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New W3x Importer

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Always wanted to fiddle with those pesky W3X? Now you have the chance to do so without much effort:

Asuka aka Lauren aka Ju-Jin has created a 3DS script to import W3X files directly into 3DSMax. This works for most Sample Art W3x and those extracted by JonWil´s tools. The importer is still WIP but it already supports meshes with UVW which is more than enough to recreate a model (Seriously! Stygs had me do tons of these already...) for further use/editing.

 

Future releases will probably support importing skeletons as well (i.e. also complete WWSkined models) and pivot importing.

 

You can get the importer >>>HERE<<<.

 

If you have any feedback and/or suggestions, please post them here.

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But animated W3X's are still unextractable, right?

Even though the importer will probably support animations and WWSkined models (infantry, some tanks etc.) in the future, it is limited to the w3x you actually have. To my knowledge, none of the available extractors can handle animations. It should however allow you to recreate them much more easily.

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The basic problem with animations is that when a w3x file for an animation is compiled, some of the data is thrown away (its called Adaptive Delta compression) so it is impossible to recover the source w3x file for animations.

 

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The basic problem with animations is that when a w3x file for an animation is compiled, some of the data is thrown away (its called Adaptive Delta compression) so it is impossible to recover the source w3x file for animations.

Except that the engine itself has some notion how those animations where compressed, and thus, theoretically, the animation can be restored.

 

In reality, that probably has as much success as rebuilding C++ code from an exe file...

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But animated W3X's are still unextractable, right?

Even though the importer will probably support animations and WWSkined models (infantry, some tanks etc.) in the future, it is limited to the w3x you actually have. To my knowledge, none of the available extractors can handle animations. It should however allow you to recreate them much more easily.

 

From my experience, having an exact reconstruction of the skeleton (pivots and the hierarchy) is enough to use w3x animations with a new model. Importing an infantry animation in the w3d format never worked very well, since it placed a keyframe at every frame. These imported files were very hard to change with good results, I always ended up creating a new animation from scratch.

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