Amnesia editor - Monster models?

[crisosphinx]

I was wondering if it would be possible to just replace to model itself with a custom one, and keep the skeleton and the animations from the original? I'm working on a low poly enemy at the moment but I get the feeling the animation part will be a problem for me. Being able to just change the appearance of the monster would be a great help in being able to get something new into the game, even if it only looks different!

Hm... lemme think. It should be possible, since as far as I know the animation files only store the name of the joint and it's rotation/ translation.
You'd need to do something like this:

- copy the whole grunt folder (or brute or suitor...)
- Import the .dae file of the skinned mesh into Maya
- don't touch the joints but delete the mesh or unbind it if you just want to modify it
- build your own mesh or modify the old one so that it still has its limbs in the right place for the joint skeleton to work.
- re-skin the mesh to the joints (If your new mesh is very close to the old one, you can also not delete the old one and use Maya's copy skin weights - function to make this step easier. Delete the old mesh afterwards then.)
- export as .dae again - make sure you have at least the correct diffuse .dds applied in the maya material or your exported .dae might crash the model editor!
(- save the .ent again to make sure it's really using the new mesh? Not sure if that would be necessary.)

Aah but it's a shame so few people are willing to get into animation. It's such a fun and rewarding field of art!

Animation files store the model as well. That's what I figured out and that's how I've been exporting them. Otherwise, you get a blank file.

You can't use a new model on the previous animation files, unfortunately (unless, perhaps, you get it to be the exact same size and then use wordpad and replace the models from before? Haven't tried that yet).



The only way to use the old animations, is to bring them into maya, parent constraint your new skeleton to the old one, bake the animation, delete the previous skeleton, export and hope your paintweights are working.