Getting Civ 4 Units into Civ 5

[Deliverator]

Wold be cool if someone did a library for converted units already, so that peapel dont have to spend unneccesary time on making the same unit conversions if someone ells already converted that unit. Wold sure save alot of time for everyone.

LoneGamer has now set this thread up.

 

[Erik_3E]

Cool, thanks for the tipp.

 

[Deliverator]

Another update on rigging units to Civ 5 anims. I've fixed the issue that was causing my Cyborg test to appear half buried in the ground. See below the units are fortified holding their invisible guns.

Now I just need to either do a more accurate job of copying the structure of the Civ 5 skeleton or extract the skeleton from the Civ 5 unit GR2 file. Once I have that rigging a new mesh to the skeleton easy and we'll have a proper custom unit using Civ 5 animations. Then we'll be able to do everything with unit modding that we can do in Civ 4.

I'm going to see if I can get the skeleton extraction plugins working somehow, before recreating the skeletons by hand. Extraction will be much easier and more foolproof.

 

[Jaythekiller]

Great !
Btw did you see my Anti-tank Infantry unit?

 

[LoneGamer]

Deliverator did you have to add any bones? I'm looking at the marine right now and he is missing some. Like the base where there would be Dummy_WORLD and BaseHumanRCollarbone

Spoiler :

 

[Jaythekiller]

I've got a new problem
I imported the Knight Templar from CivIV
It works, except for the texture (I joined them following your tutorial)
I tried many other setting but nothing change
I'll upload a screen as you can see the result in blender when i reimport my nif with the texture i made
I probably miss some blender skills...

 

[Deliverator]

Deliverator did you have to add any bones? I'm looking at the marine right now and he is missing some. Like the base where there would be Dummy_WORLD and BaseHumanRCollarbone

Yeah, there are extra bones in the Civ 5 units. The structure for the human units seems to be this mostly:

I'm less optimistic that copying the skeleton by hand is going to work. I tried copying the Archer skeleton and getting the position and rotation of everything right is pretty damn hard.

Edit: This kind of says it all...

 

[lemmy101]

It'll be storing data on the animations by bone index, so you'll likely have to have the correct order of bones as well as names of bones. :\

 

[LoneGamer]

nice pic. I'm going to try just deleting the entire sceneroot and starting from scratch trying to make it look as much as the infantry structure as possible. the renaming and adding was too much of a pain for me.

Also I could only get nexus viewer to work. I downloaded granny viewer but I'm not too sure I fully understand the instructions. What menu to I go to in nexus to open the .gr2 and save it so I can access it in granny viewer?

 

[Deliverator]

What menu to I go to in nexus to open the .gr2 and save it so I can access it in granny viewer?

NexusBuddy not Nexus - lemmy101's thing. I'm using the older original version of NexusBuddy - open the gr2 for the vanilla unit and immediately save (not export) it with a different name. You can then open it in GrannyViewer. This is handy since side view is pretty much impossible in Nexus 3D View.

 

[Deliverator]

It'll be storing data on the animations by bone index, so you'll likely have to have the correct order of bones as well as names of bones. :\

The order and number of bones doesn't seem to matter too much - it seems to work off the bone names rather than index numbers which makes things a bit easier. Unless I've just been lucky...

Anyway, I decide it was easier to fix the Cyborg which was nearly there rather than do it from scratch. Displaying the bones axes (the little blue, green and red lines below) in Nexus 3D View is helpful for fixing the rotation of the bones. You can also display bone axes in Blender. Anyway, a much more successful match than previously:

In game the unit now looks pretty good - just need to add a visible gun to the mesh and make sure it's pointing in the wrong direction. The muzzle flash and smoke look like a case of bad wind right now...

 

[Garett20]

nvrmind

 

[JeBuS27]

This is a tutorial, not a request thread.

 

[Deliverator]

Another Civ 5 animation update...

My musket-wielding cyborgs are a success. The rotation and position of everything is not quite perfect but I'll wait until I'm rigging a serious unit to refine that further.

The best thing is that all the human units that I've looked at use exactly the same bone names (apart from the root bone which seems to vary all over the place) and basic skeleton layout. This should make it much easy to get working skeletons for the other Civ 5 units. These screenshots are using exactly the same exported FBX as used for the Minuteman/Cyborg shown above:

Jaguar:

Archer:

They are pretty close already - just need some tweaking in either case.

Positioning the weapon bones will be a bit of fiddly trial and error but once it's done the skeleton can be reused over and over.

It should be possible to build up a library of Civ 5 skeletons either in .blend format or something else that modders can use to rig their homemade or Civ 4 units to Civ 5 animations.

 

[Jaythekiller]

Will you make a tutorial on how to rig a mesh to a skeleton?

 

[Deliverator]

Will you make a tutorial on how to rig a mesh to a skeleton?

Yes, that's what I'm thinking.

 

[Ekmek]

The best thing is that all the human units that I've looked at use exactly the same bone names (apart from the root bone which seems to vary all over the place) and basic skeleton layout. This should make it much easy to get working skeletons for the other Civ 5 units.

wow maybe they did listen to me. early on I told them that the most annoying thing between units and leaders (and between leaders themselves) in civ4 was the naming conventions - bip01, BIP, b_bone - it made mesh/skeleton swaps such a pain in the @$$

 

[blazekid87]

how did u get them to align perfectlly?? whenever I try to export mine, the mesh looks stretched out. everything works tho as far as animations. just dont understand why the skin gets stretched.....anyway possible you can upload just the biped skeleton you used? I think thats wha the problem seems to be.

 

[Deliverator]

how did u get them to align perfectlly?? whenever I try to export mine, the mesh looks stretched out. everything works tho as far as animations. just dont understand why the skin gets stretched.....anyway possible you can upload just the biped skeleton you used? I think thats wha the problem seems to be.

Your mesh is probably not scaled correctly. Anyway, same as with the Civ 4, once I've developed a unit that I'm satisfied with using this technique I'll post a new tutorial.

I'm working on a proper unit to use the Minuteman animations, namely these redcoats from Civ 4 Colonization:

After that it looks like my nearly finished Zulu Impis would work well with the Civ 5 Aztec Jaguar animations so I'll try that out. Next priority skeletons after that would probably be Archer, Swordsman and perhaps something modern like the Paratrooper. At some point i'll need to copy the horse skeleton for the mounted units but I'll leave that for a while as it could be hard.

 

[blazekid87]

haha ok well i think i got it.....i did my own way, i used civ4 animations and rigged them to my custom unit. ill prob write a tutorial on how to do this later tonite. But the problem seems to be 3ds max. If i export to fbx from 3Ds, i get a twisted up model. If i do it through blender everything works fine. What I did was import the civ4 marine .nif in 3ds max, then rigged his bones to my model and exported back to .nif which i then opened with blender and exported once again to fbx. I then opened the fbx and exported once more to gr2. Lost yet?