Races: tri & egt files

[Ibsen's Ghost]

Hi all,

I just downloaded MrBobs Lilmothiit race resource and I noticed that it comes bundled with tri and egt files. I've not come across these before but the egt files are absolutely enormous!!! Do I need these files in order to create the Lilmothiit in-game? And if so, is there any way of compressing them because the head and ears are both 10mb apiece.

[Lady Nerevar]

both are for morphs i believe, so yes, you need them.

[Ibsen's Ghost]

Bugger! Ah well....some of this stuff is too good to refuse. Mind you, what if the races are only being used as creatures...? Is that possible?

[Lady Nerevar]

how are you using them as creatures? fusing their bodyparts and applying to a new skeleton? if youre doing it that way you can ditch them. if youre setting them up as NPCs you'll need them. the good news is that they compress well - i turned a 9.6 MB egt into a 750 Kb .7z (ultra compression)

more specifically, egm and tri files handle how the face changes during face gen. hence its needed if you want your NPCs, but creatures (which have no access to facegen) dont need them.

[Ibsen's Ghost]

Well, that's good! It's mainly Capucine's 'Aquamer' race I wanted to use as NPCs. They will appear as degenerate forms of the marsh elves, mute and savage.

Do you happen to know how I might be able to fuse them to a skeleton? AFAIK, I could just use a standard humanoid skeleton or something and apply the textures to it. I'll be exploring how to do this soon (I'm only thinking ahead at the moment, y'see) but if you know of any useful tutorials or something then that might be good. It's sounds like it shouldn't be too hard to do though.

I'm just totally unfamiliar with adding creatures....although I'll need to be much more familiar in the coming months, I imagine....

[Lady Nerevar]

well, you'd need to open up all the bodyparts in your model editor of choice, combine them into one mesh, and fuse the vertexes where they overlap. then you delete the skeleton that came with it and import a new one. you might have to redo some weight painting, but i think it should preserve. then you export.

here is where it gets tricky. you can either take the human skeleton or maybe that of the skeleton creature (if that just put the mesh into its folder). the later will simplify how its gotten in game.

make a new folder under Creatures, and copy all the animation (.kf) files that you need for it to work (check other creatures for this, its mostly walking and attack and idles). you could also just dump the model into the same folder where you got the skeleton from, that way all the animations are there and you save some archive space.

next open up the CS. if you chose the default human skeleton you'll need to create a totally new creature and add the skeleton, body mesh, and anims by hand. if you used the skeleton creature skeleton then you just open that up and under the models tab uncheck the skeleton mesh and check your own.

um, that should work. im not sure how well ive explained it. im also not sure how much modeling/optimization work that would include, ive never tried something like this.

[Ibsen's Ghost]

Hmmm, I think for my own sake, I'm probably best off just sticking to the NPC option....too much to do by far... :poorme: