Refreshing the flesh of Z Warriors

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Hello everyone,

I'm new at this forum but certainly not new to ESF, it has been a decade now since I follow this project and I keep loving it. So while waiting for the final release I thought of refreshing the current experience that ESF 1.2.3 with ECX RC2(Big Pack v8.4) gives. I have already started to work on things like game interface and stuff. So now it's time do the juiciest part: renew the character models.

So the purpose of this thread is to ask if anyone's familiar with model creating for ESF characters. I have all the new models I need, but the problem is the animations. There are around 200 animations for each character and it's like a suicide recreating them all. So my question is, is there a way to use the existing characters skeleton on my models, without messing it up? I have already did a try with Krillin's character, but the result was kinda messy, not as desired.


(NOTE: This my project is intended to be personal and a release is not planned, but that might happen. If I will get the character models to do what they are supposed to do I will release them for sure. The models I have are well defined, high-poly ones, with around 20k verts per character, so it would guarantee a pleasing gameplay experience.)

I might update this thread with my progress in future :)

Let me know, thanks!
 
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It's been a really long time so my memory is a little rusty about some specific details but the end result should work.

Basically you can just decompile the model that you want to re-use the animations for and import that skeleton as well as the animations on your new model. I don't know what program you're using but Milkshape 3d would probably be your best and easiest bet for this kind of thing. After the skeleton is imported, you can just rig the skeleton to that model and then compile it, the animations should be functional. There should be some old posts in the Artwork section going into more detail but you'll probably have to search a bit if they're not in the stickies.

You'll have trouble getting a 20k poly model to work ingame without modding the StudioMdl compiler, though. It might be possible to make it compileable with 20k polies since it's open source (I think) but if you don't know how to code you'll probably be stuck with only using models with the original poly limit which is somewhere around 4k polies if I remember.
 
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It's been a really long time so my memory is a little rusty about some specific details but the end result should work.

Basically you can just decompile the model that you want to re-use the animations for and import that skeleton as well as the animations on your new model. I don't know what program you're using but Milkshape 3d would probably be your best and easiest bet for this kind of thing. After the skeleton is imported, you can just rig the skeleton to that model and then compile it, the animations should be functional. There should be some old posts in the Artwork section going into more detail but you'll probably have to search a bit if they're not in the stickies.

You'll have trouble getting a 20k poly model to work ingame without modding the StudioMdl compiler, though. It might be possible to make it compileable with 20k polies since it's open source (I think) but if you don't know how to code you'll probably be stuck with only using models with the original poly limit which is somewhere around 4k polies if I remember.
I kinda know how goldsource models work, so the poly count isn't a problem since I can just separate my model into different parts(e.g. head, arms, legs, chest) and declare that in the .qc file and it will just join all the parts together without issues as long as the poly count doesn't go over 2000 per part.

As I said before, I have already done that with the Krillin character to test out if the similar workflow to the one you described would workout. But I've got undesired results, like the face and body parts had hundreds of polys messed up. Since I've been dedicated to pure modelling lately I have a really basic animating knowledge and I'm not sure if the mess with the test model was caused by rigging issues or if there are any other issues.

I have two theories so far: the first is that my attention while rigging/weight-painting was really poor and it caused the stuff to go wrong; the second, the animations handle some model faces differently since the animation/skeleton(or whatever) was made purposely for a low poly model.

I believed more in the second one more, until now, but while writing the first one seemed more logical to me, lol.

BTW, the software I prefer is Blender, but I have done the major part of the test over MilkShape 3D. I guess I gotta give a better shot over Blender.

Anyways, thanks for interest and replying.
 
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wow, people still use milkshape?!?
A lot of people use programs like 3dsmax and Maya now, especially because it's basically free for students (I'm pretty sure you can even claim to be a student and get it for free). Milkshape 3d can be a better program to work with if you want to do stuff mostly painlessly and quickly regarding things like rigging and a fast compile, mainly because you don't need to install plugins with it compared to 3dsmax.
 
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A lot of people use programs like 3dsmax and Maya now, especially because it's basically free for students (I'm pretty sure you can even claim to be a student and get it for free). Milkshape 3d can be a better program to work with if you want to do stuff mostly painlessly and quickly regarding things like rigging and a fast compile, mainly because you don't need to install plugins with it compared to 3dsmax.
Yeah, it's quite self-explaining, and initially might helpful to figure out the whole process of editing models for gldsrc.
 

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