Importing Total Annihilation Models

Has anyone had any experience converting Total Annhilation units into warcraft models?

TA is a pretty old game, so there are some halfway decent looking units that are pretty light on the file size. Also, there is a huge TA modding community and it would be great to be able to tap into that enormous resource and bring some of it into wc3 for futuristic maps where robots and mechs would look better than using creeps or heros.

Perhaps you could strip out the model file from the .ufo file that TA units usually come in and then convert it to a wc3 unit? Any thoughts?



Zak_

I'm an old TAK modder, and Rightfield did/does TA.

You can extract and import models with the various files available, getting .ufo into .3ds, and into Max.

However, you'd have to rewrap and animate every unit. AND, the units are quite poor quality compared to War3. Trust me, I originally came here to do a TAK total conversion.

Aye, cannot stress that the anims were quite poor compared to wc3 (but then, there is quite a heap of 3 yers in between). Along with whitehorn and Rightfield, I was a fellow Ta:K modders as well, creating and helping people out (there was a race by Grenseal which I helped, I recalled the gemsis, man the balance was horrid and far fetched). Also made a few units, which one of them was the creon air galleon...

anyways, back to topic, you have to reanimate everything, not to mention the wrapping and the skinning was totally different then wc3. A ta (k) unit usualy consists of 25 or more textures that are applied on each face of the unit. Would be quite a drain to fix that all up.

In other words: not recommended

Damn, its such a small world! What was your name back then? Do you remember the likes of Lurker, Jerry60k, Vaerun?

Thanks for the info guys. I'm not a modeller, so I had no idea it would require so much extra work. Sounds like you wouldn't save very much time by taking units from TA, ah well.

In other words, there isn't much hope of being able to take any model from any other game without having to do the extra work animating, etc that you describe?

Was looking for any easy way out, but it looks like there isn't one. Even using existing wc3 models is a problem because filesizes are typically 100k+ and for a multiplayer map that adds up fast.

Zak_

Am I the only one who WASN'T a TA modeller?