AW Arcaeca
Deus Vult
I don't know if there are still any unit/3D modders that follow this forum but I'll give it a shot.
I have Blender 2.79 with Deliverator's scripts, I have Nifskope, I have Nexus Buddy 2.5.3, all working; I could not get Nexus itself to work even from the old SDK.
So I've got a horse archer model for Civ4 that's almost what I want, except for the head. To match the icon I've already made, it would work a lot better to swap the horse archer's head out for the head of the cavalryman on the right:
(These are Bakuel's Kievan Rus Heavy Cavalry and Kipchak Horse Archer, incidentally)
I was planning to rig it to the keshik's armature. I managed to find a .nif import/export script that works for 2.79, so I can import them directly without an intermediate conversion to .obj, thus preserving the armature. I'm just not sure what to do with the armature - Troller's tutorial seems to imply I need to rename the imported model's bone bindings/vertex groups to the same name as the keshik's vertex groups, and then merge their objects together and then the keshik meshes? Not every keshik vertex group seems to have an equivalent in the imported horse archer though; the keshik horse has several more vertex group; and the keshik treats the bow and its associated vertex groups as a part of the rider's mesh, while the imported horse archer treats the bow and its vertex groups as a separate mesh. What do?
Okay, but the main problem: mixing and matching parts of models. I think with enough effort I could probably figure out how to delete the vertices that make up the horse archer's head (although it probably wouldn't be a clean cut). What I'm not grasping is how to 1) grab the "corresponding" vertices (i.e. matching the previous cut as close as possible) from the cavalryman, 2) copy only those over, 3) reassign them to the head bones whose vertex groups I probably just wiped out when I deleted the head (oops), and 4) stitch the new head back onto the rider mesh.
(Also, can you... not select vertices by vertex group? I'm trying to - I right click on a vertex group in the outliner > Select, to see what vertices it maps to - but I just get an error message at the top of the screen saying "not yet implemented"?)
To be clear, I'm not asking someone to do the model editing and conversion - I'm asking if someone can walk me through how I can do the model editing and conversion. I need to learn to do it myself because there are many UU models I still need converted, some of which have to be cobbled together because there are no pre-existing Civ4 models that are a good enough match.
I do have some experience 3D modeling... but in SolidWorks, not Blender, which operates in a just fundamentally different way. Operating directly on vertices, trying to transfer bone weights from one mesh to another, alllllll the buttons and dropdowns and unintuitive layout of Blender, it's just... a little overwhelming to deal with all at once.
I have Blender 2.79 with Deliverator's scripts, I have Nifskope, I have Nexus Buddy 2.5.3, all working; I could not get Nexus itself to work even from the old SDK.
So I've got a horse archer model for Civ4 that's almost what I want, except for the head. To match the icon I've already made, it would work a lot better to swap the horse archer's head out for the head of the cavalryman on the right:
(These are Bakuel's Kievan Rus Heavy Cavalry and Kipchak Horse Archer, incidentally)
I was planning to rig it to the keshik's armature. I managed to find a .nif import/export script that works for 2.79, so I can import them directly without an intermediate conversion to .obj, thus preserving the armature. I'm just not sure what to do with the armature - Troller's tutorial seems to imply I need to rename the imported model's bone bindings/vertex groups to the same name as the keshik's vertex groups, and then merge their objects together and then the keshik meshes? Not every keshik vertex group seems to have an equivalent in the imported horse archer though; the keshik horse has several more vertex group; and the keshik treats the bow and its associated vertex groups as a part of the rider's mesh, while the imported horse archer treats the bow and its vertex groups as a separate mesh. What do?
Okay, but the main problem: mixing and matching parts of models. I think with enough effort I could probably figure out how to delete the vertices that make up the horse archer's head (although it probably wouldn't be a clean cut). What I'm not grasping is how to 1) grab the "corresponding" vertices (i.e. matching the previous cut as close as possible) from the cavalryman, 2) copy only those over, 3) reassign them to the head bones whose vertex groups I probably just wiped out when I deleted the head (oops), and 4) stitch the new head back onto the rider mesh.
(Also, can you... not select vertices by vertex group? I'm trying to - I right click on a vertex group in the outliner > Select, to see what vertices it maps to - but I just get an error message at the top of the screen saying "not yet implemented"?)
To be clear, I'm not asking someone to do the model editing and conversion - I'm asking if someone can walk me through how I can do the model editing and conversion. I need to learn to do it myself because there are many UU models I still need converted, some of which have to be cobbled together because there are no pre-existing Civ4 models that are a good enough match.
I do have some experience 3D modeling... but in SolidWorks, not Blender, which operates in a just fundamentally different way. Operating directly on vertices, trying to transfer bone weights from one mesh to another, alllllll the buttons and dropdowns and unintuitive layout of Blender, it's just... a little overwhelming to deal with all at once.
