Struggling with editing a death animation

[ebontope]

I've been struggling very badly to try and change a death animation for a model that I want to use in my current project.

The model is question is the White Balverine from Kuhneghetz. It has a very silly death animation, most likely because it's based off of the Ghoul model, so I wanted to replace it with the Murloc death animation.

I've made some headway in doing so, but the problem I'm now stuck on is that the Death animation also displays the Decay Bone animation, and the Decay Flesh animation got replaced by the Decay Bone animation entirely. I've watched tutorials of various quality, I've tried at least a dozen different tools, many of which don't seem to work as intended or as the tutorial displayed, and frankly I'm completely stumped.

Could anybody help me? Attached is the work I've managed to do so far.

 

[IronBladeClan]

As someone else who wants to learn basic model editing, if someone does help this poor soul out, I would be curious about any tips on how you fixed the animation

 

[ebontope]

As someone else who wants to learn basic model editing, if someone does help this poor soul out, I would be curious about any tips on how you fixed the animation

I wish I could be more in-depth, but after an entire day of messing around I at least got the death animation ported over correctly.

Basically, I used Retera's Model Studio to import the death animation from a Murloc onto the base White Balverine model (File > Import > From Unit/WC3 Model), but that's where it gets tricky... I had to disable various geosets and manually connect motions to pre-existing bones, and frankly it was such a hassle that I don't remember which specific connections I made.

I still have not fixed the Decay Flesh animation, though I discovered the original model also doesn't have one. So I might have to fiddle around some more to see if I can import the Decay Flesh animation from a Murloc as well... Unfortunately it somehow starts playing worker animations when I try to do that, so this is probably going to take even more fiddling and feeling around in the dark.

 

[Jaccouille]

Here's a very quick guide :

You probably already noticed that murloc and murgul have very similar animations to ghoul and the model you linked, lucky you, it seems they have matching bone name, this will ease the import. I linked a 1min video here : https://www.hiveworkshop.com/media/importing-death-animation-in-1min.145036/

Using Retera model studio :
1. open your model
2. start the import wizard and select a murloc/murgul model
3. in Geoset, do not import any Geoset
4. only import the Death sequence from Animation tab
5. in Bones tab, click on motion from all, it will "map" bone with similar name, so the animation on the bone "Head" from the murloc will be imported in the bone "Head" from your model. If the name are different, the mapping has to be done manually
6. do not change the matrices
7. do not import objects,
8. in visibily select the Geoset 4 which correspond to the gutz geoset of your model and in "Imported animation visibility from" choose "Not visible", this means Geoset 4 won't be visible in the imported Death sequence

Click on finish, remove the original Death sequence which you don't like.
Murloc model doesn't have a neck so you'll have to adjust the head animation during the death sequence.