Oh, and the Hellcat you've attached actually comes from here:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/civ5-wwii-unit-pack-12-usa-part1.17438/
Likely some A&A mod used converted Civ 5 units from CFC; if you want to have it in Civ 4, it's much easier to convert from Civ 5 original (all units in the WW2 packs include blender files).
Holy cow that is awesome, thank you for pointing me there!! Looks like danrell made a model of basically every WW2 unit I could think of. These will be way easier than from A&A.
3) While I don't mean to discourage you, I've seen both stock and modded A&A units, and mostly IMO they are sub-par to what we already have. Would be glad to be proven wrong though.
You're absolutely right. My whole goal is getting units that do not currently exist in the database somewhere. I have been scouring mods and compiling my own collection of unit art so I know where the gaps are, and the M18 Hellcat is one of the missing ones. M41 Bulldog and Jagdtiger are a couple others. It sounds like I should be checking civ5's database too, though.
... So for anything A&A related you'll first have to import your nifs somewhere and then re-export them in Civ 4 format.
...Anything fancier you'll have to animate from the ground up using Civ 4 animations. With units, that's definitely the case.
Edit - corrected now that I have done it successfully. Writing out the steps I did so I don't forget, and for anyone else who happens to need to do this.
Step 1. Get Blender and everything set up as per
here
Step 2. Import the new nif into Blender, and delete everything that is not a mesh (right click mesh, hit H to hide it, then hit A to select everything else, delete, then Alt+H un-hides the stuff you hid)
Step 3. Mess with textures. All of the links in step 5 below talk about how to do that but mine seemed to work fine with its civ5 texture so I skipped this. It seems to involve unwrapping the unit onto a 2d rectangle, which you save as a dds.
Step 4. Import the old civ4 nif, which has bones you would like to use, into Blender.
Step 5. The goal is now to attach new nif mesh to old nif bones.
TheMightyToad and
this other random site (civ4 version by
the coyote) demonstrate two different ways to do this.
Ekmek's tutorial shows how to do it manually piece-by-piece too. How I got it working was to simply delete the vanilla nif's mesh, leaving its bones and your new mesh in the file. Then select new mesh >> shift + select vanilla bones >> press ctrl + p >> parent to armature. This makes a set of 'vertex groups' named after the vanilla bones. (You need to parent it no matter how you get the bones set up.)
Edit: TheMightyToad's way of joining the meshes and then deleting the vanilla mesh does not appear to work for me - the two meshes are similar enough that I can't just select the vanilla one.
Step 5. Check over the "vertex groups" in the 'editing' panel while you're in 'edit mode'. (
Older tutorial.) Vertex groups = bones, make sure they line up and make sense. You can paint-select by pressing B twice and dragging the left mouse button over a bunch of stuff. Middle mouse button deselects stuff. Then right click to get out of B mode and you can mess with whatever you selected. I opened a second blender instance with the vanilla nif to compare and make sure the bones were pretty similar.
Edit: the way I ended up rigging the bones was by looking at the vanilla nif in blender to see which groups referred to what, then selecting similar vertex groups from the new nif (civ5 should actually set up pretty similar vertex groups, you just have to transfer them over to the vanilla nif's groups).
Edit: you may also need to make sure the bone weights match the way the vanilla one is sorted out. You can see that in 'weight paint mode'. If you use the bone weight copy option you may not need to do this.
Step 6. Export. Go File >> Export and make your options match the window shown in Ekmek's tutorial linked in step 4 above. Or TheMightyToad's tutorial. They use slightly different options. I used TheMightyToad's.
Step 7. Now open the exported nif and the old vanilla nif in Civ4, and follow
SaibotLieh's post or Ekmek's tutorial or TheMightyToad's tutorial to nif swap. Basically, copy texture stuff from vanilla nif to exported nif, change it to point to the correct dds, copy nitrishape from exported nif to vanilla nif (make sure it is a nitrishape first), rename it to match the nitrishape in the vanilla nif, then delete the nitrishape in the vanilla nif. Follow Saibotlieh's post and delete the NiSkinPartition if the unit is not a shader. Then, follow notes in TheMightyToad's tutorial about the bounding sphere radius problem, which always happens for me.
Step 8. You should be done...a lot of tiny things in the nifs can go wrong and the thread linked to saibotlieh's post goes through many of them. Especially not having a texture show up at all (a black unit).
