IskatuMesk is correct, each attachment essentially has a name and the bone it's attached to and takes up roughly 40 or so bytes of data depending on its string size, absolutely nothing percentage-wise. Animations and materials/bitmaps are the largest structures in M3's, animations especially. This is why it's important to export only the animations you need with your WoW models to save on file size.
It interests me what you've described zzPop about the randomised hit points on the model and I think I know where this information may be stored. It's almost certainly the fact that we are not exporting some volume (model matrix) information. There's some matrices present in all models in certain structures of M3's which I've never bothered to clearly define but which probably play a role in spell impact regions for M3's. When I get the time I'll look into this further as I have a few suspects in mind.
All of those are using the same relationships between WoW attachments and M3 attachments as are in my script. I always assumed that 'Ref_Target' was used for missile impacts. I suppose the 'Spell Impact' attachment could be converted to 'Ref_Center' instead and that should fix your problems. Of course I'm not sure the majority of M2 models have 'Spell Impact' attachment points but I don't see why they wouldn't.
A new list would have to be created then, with the M2 with attachment ID 34 being converted to 'Ref_Center'.
The spells will be the toughest to nail, but we'll keep working on it. Thank you for testing them out and providing feedback, I'll take a look at those that aren't working correctly and see what can be done.
Particle support extends mostly to creature models for the moment, with most of them looking aesthetically as they should. We'll continue to work on the conversion until it is as close to how the original M2 is as possible. Bare in mind ribbon effects are currently not supported. I've made some progress working out the ribbon structure, so hopefully in the future ribbon effects can be converted too.
Many thanks to chuanhsing and cutevisor who are doing all the code additions.. They're working really hard updating the code and alot of effort has been put in to get it right. Thanks guys :D.
There's currently a bug in the new version that fails to export the particle textures which is resulting in the 'square' particles you guys are seeing. This the editor not being able to find the proper texture as it's not being imported into the Starcraft 2 editor due to it not being exported by WMV. This should be fixed up in the next version.
If you're impatient you can manually export the TGA through the 'Export Textures...' option. I've looked over a few models and the M3 particles are very close to how the M2 particles look. A few minor things still need work but overall the particle conversion is looking great!
It's much much faster and way less overhead and it can be done without 3ds Max at all. This means free conversion of WoW models to Starcraft 2 format fast. Importing into 3ds Max with all the anim files and such is messy and can take large amounts of time whereas exporting from WMV automatically handles all the extra files, exporting just the TGA's involved with the model and the .M3 needed for the model to work in the Starcraft 2 engine. It simplifies the process.
Chuanhsing and CuteVisor have done superb work on converting the format. It's always a hard task to convert from one file format to another, even with decent documentation of both. The TGA's that WMV exports now work properly in the Starcraft 2 engine. The code is for the moment being updated consistently and it has great room for improvement, this means that once M3 particles are decyphered we can have a straight conversion of the M2 particles to the M3 format. The UI options can potentially include a host of tweakable settings and once it's figured out, exporting the difficult character models with their specific submeshes will be super easy rather than the complex mess it is to import them into 3ds Max and delete the extra meshes.
Overall this is a great step forward for the mod community as I feel we're finally moving away from 3ds Max dependency and moving into the open source environment.
Aye I'm very pleased with the work :D I regret that I can't contribute moreso to the coding side of things. On my next holiday break I hope to devote some time to the blender plugins people have been asking for but we'll see how I go for time.
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@IskatuMesk: Go
IskatuMesk is correct, each attachment essentially has a name and the bone it's attached to and takes up roughly 40 or so bytes of data depending on its string size, absolutely nothing percentage-wise. Animations and materials/bitmaps are the largest structures in M3's, animations especially. This is why it's important to export only the animations you need with your WoW models to save on file size.
It interests me what you've described zzPop about the randomised hit points on the model and I think I know where this information may be stored. It's almost certainly the fact that we are not exporting some volume (model matrix) information. There's some matrices present in all models in certain structures of M3's which I've never bothered to clearly define but which probably play a role in spell impact regions for M3's. When I get the time I'll look into this further as I have a few suspects in mind.
@zzPop: Go
All of those are using the same relationships between WoW attachments and M3 attachments as are in my script. I always assumed that 'Ref_Target' was used for missile impacts. I suppose the 'Spell Impact' attachment could be converted to 'Ref_Center' instead and that should fix your problems. Of course I'm not sure the majority of M2 models have 'Spell Impact' attachment points but I don't see why they wouldn't.
A new list would have to be created then, with the M2 with attachment ID 34 being converted to 'Ref_Center'.
@HellFire0102: Go
The spells will be the toughest to nail, but we'll keep working on it. Thank you for testing them out and providing feedback, I'll take a look at those that aren't working correctly and see what can be done.
Particle support extends mostly to creature models for the moment, with most of them looking aesthetically as they should. We'll continue to work on the conversion until it is as close to how the original M2 is as possible. Bare in mind ribbon effects are currently not supported. I've made some progress working out the ribbon structure, so hopefully in the future ribbon effects can be converted too.
Many thanks to chuanhsing and cutevisor who are doing all the code additions.. They're working really hard updating the code and alot of effort has been put in to get it right. Thanks guys :D.
@zzPop: Go
There's currently a bug in the new version that fails to export the particle textures which is resulting in the 'square' particles you guys are seeing. This the editor not being able to find the proper texture as it's not being imported into the Starcraft 2 editor due to it not being exported by WMV. This should be fixed up in the next version.
If you're impatient you can manually export the TGA through the 'Export Textures...' option. I've looked over a few models and the M3 particles are very close to how the M2 particles look. A few minor things still need work but overall the particle conversion is looking great!
@vjeux: Go
It's much much faster and way less overhead and it can be done without 3ds Max at all. This means free conversion of WoW models to Starcraft 2 format fast. Importing into 3ds Max with all the anim files and such is messy and can take large amounts of time whereas exporting from WMV automatically handles all the extra files, exporting just the TGA's involved with the model and the .M3 needed for the model to work in the Starcraft 2 engine. It simplifies the process.
Chuanhsing and CuteVisor have done superb work on converting the format. It's always a hard task to convert from one file format to another, even with decent documentation of both. The TGA's that WMV exports now work properly in the Starcraft 2 engine. The code is for the moment being updated consistently and it has great room for improvement, this means that once M3 particles are decyphered we can have a straight conversion of the M2 particles to the M3 format. The UI options can potentially include a host of tweakable settings and once it's figured out, exporting the difficult character models with their specific submeshes will be super easy rather than the complex mess it is to import them into 3ds Max and delete the extra meshes.
Overall this is a great step forward for the mod community as I feel we're finally moving away from 3ds Max dependency and moving into the open source environment.
@zzPop: Go
Aye I'm very pleased with the work :D I regret that I can't contribute moreso to the coding side of things. On my next holiday break I hope to devote some time to the blender plugins people have been asking for but we'll see how I go for time.