[TUTORIAL] Bone Weight Copying Civ 4 Units into Civ 5 using blender

[Ekmek]

This Tutorial is to help speed up the blender rigging process. It assumes that you are familiar with Deliverator's "Getting Civ 4 Units into Civ 5 - Full Conversion" or Wolfdog's "Convert Civ 4 units to Civ 5 "


Step 1:
Export your Civ4 Mesh as an obj files using nifskope (picture below) OR import into blender and export as a waveform.obj file. I use OBJ so I don't have multiple skeletons around.



Step 2:
Import the wave object.



Step 3:
Select the mesh in scenes viewer



Step 4:
Resize and rotate if need be


Step 5:
line up your objects.
I DIDN'T DO IT HERE FOR BREVITY SAKE BUT LINING UP CLOSELY TO THE MESH HELPS MAKE THE RIGGING MATCH BETTER


Step6:
select the objects with shift RIGHT CLICK. NEW mesh first then the rigged old one second.



Step 7:
Go to scripts->objects->bonewight copy
YOUR NEW MESH MUST HAVE NO VERTEX GROUPS FOR THIS TO WORK

NOTE SELECTING 2 or 3 APPEARS TO HELP




step 8:
Check rigging. It may be trial an error as you test the animations and you may have to rerig some parts but this should do 70-80% of the rigging work. 3 or 4 is good.






NOTE: to remove vertex groups from your new mesh.
Select your new mesh (they must still be separate at this point).
Go to where the vertex names are in the left-bottom corner.
there is a delete button there. just keep pressing that until its empty.
Be careful not to delete the vertex groups of the old mesh.



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Ok, I know it's real rough. try it out so I can see where I need to add detail

 

[Ekmek]

Reserved 1

 

[Ekmek]

Reserved 2

 

[Mahandar]

Is this done before or after what's done in the other tutorials?

 

[Ekmek]

In the middle - when you need to rig the meshes (stage 1 D in wolfdog's guide)

 

[Deliverator]

I made my first unit using this method here. Definitely a time-saver.

BTW, in step 7 you mean "YOUR NEW MESH MUST HAVE NO VERTEX GROUPS FOR THIS TO WORK" rather than "VERTICES".

Also setting the quality for the Bone Weight Copy to 2 or 3 helps.

 

[Ekmek]

Thanks! I incorporated your comments.

 

[Ekmek]

In your tutorial it says that the new mesh must have no vertex groups for bone weight copying to work. I've managed to get as far as the copying, but then it says that more than one of the selected meshes has vertex groups. Obviously this means that my new mesh has vertex groups. My question is, how do I get rid of the vertex groups in the new mesh? Thanks!

select your new mesh (they must still be separate at this point) and go to where the vertex names are in the left-bottom corner. there is a delete button there. just keep pressing that until its empty. Be careful not to delete the vertices of the old mesh.

 

[Shirotora Kenshin]

the bone weight copy is really an time-saving,magical feature of blender.
but what can i do when there are still weights-problems in game,and now i want to
correct the weights in blender ?

currently the unit have deformations when the unit moves or fight.......

 

[Ekmek]

you have to re-rig. the functions are in the last picture. Also my civ4 leaderhead guide (in signature) has a lot of the functions you can use for civ5 (uses the same blender program).

 

[Shirotora Kenshin]

this leader guide is great ! thanks ! now i know what you mean and what to do,but test it in game
for every little change i made is much time-consuming.

can i see in blender whether the model moves correctly with the animation ?

sended you a friend request on steam .

 

[Ekmek]

sadly, in-game is the only way to do get the best view of it animating unless you have the sdk. Maybe someone else knows how.

 

[Deliverator]

sadly, in-game is the only way to do get the best view of it animating unless you have the sdk. Maybe someone else knows how.

You can run the animations in Granny Viewer too. You just need to open and re-save the vanilla animations that you want to test. Then you can open your model .gr2 and simply drag and drop the animation .gr2 onto to it to play the animation.

 

[DoctorMcGann]

Nifskope 1.1.3 says that the obj export doesn't work. What should I do instead?

EDIT: NVM, got 11.2