uvmaps though, it would require use of blender and photoshop/gimp too. not really hard, but it's annoying work.
soooo..... whats needed to do this kind of stuff, is it something I or others who dont have any moddelling experience could learn without a huge time (and money in case the programs needed to it arent free) investment ?
I'd say start with blender. It's not the simplest, but it's ultimately the best way to do things and not end up with broken nifs, as working purely with nifscope often does. Especially, don't ever use anything but blender for re-rigging. It creates a huge bloated mess that is permanantly broken and can never be re-imported. Sadly, many older FFH units are like this
You will need nifscope for adding shaders and touch-ups to the final unit though. That's a pretty confusing program, but it's not bad once you learn to ignore the 99% of stufff that you'll probably never use.
My suggestion is to work on a simple proof of concept, before making any actual units. My first nif was a rainbow colored cube. Made and textured in blender.
To become an artist, you will need to get and learn the basics of, the following
1. Blender, and the blender .nif scripts
2. Nifscope or Nifviewer (preferably the former)
3. Photoshop, Gimp, or some similar advanced image editor. MSPaint will NOT do the job.
4. Notepad++, or just notepad. For xml artdefine editing. Notepad++ is awesome though.
Everything listed above except photoshop is free.
Best place to get started if you need help is the main Creation and Customisation forum. I basically started by posting "I'm a noob. tell me what to do"
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