Any guide on how to port model objects(skeletonless or rigless) into a already existing model from War3?

[ehsank1768]

Hello everyone, ive been looking for quite while on how i can port a model object into a model that has skeleton, my english is not great so you might've got confused a bit so i'll try again
I have for example a model.obj that has body/head/hands... and has textures too but it has no bones or anything now i want to rig this with a model from War3 that has skeleton, lets say for example Night Elf Sentry rigging its body with night elf sentry's skeleton and then removing the original body parts of Night Elf Sentry

 

[Retera]

this might be similar

this might be similar

General Guide of what I would probably do:

File > Open of sentry

File > Import of your model without the animations

You get a confusing popup with a bunch of tabs across the top. Skip Geosets tab without clicking anything, on Animations tab click "Leave all" at the top, on Bones tab click on "Leave all" at the top, on the Matrices tab only click on Orange things on the left. They probably have either:

• one item shown, in which case ignore them
• a bunch of parts shown, in which case you can use the UI here to try to correlate parts of the mesh you're importing to the parts of the sentry to get started, if you're lucky (probably not)

Then click on "Objects" tab and click "Leave all" then on "Visibility" tab, maximize the page so you can see all the items on the left (they dont fit for some reason) then find the orange ones, it will say something like Geoset 1 with an orange square when all the other squares are green. Click that. Then on the page that shows, it will have 2 dropdowns. These are:
- Visibility in the animations of Sentry
- Visibility in the animations of model.obj

So you can ignore the second one. For the first one, set it to Sentry: Geoset 1 or something like this. The goal is to pick whatever corresponds to the body of the sentry, so that when she disappears, your guy disappears.

Then press OK. It dumps the model.obj into the sentry now, but it probably still doesn't animate. So then, you can go into Edit tab and click pieces of the model and use CTRL+W or else use RightClick->"Re assign matrix" (which is a less efficient ui) to bind parts of the model onto parts of animation of sentry one by one until everything works.

Obviously if you are importing from some model that already has animations, then it already has the separation. So if you import Warden onto Sentry, you don't have to click each part of her body and link it, because the parts are already separated and all you have to do is do a "Smart Map" button click in the Matrices tab during import, or something like that. But on some model.obj with no animations at all, since that's only a geometric shape, we don't have data to auto link to Sentry. (In other words, "what part of the model is the hand? what part is the foot?" are questions that aren't stored in the file, probably.)

If you want to try to train an AI to do this automatically, maybe that would be an interesting task, but nobody told me that they did it yet.