Update is going up. http://www.sc2mapster.com/assets/m3-export-plugin-3ds-max/ when it's approved. I'm bundling the import and export scripts together with the object definition script so I can keep the object definitions in sync with the scripts. I've cleaned up the exporter alot and fixed alot of bugs that were causing people to crash. There were some compatibility issues with older versions of max which should now be fixed. I tried to get all the bugs cleaned up but as always some will probably slip through. The feedback is really valuable so keep it coming.
The importer now uses the custom objects (materials, maps, etc) too so it should be easier to import a model, modify it and then export it back out. I'm pretty much done with the material/maps side of things, so if there's anything you think should be added let me know. Otherwise I'm going to leave it and move on to bones and animation.
Skizot and Triceron are right, you'll need to uncheck 'Use material path' and use an internal path in the form of 'Assets/Textures/' and then import the maps to the correct paths through the importer within the editor. The 'Use material path' checkbox forces the exporter to use the hard drive paths used in max for your maps. That means it'll pick up your map on the hard drive and show the model with the texture in the editor and in game, but if you try to distribute the model other people won't have a map in that location so they'll get a null texture.
Hey malu05, long time no speak. How are ya mate? Good to see you still around. The project seems really good after watching that youtube video I'm impressed. I hope to try out the finish product soon :)
I'm sorry I haven't responded to your PM's, I'm flatout at the moment. Barely have time to respond on this forum ><. I don't think rotating your model through the exporter is the way to go, since you'll lose all animation of the model, unless you just want to rotate a model that only has geometry. If so, then yes you can definitely use this plugin. You'll have to go to the display tab of 3ds max, click on the Unhide everything button, and you'll have to delete everything that isn't the main mesh before you'll be able to export.
@Skizot: Go
The sphere is the bounding sphere. At the moment I don't know what to do with it so I'm just hiding it. For my exporter I want people to be able to provide their own bounding spheres instead of relying on the extents of the mesh so that's future development in the works there.
Thanks guys for all your kind words and I love seeing the models you guys are putting into the game, really cool. I hope to expand the exporter at some stage to provide the juicy things such as bone support, animation, attachments, particle/ribbon emitters, etc. Obviously it's pretty far off but the potential is definitely there. I tried to read up a bit about StarTools, with what little is known. StarTools seems to be aimed at creating 'doodads' only, so I get the feeling it'll lack extensive animation support. Hopefully StarTools supports everything, but at the moment it's kind of a motivator to keep going because I can extend my plugin to whatever degree I want whereas StarTools will be a utility we'll depend on Blizzard for.
I'll be updating the importer in the future to use 'Starcraft 2' shaders and 'Starcraft 2 Bitmap' maps so that they hold all the extra settings and exporting them back out after modification will be easier. That's when I get the time :(.
Particle emitters would probably have to be custom objects as the regular particle emitters won't house all the settings that M3's would use. I don't see this is a big problem though, I can use a similar method with materials and just extend the native particle emitters to support the extra settings. However the problem is you won't know exactly how the particle emitter will behave because max won't be taking into consideration all the extra settings. It'll mean you'll have to check them out in the previewer after exporting each time to observe the effect, which while not difficult to do is inconvenient. That's just a preliminary guess on how things will work, particle emitter block structure has not been deciphered yet so it's alot of unknowns at this point.
Update is up and waiting for approval. The new file has an extra script, sc2_objects.ms. If you place it in your 3ds max plugins directory it'll allow you to use custom Starcraft 2 materials that lets you tweak the material settings. There's also a custom map type which allows you to set team colour and texture wrapping for a bitmap. The map type will be expanded upon later. Enjoy :D
My motivation for the script is hard to pinpoint exactly. I like to create and design tools, but I'm not quite able to step up to C plus and do proper programming. Maxscript is really fun to work with. It's forgiving and flexible, my only qualms is that it can be inconveniently slow and accessing and setting some of 3ds max's settings can be a nightmare (don't get me started on vertex normals...). However I enjoy overcoming the technical hurdles and the challenges involved. I also love models, especially highly detailed ones such as the ones from WoW and first person shooters in general. I know there are artist rights at hand, but I find it frustrating that such great models can be limited to one game. Ontop of all these reasons, I have lots of affection for SC and its universe, so I have a fascination with SC2 and its models I guess you could say.
I'm working on a big update that's on the verge of release. Basically for materials I discovered maxscript provides plugins that you can use to extend the native material types. I've used this to create custom materials that hold all the custom kind of settings that M3's have, and a custom bitmap too that allows you set layer properties such as if it uses the material alpha to render team colour and texture wrapping. You'll still be using a multimaterial for the submeshes, but each mulimaterial will be of the 'Starcraft 2' type and you'll use a 'Starcraft 2 Map' for each map (diffuse, spec, emissive, etc). I'm looking forward to this update as the custom materials are exactly what I've been wanting to implement from the outset.
Similar to above, you'll be able to set materials to 'Unshaded' via the custom material flags once the new update is done. I hope to get it out soon so stay tuned.
I'll add specular functionality in the next update, fairly easy to do. I'll just be using max's spec level. As for Specularity and HDR spec multiplier, should they both be set to 1 for the mean time? I think I'll have to design some UI to adjust these custom kind of settings as max doesn't support them natively. I'll figure something out. I'm not much good when it comes to materials and such, you'll have to give me feedback so I can get that part of the exporter right.
I'll look into the emissive shaders and being able to adjust them. I'm really hoping I can setup a UI with the M3 material settings incorporated so you can adjust things such as priority and whether team colour is used for the bitmap alpha and such.
Team colours are done via the alpha channels I believe, so you're correct. Materials that use the alpha channel for team colours require a flag switched that my exporter currently doesn't do. I should be able to add it in for the next update.
I've looked at the billboards, they're pretty cool. Animated textures shouldn't be a problem. I'm impressed with the formats the engine is willing to support. I didn't think .png would work but it does. There's probably flags that setup and allow animated textures. I'll check out the billboard models and see what I can figure out.
I'll look into the problem but could you list the steps you're doing for exporting. The steps should be:
Use an 'editable_mesh' for your mesh.
Use 'Multimaterial' material, with the UI set to the one you're using.
For each material in the multimaterials, use 'Standard' materials and use bitmaps for the maps (diffuse, specular, etc). Apply these maps to the parts of your mesh you want. Each material in the multimaterials represents a 'submesh' of the main mesh for the exporter.
Updated the plugin to add better support for textures. You can now check the 'Use Material Path' and it will use the bitmap paths used in max. You can still customly set the paths if you wish too. The path problems should be all fixed aswell. Test it out and let me know how it goes in max 2008. Specular and normal maps should work...I'll look into it. They're currently being exported to M3's but they may need additional settings to work. I also think the normal maps for M3's use odd settings.
I hope they release their own tool, but from what I read in the latest twitter update, it seems they're holding back and just going to provide more units as part of the campaign component. While the viewer supports importing and exporting M3's, I'm not a firm believer that Blizzard is going to provide support for importing other model formats. They would either have to release a 3ds max plugin, since that is the software they're using, or do something unusual and allow you to import .obj or other formats as .M3's. The latter method is flawed as the majority of modelling formats simply cannot hold the information necessary to generate a complete M3 file.
I've been considering a metaformat for M3's that is similar to MDL's for Warcraft3 so that the M3 data is expanded into plain text. This would provide an easier way to export data in the various modelling programs so things aren't restricted to 3ds max. However this is alot of overhead to code for and I don't feel confident I could complete it satisfactorily.
I have an old M2 importer that I coded from BC-era. It has animation support and a host of other features. I understand WOTLK uses a newer M2 format so the script would need to be updated to support it. I don't see a problem in converting fully animated M2's to M3's.
Whoa that's really cool. It's good to see people getting some use out of the script. Like I mentioned it's really rough at the moment but I plan on adding animation support. You would definitely be able to add barrel rolls for movement and such. Thanks for the feedback for the texture problem, I'll be able to fix that up. My question for you, are you able to view the model in the viewer with textures without adding textures to the patch MPQ's (i.e. the patch mpq's located in the latest version folder)? I'm not too familiar with the importer side of the editor, but I could not get the viewer to use textures unless I placed them directly into the patch.MPQ which is very inconvenient. Any help with this will help me debug the models more efficiently.
I think your problem is that you're trying to import MD33's from the original MPQ's, which the viewer won't take. It only works with MD34's, the new format released with the editor patch. These models are present in the Versions\Base<version> MPQ's in your base starcraftII directory. That should clear up the confusion.
I've thrown up an M3 exporter plugin for 3ds max in the assets. It's extremely alpha at the moment, which means it's not thoroughly tested and it has very limited functionality, but it is able to export geometry if you follow the correct procedure. I realise I could have made an obj->m3 converter, but I plan to add in animation support which would be impossible with the obj format. For these examples, I've imported models from WoW and Doom3. Any geometry you can make can be exported, however, I'm just using WoW and Doom3 models as an example using 'Add File' in the editor:
I've released the plugin in its rough state because I don't have much time to work on it and I wanted to provide at least a basic geometry exporting tool for people to mess around with. I'm not going to provide much support for it, and I'll add functionality when I can get around to it. Life is hectic at the moment. I'll do up a tutorial when I get the time to explain how to get the custom textures on the models (they must be added to the MPQ I think, couldn't get it working with the Import function in the editor...) and the whole process. Cheers :)
The glow effects are done through particles, the PAR_ chunks in models. I'm not sure what those unknown bytes are for in the vertices but I'll check into them when I have the time. As far as I know blanking them has no effect on the model in-game. I do believe alot of the values in the model are not for the engine but for 3ds max itself, however I maintain the viewpoint that if the engine can render it without those values then max should be able to aswell. Good to see you contributing therockman, it's great to have some fresh people on the scene helping to figure things out :).
As for an application for conversion, it's possible. HeliosDoubleSix and I were talking about creating a metaformat to use for easy importing into different modelling applications. I'm going to stick to 3ds max because I know Blizzard are using it, so everything Blizzard includes in their M3's must be possible through max. Previously I'd designed a World of Warcraft .M2 importer/exporter so I'm able to reuse alot of that code and am reusing it for the future exporter. A metaformat is a little too much overhead for me, I don't get alot of spare time as it is, and it would mean coding in something like C plus which is not my fortay. I do feel like restricting people to 3ds max is not the way to go but at the moment, it'll have to be up to other people to sort it out.
It's done through ribbons. The hair is bound to the Star2Ribbon01 bone in the model. We don't have ribbons properly documented yet, but you can see the first int32 points to its parent bone. You can turn ribbons off by blanking the reference and you'll see the hair disappear.
I haven't tried using the rotation matrix that comes right after the IREF reference, but the one in the zealot contains no rotation data, just translation.
It says the person that submitted it at nibbits was you? Is that really you or someone pretending to be you? I'll make an account at some stage and sort it out. It looks bad how my name has been pulled from anywhere in the description :(
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Update is going up. http://www.sc2mapster.com/assets/m3-export-plugin-3ds-max/ when it's approved. I'm bundling the import and export scripts together with the object definition script so I can keep the object definitions in sync with the scripts. I've cleaned up the exporter alot and fixed alot of bugs that were causing people to crash. There were some compatibility issues with older versions of max which should now be fixed. I tried to get all the bugs cleaned up but as always some will probably slip through. The feedback is really valuable so keep it coming.
The importer now uses the custom objects (materials, maps, etc) too so it should be easier to import a model, modify it and then export it back out. I'm pretty much done with the material/maps side of things, so if there's anything you think should be added let me know. Otherwise I'm going to leave it and move on to bones and animation.
@Cyb3rD3lux3: Go
Skizot and Triceron are right, you'll need to uncheck 'Use material path' and use an internal path in the form of 'Assets/Textures/' and then import the maps to the correct paths through the importer within the editor. The 'Use material path' checkbox forces the exporter to use the hard drive paths used in max for your maps. That means it'll pick up your map on the hard drive and show the model with the texture in the editor and in game, but if you try to distribute the model other people won't have a map in that location so they'll get a null texture.
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@malu05: Go
Hey malu05, long time no speak. How are ya mate? Good to see you still around. The project seems really good after watching that youtube video I'm impressed. I hope to try out the finish product soon :)
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@HeroicPrinny: Go
I'm sorry I haven't responded to your PM's, I'm flatout at the moment. Barely have time to respond on this forum ><. I don't think rotating your model through the exporter is the way to go, since you'll lose all animation of the model, unless you just want to rotate a model that only has geometry. If so, then yes you can definitely use this plugin. You'll have to go to the display tab of 3ds max, click on the Unhide everything button, and you'll have to delete everything that isn't the main mesh before you'll be able to export.
@Skizot: Go The sphere is the bounding sphere. At the moment I don't know what to do with it so I'm just hiding it. For my exporter I want people to be able to provide their own bounding spheres instead of relying on the extents of the mesh so that's future development in the works there.
Thanks guys for all your kind words and I love seeing the models you guys are putting into the game, really cool. I hope to expand the exporter at some stage to provide the juicy things such as bone support, animation, attachments, particle/ribbon emitters, etc. Obviously it's pretty far off but the potential is definitely there. I tried to read up a bit about StarTools, with what little is known. StarTools seems to be aimed at creating 'doodads' only, so I get the feeling it'll lack extensive animation support. Hopefully StarTools supports everything, but at the moment it's kind of a motivator to keep going because I can extend my plugin to whatever degree I want whereas StarTools will be a utility we'll depend on Blizzard for.
I'll be updating the importer in the future to use 'Starcraft 2' shaders and 'Starcraft 2 Bitmap' maps so that they hold all the extra settings and exporting them back out after modification will be easier. That's when I get the time :(.
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@TheSecretArts: Go
Particle emitters would probably have to be custom objects as the regular particle emitters won't house all the settings that M3's would use. I don't see this is a big problem though, I can use a similar method with materials and just extend the native particle emitters to support the extra settings. However the problem is you won't know exactly how the particle emitter will behave because max won't be taking into consideration all the extra settings. It'll mean you'll have to check them out in the previewer after exporting each time to observe the effect, which while not difficult to do is inconvenient. That's just a preliminary guess on how things will work, particle emitter block structure has not been deciphered yet so it's alot of unknowns at this point.
0
Update is up and waiting for approval. The new file has an extra script, sc2_objects.ms. If you place it in your 3ds max plugins directory it'll allow you to use custom Starcraft 2 materials that lets you tweak the material settings. There's also a custom map type which allows you to set team colour and texture wrapping for a bitmap. The map type will be expanded upon later. Enjoy :D
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@crazyfingers619: Go
My motivation for the script is hard to pinpoint exactly. I like to create and design tools, but I'm not quite able to step up to C plus and do proper programming. Maxscript is really fun to work with. It's forgiving and flexible, my only qualms is that it can be inconveniently slow and accessing and setting some of 3ds max's settings can be a nightmare (don't get me started on vertex normals...). However I enjoy overcoming the technical hurdles and the challenges involved. I also love models, especially highly detailed ones such as the ones from WoW and first person shooters in general. I know there are artist rights at hand, but I find it frustrating that such great models can be limited to one game. Ontop of all these reasons, I have lots of affection for SC and its universe, so I have a fascination with SC2 and its models I guess you could say.
@Triceron: Go
I'm working on a big update that's on the verge of release. Basically for materials I discovered maxscript provides plugins that you can use to extend the native material types. I've used this to create custom materials that hold all the custom kind of settings that M3's have, and a custom bitmap too that allows you set layer properties such as if it uses the material alpha to render team colour and texture wrapping. You'll still be using a multimaterial for the submeshes, but each mulimaterial will be of the 'Starcraft 2' type and you'll use a 'Starcraft 2 Map' for each map (diffuse, spec, emissive, etc). I'm looking forward to this update as the custom materials are exactly what I've been wanting to implement from the outset.
@Cyb3rD3lux3: Go
Similar to above, you'll be able to set materials to 'Unshaded' via the custom material flags once the new update is done. I hope to get it out soon so stay tuned.
@Skizot: Go
Nice Wraith model! It'd be cool to reproduce the original SC models for SC2. Definitely nostalgia attached to that.
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@crazyfingers619: Go
I'll add specular functionality in the next update, fairly easy to do. I'll just be using max's spec level. As for Specularity and HDR spec multiplier, should they both be set to 1 for the mean time? I think I'll have to design some UI to adjust these custom kind of settings as max doesn't support them natively. I'll figure something out. I'm not much good when it comes to materials and such, you'll have to give me feedback so I can get that part of the exporter right.
I'll look into the emissive shaders and being able to adjust them. I'm really hoping I can setup a UI with the M3 material settings incorporated so you can adjust things such as priority and whether team colour is used for the bitmap alpha and such.
@Skizot: Go
Team colours are done via the alpha channels I believe, so you're correct. Materials that use the alpha channel for team colours require a flag switched that my exporter currently doesn't do. I should be able to add it in for the next update.
I've looked at the billboards, they're pretty cool. Animated textures shouldn't be a problem. I'm impressed with the formats the engine is willing to support. I didn't think .png would work but it does. There's probably flags that setup and allow animated textures. I'll check out the billboard models and see what I can figure out.
@Samoner: Go
I'll look into the problem but could you list the steps you're doing for exporting. The steps should be:
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@crazyfingers619: Go
Updated the plugin to add better support for textures. You can now check the 'Use Material Path' and it will use the bitmap paths used in max. You can still customly set the paths if you wish too. The path problems should be all fixed aswell. Test it out and let me know how it goes in max 2008. Specular and normal maps should work...I'll look into it. They're currently being exported to M3's but they may need additional settings to work. I also think the normal maps for M3's use odd settings.
0
@vjeux: Go
I hope they release their own tool, but from what I read in the latest twitter update, it seems they're holding back and just going to provide more units as part of the campaign component. While the viewer supports importing and exporting M3's, I'm not a firm believer that Blizzard is going to provide support for importing other model formats. They would either have to release a 3ds max plugin, since that is the software they're using, or do something unusual and allow you to import .obj or other formats as .M3's. The latter method is flawed as the majority of modelling formats simply cannot hold the information necessary to generate a complete M3 file.
I've been considering a metaformat for M3's that is similar to MDL's for Warcraft3 so that the M3 data is expanded into plain text. This would provide an easier way to export data in the various modelling programs so things aren't restricted to 3ds max. However this is alot of overhead to code for and I don't feel confident I could complete it satisfactorily.
@IskatuMesk: Go
I have an old M2 importer that I coded from BC-era. It has animation support and a host of other features. I understand WOTLK uses a newer M2 format so the script would need to be updated to support it. I don't see a problem in converting fully animated M2's to M3's.
@crazyfingers619: Go
Whoa that's really cool. It's good to see people getting some use out of the script. Like I mentioned it's really rough at the moment but I plan on adding animation support. You would definitely be able to add barrel rolls for movement and such. Thanks for the feedback for the texture problem, I'll be able to fix that up. My question for you, are you able to view the model in the viewer with textures without adding textures to the patch MPQ's (i.e. the patch mpq's located in the latest version folder)? I'm not too familiar with the importer side of the editor, but I could not get the viewer to use textures unless I placed them directly into the patch.MPQ which is very inconvenient. Any help with this will help me debug the models more efficiently.
0
I think your problem is that you're trying to import MD33's from the original MPQ's, which the viewer won't take. It only works with MD34's, the new format released with the editor patch. These models are present in the Versions\Base<version> MPQ's in your base starcraftII directory. That should clear up the confusion.
0
I've thrown up an M3 exporter plugin for 3ds max in the assets. It's extremely alpha at the moment, which means it's not thoroughly tested and it has very limited functionality, but it is able to export geometry if you follow the correct procedure. I realise I could have made an obj->m3 converter, but I plan to add in animation support which would be impossible with the obj format. For these examples, I've imported models from WoW and Doom3. Any geometry you can make can be exported, however, I'm just using WoW and Doom3 models as an example using 'Add File' in the editor:
I've released the plugin in its rough state because I don't have much time to work on it and I wanted to provide at least a basic geometry exporting tool for people to mess around with. I'm not going to provide much support for it, and I'll add functionality when I can get around to it. Life is hectic at the moment. I'll do up a tutorial when I get the time to explain how to get the custom textures on the models (they must be added to the MPQ I think, couldn't get it working with the Import function in the editor...) and the whole process. Cheers :)
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@Rizaun: Go
It's been confirmed that you can infact import custom models? I hadn't heard :(. I've been messing around with an exporter anyways:
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@therockman: Go
The glow effects are done through particles, the PAR_ chunks in models. I'm not sure what those unknown bytes are for in the vertices but I'll check into them when I have the time. As far as I know blanking them has no effect on the model in-game. I do believe alot of the values in the model are not for the engine but for 3ds max itself, however I maintain the viewpoint that if the engine can render it without those values then max should be able to aswell. Good to see you contributing therockman, it's great to have some fresh people on the scene helping to figure things out :).
As for an application for conversion, it's possible. HeliosDoubleSix and I were talking about creating a metaformat to use for easy importing into different modelling applications. I'm going to stick to 3ds max because I know Blizzard are using it, so everything Blizzard includes in their M3's must be possible through max. Previously I'd designed a World of Warcraft .M2 importer/exporter so I'm able to reuse alot of that code and am reusing it for the future exporter. A metaformat is a little too much overhead for me, I don't get alot of spare time as it is, and it would mean coding in something like C plus which is not my fortay. I do feel like restricting people to 3ds max is not the way to go but at the moment, it'll have to be up to other people to sort it out.
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@witchsong: Go
It's done through ribbons. The hair is bound to the Star2Ribbon01 bone in the model. We don't have ribbons properly documented yet, but you can see the first int32 points to its parent bone. You can turn ribbons off by blanking the reference and you'll see the hair disappear.
I haven't tried using the rotation matrix that comes right after the IREF reference, but the one in the zealot contains no rotation data, just translation.
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@witchsong: Go
It says the person that submitted it at nibbits was you? Is that really you or someone pretending to be you? I'll make an account at some stage and sort it out. It looks bad how my name has been pulled from anywhere in the description :(