World Editor only shows the model's shadow

[MarcusZuOppenheim]

i was trying to import Herrdave's Myrrddal animations to Ujimasa Hojo's Highborne Warmage. I used Retera for it, cleared previous animations, deleted unused vertices/nodes, set the bones to match, but my custom map wouldn't load them when I clicked test map. I wondered if the custom model was the problem, so I tried again with the vanilla Blademaster, but the world editor still wouldn't load the model while testing. All I see is a shadow.

The models with imported animations are attached below.

 

[Retera]

When you have a problem with a model, before reaching out to the humans for it one great option is to use this Sanity Checker program created by the user formerly known as Ghostwolf.

Sanity Test

According to this checker, your models each have the same 9 errors. Items marked in red as "errors" in this way are issues that will probably prevent the model from loading inside of Warcraft 3. Other stuff like "warnings" and lighter colors that are not red are sometimes speculative and might be indicative of a potential problem but might be passable and not a major problem.

But as it stands currently, there's what we might call a "bug" in the Retera Model Studio program that it happily saves EventObjects (EVTS) chunks that are effectively empty by writing 0 keyframes/tracks/timestamps whatever you want to call them for playing the event. And we can save and load that and generally make sense of what it means, but if we put it into Warcraft 3 the game refuses to load the model for some reason. It's conceivable that someone could patch Retera Model Studio so that if you have empty EVTS data in the model when you try to save, maybe we could nuke that data and erase them entirely. But for the time being, the user needs to go and delete them.

From a high level, the problem comes from the animations that you are deleting, such as a "Walk" animation that leaves footprints on the ground. Retera Model Studio will delete the timestamps when we would have spawned the footprints along with deleting the animation, but the automation to actually remove the "Footprint" spawner object entirely is missing, and so you end up with this empty dud object that makes the model fail to load.

But if you click on the "Footprint" spawner event objects in the 2D space, and use the DEL key to delete them entirely, then save the model again, it will happily start loading in the game after this.

 

[stan0033]

Common problems why a model is not visble in-game, that I encountered, are:

• Sequences are not in the correct order (sequantial) and/or are overlapping
• All your geoset animations are set to 0 static (invisible)
• The game cannot find one or more of the used textures by the model (if external texture, did you set the path properly?)
• One or more of the bone/s to which the vertices are attached has scaling 0 for stand sequence
• if the model is an effect and using visibility transformation for special effects, the keyframes are not in sequential order
• As Retera wrote, any red error message by teh sanity test will result in model not showing and/or crashing the map
• If you are using the model as doodad, and it has more than 1 variations (field), the game will expect more models, but since there aren't it will display nothing
• if you just imported the model, it will not be immediately visible, instead save the map, re-start the world editor and re-load the map

 

[MarcusZuOppenheim]

When you have a problem with a model, before reaching out to the humans for it one great option is to use this Sanity Checker program created by the user formerly known as Ghostwolf.

Sanity Test

According to this checker, your models each have the same 9 errors. Items marked in red as "errors" in this way are issues that will probably prevent the model from loading inside of Warcraft 3. Other stuff like "warnings" and lighter colors that are not red are sometimes speculative and might be indicative of a potential problem but might be passable and not a major problem.

But as it stands currently, there's what we might call a "bug" in the Retera Model Studio program that it happily saves EventObjects (EVTS) chunks that are effectively empty by writing 0 keyframes/tracks/timestamps whatever you want to call them for playing the event. And we can save and load that and generally make sense of what it means, but if we put it into Warcraft 3 the game refuses to load the model for some reason. It's conceivable that someone could patch Retera Model Studio so that if you have empty EVTS data in the model when you try to save, maybe we could nuke that data and erase them entirely. But for the time being, the user needs to go and delete them.

From a high level, the problem comes from the animations that you are deleting, such as a "Walk" animation that leaves footprints on the ground. Retera Model Studio will delete the timestamps when we would have spawned the footprints along with deleting the animation, but the automation to actually remove the "Footprint" spawner object entirely is missing, and so you end up with this empty dud object that makes the model fail to load.

But if you click on the "Footprint" spawner event objects in the 2D space, and use the DEL key to delete them entirely, then save the model again, it will happily start loading in the game after this.

I am so sorry. I did as you suggested and the model loaded properly. Thank you very much. I did not know about that sanity test site. This will stop me from asking more such questions in the future, I swear.