Empty Model with Portrait

[Death Adder]

I'm using blank models together with imported default models as portraits to make selectable buildings for players when they click dummy units.

The actual model doesn't need anything but at the moment I'm copying entire models for the portraits so it's taking quite a bit of space after importing a few of those models...

I'm wondering what's safe to remove from the .mdl and still have it work as a proper portrait?

As an example HumanBarracks.mdx takes 146 kb, if I changed it how much could I lower that by?

 

[PurgeandFire]

If the portrait is built-in to the model, then you can remove all animations apart from the "portrait" animation. You can also remove whatever part of the mesh isn't seen by the camera, but that might not make a huge file size difference.

 

[Apheraz Lucent]

I did something similar with this technique: I had a spell named "Distribute Stats" which basically opened up an interface to spend the 10 points to INT, AGI or STR, by your choice. The interface was actually a dummy unit, and the dummy unit had the original model of the hero, no attack, movement or colision, and was invulnerable. Dummy unit had the three spells to upgrade stats. To make the dummy "invisible" but still keep the portrait model displayed when you triggered a click on the dummy, I've just held shift while double-clicking to modify the unit's scaling value in object editor to 0.01. Remove shadows and voila! An invisible clickable dummy with no model but with portrait file properly displayed and functional. You can then move it with triggers every 2 seconds to the position of the Hero if you want to have the function of clicking on the portrait and making the camera pan to the dummy.

On a side note, I first tried to make it invisible by making it's vertex coloring to 100% transparency in the trigger editor, but it also makes portrait invisible by that percentage

Hope this helps you figure it out

edit: I just figured out that this actually doesn't solve your problems, especially if you're aiming to create custom buildings made of several doodads and units combined to look like a single structure, as the structure would only be selected when you click the 0.01 dummy. You can, however, ask for a clickable modelbox from any modeler, with no textures, just a collision sphere of a sort, and trigger it that when it's clicked, it selects dummy instead. This may create a VERY brief pause before selecting the "dummy" but I guess it's still better than having to manually import a shitload of models.