Hello, Modcraft. Been a long while since my first tutorial about MDX TO M2 For Static Models. Well I've learned a few things that makes it possible to convert animated models aswell. Before you start reading this tutorial, I recommend you to read my old tutorial and try to convert an unanimated model at first, otherwise this will just be harder and you will ask questions that I will not answer.
Alright, so before I get started on the steps I am going to explain a few stuff about this converter and the m2 structure.
Infobox:
The model cannot have a camera, otherwise it will bug. You will delete this in Notepad.
I advise you to get MDLVIS 1.39, this is in russian but is much more stable and doesn't corrupt files as high chance.
You can only have 60 bones in the skeleton of your model, otherwise it will instantly crash.
You cannot have duplicate geosets.
You must use the LAZY CONVERTER for this, it is much more stable.
You must build skeleton in MDLVIS, not in another 3d editor.
Animations can be done in other programs, like Maya/Milkshape/3dsmax and then imported through notepad. I however advise animating in MDLVIS aswell.
In your model, the bone order must be 1 > 2 > 3 and so on. If the parent bone of a bone is a higher bone number or after the child bone in the list, it will not work. The parental bone must always come first in the list and have a lesser bone numberid.
Tools you will need:
PyModelEditor or 010 Editor. I advise getting both.
MDX > M2 Lazy.
Microsoft Notepad.
MDLXCONV.
Ladik's MPQ Editor + WC3.
Alright, the introduction part is finished. Lets get ready to do the actual editing.
I suppose you already have your model as an MDX or MDL that can be opened in MDLVIS, so open your model. Select the vertices and hit CTRL-C to Copy. Then open a Warcrat 3 Model and paste it into this model, I usually use the pandarenbrewmaster model. If it did not work with this model, try with nullmodel which is uploaded at my tutorial for static models, I think it could also be done with a TBC M2 opened in MDLVIS.
Go into sequence editor and delete all old animations and old bones.
Now make your own skeleton from scratch in MDLVIS, and make your own animations.
When this is done, save your model as an MDL-File.
Open the MDL File with notepad and scroll to the bottom, here it will say Camera and "BlizzParticle" and stuff like that. Delete all that kind of stuff. Now save it down.
Now drop your MDL File on the MDXToM2_Lazy.Exe and it should convert.
You now have one skin file and one m2 file, add these two files into a MPQ and load that MPQ into WoWModelViewer. Open your model and all your animations will say "stand" with different ids. We must change this, so open the m2 file in 010editor or PyModelEditor if you prefer that.
I use 010editor, scroll down to the animation section, open it up and you will see that even here it is X-amount of Animations called "Stand". If you click the arrow on one of them, you can change this one to "Walk" or "Attack1h" and similiar stuff. So how do I know which of these stand animations should be renamed to Walk For example? Well just go into WoWModelViewer and look at the animation, until you find the animation for stand. Look what order it is in the WMV List. Example: 6th animation from top, then it will also be 6th animation from top in the 010 Editor. So simply change that to Walk.
Do this to all animations, pack into an MPQ and rename the model files to for example Wolf.m2 and Wolf00.skin, go to Elwynn Forest and look at the wolves. They should now have been replaced by your custom model.
I wrote this very quickly, and since I have no computer at the moment I cannot provide pictures or anything like that.
Thanks for your time - Phucko1.
