Is it possible to bring down the size of an MDX?

[Ravencore]

I'm currently working on a map that has over 20 custom player models, and they used to have about 70-100kb each, after i transfered the animations to each of them, i had to convert then with mdlx from mdl to mdx because they gave an error, and now they have 150-200kb each :O, all because they were converted with mdlx. Is there any way to compress the models in order to bring down their size?

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

... The size has nothing to do with how you converted them; they're bigger because you've just added fuckloads of extra animation data -- the worst kind of filesize-killer.

Try using the MDX Squisher; this will not give you an immediately visible effect, but the size of your final map should drop by a reasonable amount.

If that doesn't tickle your fancy, then track down Oinkerwinkle's Animation Remover and chop out the sequences that you just don't need (especially long alternate stands). Do not just remove the 'sequence' entry, since that will do absolutely nothing except make the animation data entirely inaccessible.

 

[Ravencore]

Tnx a lot, i appreciate it

 

[BlinkBoy]

Well optimizing MDLs is a complex subject. There are a lot of ways to optimize as much data as possible, yet most are heavy/difficult to make.

I suggest you that you download Oinkerwinkle's note track tool, open your model and resave in other file, it will transform your animations from bezier/Hermite into linear, which reduces the .mdl to half size.

I also suggest you that you try to convert textures of massable to units to 128*128, normally your models won't use the first mipmap which is 256*256, so it will help you reduce a lot of space. (unless you scale your models to be big in the editor)

 

[Kitabatake]

Remove the unnecessary bones

Many models have unnecessary bones that can take a lot of space (because they have animation info stored in them).

These bones are useless because a modeller has removed the area that the bone used to control.
For example: A modeller removes the head and necklace from blademaster and replaces with a head of a grunt.
In this process 18 bones are left useless as the new head does not use bones such as "jaw", "eyelid" etc. because it is just attached to the one and only "Bone_Head".

Quite many modellers seem to leave the useless bones untouched, but by removing them you could save a lot of space

Be careful though, sometimes you can screw up a model if you remove the wrong bones. So keep some backups if you attempt to remove the useless ones.


Edit: Oh yes, if your models use custom textures, you can make them into 90% smaller filesize with Warcraft 3 Viewer.
Just convert the textures first to .tga and then use Warcraft 3 Viewer to convert it back into .blp and set the quality of compression to 30 or something.