3ds max Video tutorial request

[LupusXIII]

Hello with this i would like to request that a few of the modding veterans here to share there wisdome and make some videos to guide us modding adepts. Since a few months im part of Gabriels Codexedition dev team and i love this game and the effort the comunity shows to improve it i already made some models for new units but i still have problems with getting them to work and i know that other very skilled model designers have problems too and i already asked some for guidance but now i decided to raise my voice in a way everyone can hear.
To get to the point this thread will show a list of tutorial request post if u have a request too or if u made/found a tutorial i will update the initial post regulary.

Requests:
Adding new bones to an existing model

How to make a modified model export ready
(as example i made a few new guns for the eldar gravtanks and added them to the existng parts but allways get export errors so a step by step video should help a lot to find waht im missing)

A tipps and tricks for using the material editor

ragging and finishing a entire new model
(as example u have made the meshes and want to make it useable)

V-mapping and texturing, interducion to highlight maps and army painter preperations

Basics for animations

I know some of this points are very general so if u find some not DOW2 dedicatet tutorials that u find helpfully post them here
and know LEARN AND SHARE YOURE WISDOME

Greetings Lupus

[uncle_anaesthesia]

what version? max?

Adding new bones to an existing model
create,systems,bones IK chain (name your bone or bones in lowercase) and link to parent bone by 'select and link icon' it looks like a chain link on the left of the ui interface (screen). check the schematic view for hierarchical layout of bones and parents (beside the materials icon in ui interface).

How to make a modified model export ready
u need to be more specific as there are a lot of things that can cause problems, does the model export but the new gun show up weird?


V-mapping and texturing, interducion to highlight maps and army painter preperations
practice practice practice if you use an older version u may need to get a uv unwrap 3rd party plugin i think there are free ones out there. if you have a specific problem post on your thread and im sure me n other will answer if we know

basics for animations
you tube tutorials and i use and max tutorials, i hate doing animation stuff myself but the more times i try things the easier things get

[Gabriel Gorgutz]

We are trying to create pintle-mounted storm bolters for the Rhino that will go on the two front cupolas/hatches. We need them to rotate and animate much like the Big Shoota turret on the wartrukk. Bloodravage tried getting this to work for 2 weeks and it either won't export, or it won't animate/fire properly in-game.

If you're able to help out, here's a list of what we're trying to do with this: 1. Pintle mounted storm botlers on both front cupolas of the Rhino and Chaos Rhino chassis, basically the same bones/animation ability as the trukk turret, on both front hatches. 2. A havoc launcher for the Chaos rhino that would sit in the same place as one of the storm bolters. 3. Pintle-mounted storm bolters on the Predator and Chaos Predator turrets. 4. A pintle-mounted heavy stubber with a guardsman firing it on top of the Leman Russ.

The storm bolter pintles would have 3 varieties. For the Rhino, one with a SM firing it, and one that is remote-controlled like Bloodravage's Land Raider storm bolter. For the Predator version, it would have a marine firing it and a special upgrade version with a unique character like Sgt. Chronus (basically the SM tank hero) firing it.

Is anyone from the original DoW2 team available to give advice? Someone who worked on the original models, who could tell us how it's done? Since this would fall under "general modding advice" and isn't proprietary info of relic or THQ, I don't see why someone like Hirm couldn't get a modeler who worked on the game to tell us how to add parts to models.

Chaos would get the same deal for their twin bolter pintle guns - one with a CSM firing it, one without - plus the havoc launcher and combi-weapon versions of the twin-bolter with the CSM firing it.

Making different looking versions of the pintle guns should be simple, it's getting the bones for the pintle mount/gun/marine gunner to attach to the model, export properly, and rotate and fire like the ork trukk gun that's the problem.

Also, Bloodravage's GK dreadnought is supposed to be able to fire its torso incinerator independently from its arm cannons, and for some reason the hkanim won't support this. Either the flamer doesn't fire, or it fires in very quick bursts along with the arm gun. Does anyone know how to get this to work?

We need to get either 1. 3ds Max experts from the max forums or the original DoW2 team to come here and help out, or 2. Horus to come back, since he apparently knew how to do this with his scout sentinel, which had a cockpit with an animated pilot that must've used new bones, since the vanilla senti model has just a solid cockpit.

[LupusXIII]

if i try to export i get an error and no file is showing up Shuma already tryet to help me and wrote a tutorial but i still get the error here a copy of waht Shuma send me
Ok, i'll tell you what you need to do to get the models in a ready-to-use state, ie, the models are converted to Relic's propietary file format(.model file), how to code them in game and all that is beyond me and i wouldn't be able to help you with that anyway. Read everything before starting:

First than all, i'd begin by importing the falcon grav tank's weapons to the scene again, but this time un-check the "Group Meshes" box so that the healthy box disappears, that's how i always import files, and keep the "reset scene" check box checked so that the scene is reset.

Now import the new weapons for the grav tank you made(and that i assume are saved as .obj files) by going to the big green box on the top left corner and clicking on import, choose the .obj files and they should be imported into the scene, resize and move around until they're in their correct position/size.

I'm afraid i'm not familiar with the weapons an eldar grav tank uses, but i'm going to assume that they take the same place as the ones it currently has around the cockpit. If you select the current weapons you'll see it has 2 modifiers, "editable mesh" and "Skin", if you select skin and click on edit envelopes and you go through the different bones on the list you'll see parts of the model are highlighted, those are the parts of the model that the corresponding bones control, so if you select those bones and move them or rotate them around you'll see that they move those parts of the model. So what you want to do in this case is to rig the new weapons to existing bones, now that the weapons are in place, add a skin modifier to them. Like i said before, i'm only assuming what weapons go where since i don't know how Eldar grav tanks are set up, but i'm assuming that they go around the cockpit turret just like the current ones, in which case the easiest way to rig them would be to simply add a skin modifier and add the "bone_top_chassis" to it, which controls the cockpit turret and the turrets attached to it, if the new weapons attach to the chassis then use the bone which controls the chassis, easy.

Now you have the weapons rigged, next thing is to name them, look at the name of the old weapons, it's: healthy:lod0:merged material-[falcon_grav_tank,relic.material.falcon_grav_tank]

Healthy means it's... Healthy, if it said "wreck" then that'd be the model used for the vehicle's wreck once it's destroyed, there's also "light_damaged" and "heavy_damaged" which is the appearance the model would take when it takes x ammount of damage, but no unit in the game uses it, and i don't think any mod does either, so you don't need to concern yourself with this, just keep it as "healthy".

lod0 is Level of Detail 0, this is the highest level of detail, which is what's shown when you zoom in the closest(if the unit has additional level of detail, those will be shown when you are zoomed out, if not level of detail 0 is shown from afar too), lod1 and lod2 are shown when far away or when using lower settings, this is one thing i never concern myself with, all my models are lod0, but it's something everyone should know and understand.

Not sure what merged material means, but the next part is kind of important. "falcon_grav_tank" is the name of the mesh itself, but i don't think it matters at all, i at least rarely change the name of what i make, the very important thing is:

relic.material.falcon_grav_tank This tells the game what textures to use, this is especially important if you have several meshes in one model file and they use different textures from each other, this is the part that you need to change, so it'd be relic.material.new_weapon or whatever you want to name it, but this name is the important part.

Now you need to give it textures(assuming the model is already unwrapped), if it's not unwrapped and if it's not textured it doesn't matter right now, we only want you to get the model ready. Go to the material editor(it's the checkered sphere with the box in front) a new window will pop up, it'll have several spheres, these are called "materials" they're basically where you set up your textures or simply the "material" the model is made of, for example i could make some robot and give it a "chrome" material, but that doesn't matter when doing stuff for DoW II, what's important is that you use materials to give models a texture.

In your case since you already have imported a relic made model one material will be set up, it's the selected sphere and you can see below on a drop down list that it's a "multimaterial" which simply means that several materials can be added to it, which is how it's done in DoW II. In order to diferentiate which material goes to what mesh it has a material id, in this case 1. Most times, all models will have their material ID as 1, but in order to check you have to go under editable mesh, select all polygons and scroll down to where you can change the material ID.

Anyway, to the right of the material ID(in the material editor) there's a name, in this case relic.material.falcon_grav_tank, you want to change that name to the name of the new weapons, next click on the box to the right under sub-material. You'll see that it also has a name on a drop down bar, also change it to the name of the weapons.

Now the material editor looks a bit different, and here you can see the actual textures, like diffuse texture and then a box to it's right that has the path to the diffuse texture, we want to change those textures, click on the boxes, and then on the new screen change the path to the texture where it says bitmap. IF you have textures for the weapons choose those textures, if not choose a texture from data/art/defaults, if you haven't extracted those textures from whichever .sga they're in(i don't remember in which .sga they're in) then do so, and select the corresponding texture, for example defaulttexture_dif for the diffuse texture, if there's not a corresponding texture for one slot just choose default texture.

What this does is make the models appear as a solid grey in-game. Below the texture slots you can see other variables, like "alpha test" this is what's used to make things like the chaos lord's cape have holes, unit occlusion flag which makes the occlusion texture more apparent in game, etc, etc, etc, if you're not a texture you don't need to know all of this, if you are then you probably know what it all means. Then below that you have stuff like badge matrix something something something and a load of weird numbers, that controls where the badge is applied, but we don't do that in max we do it in Santos's editor and it's very simple and again, it doesn't matter now anyway.

So with the model set up, rigged, name changed, and textures applied we're ready, go to santos's tools and go to export, export options, select the where the model will be saved and the name and export, there's a couple of check boxes there that i don't know what they do, but if you only have one model called healthy then keep them all as healthy and check the damage_state checkbox, after that close it and click the export model button. If it worked and there were no errors then you can go to Santos's model editor and load the model to see if it works fine, if it appears correctly.

You should open the grav falcon, then go under attachments and load up your model, it should look fine, just grey and pretty much featurless, then go under the animations tab and play a couple of animations, the model shouldn't deform, unless it's rigged to more than one bone, either way you should know if it's deforming correctly or in-correctly, if it's not correctly then you have to go up and adjust things on the skin modifier, it should be pretty self explanatory.

And i think that's pretty much it. PM me back if something fails. "

And thanks for the help with the bones

[uncle_anaesthesia]

another way is to import your model and attach your weapon to the model so its part of the main model and weight the vertices to the bone chassis, apply the materials and export into the model viewer, this gives you the grav tank +weapon attachment, though the weapons textures will be crap.
copy the model and save a spare then re import into max and delete the main chassis vertices, (optional), leaving the weapon only which will be in correct position.
apply uv unwrap on top of editable mesh but under skin modifier (modifiers-uv coordinates Uwrap uvw) this gives you the map, choose selection modes (face subject mode) and hilite model in red , go to mapping-normal mapping-back front or whatever u want. for the unwrapping of say the gun barrel use cylindrical (its in map parameters). to export your uv map go to tools-render uv template,,pick size 512 x 512 etc and export to model folder in the mod alongside .model file ( make sure to generate mipmaps and pick dxt1

GG i take it he rhino model has the guns attached in game but they dont fire?