Royal Guard Weapon Ref Problem

[raduman]

Hello. I'm having real problems with the Naga Royal Guard model. It appears that the Weapon Ref attatchment is acting strange and I can't figure why.

I needed the model to be able to morph to and from the Naga Myrmidon (I intended to get the effect of a unit switching weapons). However, the Naga are able to swim and their models change to swim animations when they are the final form of a morph ability (this does not happen when they are the base unit). I should mention I'm using the Druid - Bear Form to change between them.

What I did was I extracted the model from the game files and used AnimationRemove on it to get rid of the swim animations in order to use morphing abilities on the unit with the model, without it diving into the ground and disappearing.

Now everything worked as I wanted... except that if I morph my myrmidon to the royal guard and it has some orbs equipped they will look really really bad (they will magically move from in front of the Royal Guard to the weapon of the Myrimidon).

All that being said, the problem really consists of me not being able to fix the attatchment point for the Royal Guard, morphing or not. I tested the original model inside the game files and the weapon ref is really buggy, it doesn't sway with the weapon and it is located in front and a little to the right of the character.

The next screenshot shows what I've been able to find out so far about the model and what might me the problem in my idea.

Comparing the Naga Myrmidon and the Naga Royal Guard i found that the Naga Royal Guard contains an additional mesh (mesh 7) which looks like the texture file(it appears visible only from under the model). I'm not sure this the problem though. I thought the main problem is the Weapon Ref not being attatched to any bones (apparently) Amazingly, editing the Weapon ref attatchment, putting it on a bone etc does absolutely nothing to help. (I used Magos' War3ModelEditor for these steps).

Moving on to 3ds Max made things even weirder: it's like the weapon ref was there all along...

So... now what?

edit: I attached the edited mdx of the Naga Royal Guard and Naga Myrmidon(without swim animations, otherwise unaltered) as well as the original ones extracted from the war3 expansion mpq archive.

 

[Deolrin]

Hmm. I'll see if I can help. First of all, the weapon ref attachment, does it works properly on a non-altered Naga Royal Guard model?
Just to make sure it's a fault in the editing process.
And you said you wanted to give the effect of a unit switching weapons... Is the skin change intended? I can guide you through the process of swapping textures(without affecting the weapon) if you want.

Besides all that, I think this might fit the requests forum more, but eh, I don't know.

 

[raduman]

Hmm. I'll see if I can help. First of all, the weapon ref attachment, does it works properly on a non-altered Naga Royal Guard model?
Just to make sure it's a fault in the editing process.
And you said you wanted to give the effect of a unit switching weapons... Is the skin change intended? I can guide you through the process of swapping textures(without affecting the weapon) if you want.

Besides all that, I think this might fit the requests forum more, but eh, I don't know.

To answer your first question, no... the original weapon ref is not working properly on a non-altered model. It was the first thing I thought after I removed the animations ("Oh my God, I destroyed the weapon ref"). I'm pretty certain that Blizzard never tested the model on a hero with an orb on or adding a special effect on the weapon attatchment... it wasn't the case with the TFT campaign.
Also,I don't really mind the texture change yet, I guess I could transfer the texture of either of the two models onto the final hero... I don't know if that's going to be a bigger problem than actually fixing the weapon ref. What I'm really interested in is getting the weapon the model holds to change... Textures are secondary atm... Thanks for the offer though.
I was thinking about putting the thread in "Requests", but I wasn't so sure this was request material. I made a post there linking back here, anyway, thanks for the idea. Here is the link.
This has been bugging me for a while, I'd appreciate any help I got.

 

[Deolrin]

I'll make you a naga myrmidon with a Royal Guard's weapons later, alright? Just not now. Kinda busy, remind me tomorrow or in a few hours. Also, do you want the myrmidon's blue color or the royal guard's green color? Just so I know. I'll make a finished model for you.

 

[raduman]

I'll make you a naga myrmidon with a Royal Guard's weapons later, alright? Just not now. Kinda busy, remind me tomorrow or in a few hours. Also, do you want the myrmidon's blue color or the royal guard's green color? Just so I know. I'll make a finished model for you.

Hmmm... I do like the green one better than the blue I guess... Do tell me what tools you used so I won'y be running around all the time with things as minor as a buggy weapon ref. And take your time I don't need it on a deadline... I've moved to different problems
Model or no model, I appreciate the attention so far +rep

 

[Deolrin]

Alright, here you go. In the pack are two models - "RoyalGuardTrident" and "RoyalGuardHarpoon"(the Royal Guard with the Myrmidon's and the Royal Guard's weapon, respectively) as well as two portraits(basically the same portrait twice; I'm sorry, but you'll have to import them twice for both models to work correctly). I simply used Magos Model Editor to change the Myrmidon's textures to the Royal Guard ones, then I saved it as an .MDL, opened the model in notepad and duplicated all the geosets that have the weapon(the first three ones in this case) by copy-and-pasting them, effectively creating a 'double mesh'. I used Vertex Modifier to remove the non-weapon parts from the 3 first geosets, and all the weapon parts from the next 3. The result is the Myrmidon's body in three geosets and the Myrmidon's weapon in three separate geosets, all of which currently used the Royal Guard's texture. I then used Magos to create three new materials, which are effectively doubles of the Royal Guard texture materials I edited earlier, only with the Myrmidon texture, and assigned the weapon geosets to use the newly created Myrmidon materials, thus - the body used the Royal Guard texture while the weapon used the Myrmidon texture as it should. The only problem that remained was the geoset animations, which got screwed up by the geoset-duplicating in Notepad. This is easily fixable with General Frank's tutorial - http://www.hiveworkshop.com/forums/...2/fixing-faulty-death-decay-animations-40794/.

For the Royal Guard with Harpoon model with the working attachment point, I simply took the model I edited earlier, the Trident Royal Guard, and changed the weapon with Vertex Modifier.

 

[raduman]

Beautiful work indeed. I didn't notice any problems at all. Thanks for explaining the process which i now only about 50% understand, I'll have to read more about geosets and stuff.
Thank you very much. Good job!

 

[Deolrin]

I'm glad I could help. I wonder, do they work in-game? I'm not sure if the attachment problem is fixed but it should be. If not, it's a problem with the ability.
Anyways, a few tutorials are recommend:
Oinkerwinkle's MDL Tools and Tutorials (All of them are extremely helpful albeit the fact that some of them are outdated\primitive)
http://www.hiveworkshop.com/forums/3d-modeling-tutorials-282/model-editing-114210/(Pretty basic but still very useful)
http://www.hiveworkshop.com/forums/3d-modeling-tutorials-282/basic-animation-transfers-31703/ (Ignore the part about animation removal; this is a very inefficient way to remove animations)
http://www.hiveworkshop.com/forums/3d-modeling-tutorials-282/modeling-animation-101-a-41840/

The rest you'll have to find by yourself in the tutorial section or learn on your own. Good luck!

 

[raduman]

They work perfectly, I only checked the attack, move and death animations so far and everything seems in order. The attatchment is now relatively well placed and sways with the weapon so it's exactly what I wanted. Though what you did to copy models and stuff I thought as a last resort... there really should have been some easier logical way of snapping an attatchement point to a weapon.
I like the way you edited the mdl file in notepad, I did that too (among other things) but to no effect.

Lastly, not entirely thread related but, is there a way to change the rotatation of a weapon ref point? I don't entirely understand these things, but I figure if I could somehow change their orientation or something I could change the rotation axis of an orb effect. That unless the actual 'rotation' or 'direction' of the point is actually given by a normal from the plane the point is located on, in which case they can't be modified. Am I overthinking this? Note: I guess if i had any idea what a point instance is to a modelling program I'd know already.

Thanks again and those tutorials will surely be useful to me.

 

[Deolrin]

The rotation is simply thanks to the Orb model's animation.

There is a simpler way, but I prefer the hard way. It's the most accurate way at least.