Dress Your Own Golem

Dress Your Own Golem is a concept that has been close to my heart for a very long time. It's only recently that I have decided to realise it.



What Is Dress Your Own Golem?
Dress Your Own Golem is a set of models that will allow you to dynamically change your golem's appearance on a whim, and even mix and match parts to create numerous combinations of new golems!



How Does Dress Your Own Golem Work
There is a base model, DressYourOwnGolem.mdx, which has been salted with additional attachment points. There are sets of specially-made attachment models that are applied to these new points, meaning that you can assemble the golem without disrupting default spell attachment effects!



Why Does Dress Your Own Golem Work?
The golem models of Warcraft III are made up of discrete body parts (except the feet). Because these are free-floating, they can be easily assembled from spare parts without detracting from the model, as would be the case with an organic attachment set model.



Can I Make My Own Attachment Sets For Dress Your Own Golem?
Yes you can! I've even included instructions in the "INSTRUCTIONS.txt" file, plus the four Milkshape 3D files from which the included sets are built. Dress Your Own Golem is designed specially to make it really easy to construct new attachment sets!



Are There Any Drawbacks to Dress Your Own Golem Work?
There is no portrait, because that relies on the base model -- which is invisible. You'll have to work something out for yourself; a generic portrait of some kind, perhaps.



Miscellaneous
Attached is a test map to prove to you that it actually works.

Included are four attachment sets, using only in-game textures:

• RockGolem: the original WC3 model reconstructed as a demonstration.
• GolemStatue: the original WC3 model reconstructed as a demonstration.
• CrystalGolem: liberal abuse of Textures\CrystalOpaque.blp
• DarkGolem: SHOCKWAVE LIVES

Other Attachment Sets
Post your own and I'll add them here!

• Ancient of War Golem

Please do not modify or redistribute any of these models (beyond inclusion in your project). These are a WC3C-exclusive resource, and I wish them to remain that way. If your friends want these models too, direct them here.

this is cool...

for the portrait, maybe give every possible head an portrait and use the head as dummy...

The problem is that you cannot affect the portrait in any way (?) in-game, short of a single model with all the heads and animation tags (and I'm not convinced that would work either), so it's a tough one.

Yeah, what Tot said, that´s the best solution I think.
Really awesome idea btw, can´t believe no one thought about this before.

EDIT: Oh, well. You posted already.

coloring and scaling the original model affects it, as well as invisible-ability...
I think wc3 handles a portrait like an attached effect, so everything that changes an units appearance ingame (nothing attached/no effects) changes also the portraits appearance

It could even work for units that are meant to be to wear armor and stuff, only different proportions.

Ooh, I can see some cool uses for this.

EDIT: I demand infernal golem limbs! Some robot parts would be pretty cool too.

I think you could add a camera to the actual model - that should work as a portrait that displays attachments.

Again, as far as I'm aware you can't actually put attachments onto the portrait; while the main model is stacked up, it would remain blank.

Funny story, though: the Footman (or is it TheCaptain, or both?) portrait does actually have attachment points. I'm assuming developers too lazy to remove them from carving the portrait out of the real model instead of functional, though.

Hmm. Well I remember seeing it actually work somewhere. You could try, I suppose?

It can work if you bake the attachment model into the model itself with the "Path" property of an attachment, but that ruins the versatility; you're back to square one with specific models for each model.

Even making a single model with all the heads in is troublesome, since every time somebody added a new attachment set the model would have to be tweaked.

so I guess it won't be possible aswell to creade some code which allows to add attachments to a portrait, aye??

Anyways, an awesome idea. Might try to create some attachment set for it if I find some inspiration :)

You guy should simply make 4 dummy models, each one already has the head and it also has the portrait... I know it's quite shitty but it's the only way to make it work on portraits, I believe...

That or make alternate anims on one huge dummy model with the 4 heads... That isn't so good tho...

BTW RDZ, if I ever get to make a random golem to be used with this system, would you happily accept it and put it here?

Not as far as I'm aware. Poke MindWorX and get him to hack the game somehow?

Locking to any one body part would ruin the dynamism. I did consider putting in portrait animations to the head pieces, so you'd have to re-import the main base model for each one, but you're exactly right -- there's no "nice" way of doing this. Any option will require bloat and inconvenience across the board, hence my leaving it blank.

I can update to cater as best I can for a specific option if people reach some kind of consensus as to what approach they want to do.

I would be absolutely delighted to append other peoples' sets (or links to them) to the first post.