Looking good! I always enjoy models more when I can see them in game. These are simple steps to get a model from GMax to NWN
as a placeable. Any mesh (object) can be turned into a placeable to quickly view it in NWN. There are some important things related to Placeables like PWKs, but we're going to skip over those. This will at least give you the general idea of how to get a model exported.
1.Load GMax
2.Create an AuroraBase by clicking on Helpers (1) then AuroraBase (2):
3. Then click somewhere in your perspective view. It doesn't matter where. A window will come up which looks like this:
4. Click "
Center to [0,0,0]" (3) and change the name to
plc_a01 (4). Thern hit the OK button on that window. You now have an AuroraBase centered at 0,0,0 (which is important) and named. The name I chose is the name of the very first placeable in NWN. It is the armoire model. We're going to export this model into our override directory and when we load up the toolset & game, this model will override the armoire model.
5. Now we're going to go back to the Geometry panel and create a box (1), like
this6. Go back into select object mode (1), select the box by clicking on it (if it is not already selected) and while the box is selected, right click on it and select "Convert to Editable Mesh" (2), like
thisNotice that when you select the box from now on it displays the Modifiers tab and it shows you that the box is an
Editable Mesh. This is a type of object that the NWN engine can understand and whenever an object is to be exported to NWN it needs to be in
Editable Mesh format. When I created it, it was just a box. It was just a
primitive. A primitive is a basic shape like a sphere, cone, cube, etc. It should looke like
this.
7.Now you're going to add a modifier to the Editable Mesh. What's a modifier? It's something that affects your mesh. Usually it's something that distorts or changes your mesh's shape. How it all works is they "stack" on top of your editable mesh and then when you're happy, you
right click on the modifiers which are "stacked" above your Editable Mesh and "collapse" them onto your Editable Mesh. To "collapse the stack" means you're applying all of your modifications to your mesh and you don't need to fiddle with them anymore. You can learn more about that from the GMax help file, which is also included for searching in the NWN Omnibus.
But we don't need to change our cube, it's just fine and so we're going to apply a
special modifier which tells NWN how to display the mesh in-game called the
AuroraTrimesh modifier. You can do all kinds of neat things by changing its settings but I'm just going to use the default settings on it for now.
8.Click on the
button (1) next to the words Modifier List and scroll down till you see the AuroraTrimesh modifier, then select it.
As you
can see we have new modifier in "the stack". Let's finish up, we're almost there.
9.We need to link the cube to the model base so that when the model is exported the cube goes along with it. So we select the
Select and Link tool (1), then select the cube (the cursor will change to two boxes) and then drag until the cursor is over the model base (2). The cursor will change back to boxes when you can link your model to something so when your cursor is over any part of the green model base you will see the two boxes again. Let go of the mouse button and you should see the model base indicate that it has had a new object attached to it. If you did it right, the two models will now be linked, the cube being a child object of the model base. Like
this10.Now go back into select mode (1), select the model base (2), change the path to be your override directory (3) and hit the Export Geometry Only button (4). It may complain that the model failed the sanity check. You can go ahead and export anyway, if you want. Or, if you don't like the sanity check complaining, you can turn it off by unchecking its check box (5). Like
thisAnd so we place an Armoire placeable in the toolset and it doesn't look like an armoire anymore because we've overrode the model (by saving a model with the same name). Instead, we now have our new creation in the toolset and in game:
Modifié par OldTimeRadio, 01 septembre 2011 - 05:00 .
