2 replies to this topic

[Kardonn]

Hi all,

I'm a VFX artist working in features, and decided to take on a WoW based project as one of my spare time activities. The goal is to do beautiful renders of the WoW landscapes and environments, using Blizzard's artwork and game assets as the basis for the work and then going free form from there to make it better.

So far, I've had some success pulling out Blood Elf buildings from WMV and into Maya (decided to start my first scene in Eversong Woods). Here's a quick render with new materials and custom trees created...this is just a work in progress image to see how the buildings will look in some nice lighting setups and a bit of compositing work.



I'm having a few problems though that I was wondering if anyone knew workarounds for.

I would love to be able to grab a full export of something like Silvermoon City...or even better, a full export of an entire region of the WoW map complete with textures, buildings, everything. There's a lot of doodads involved in the game and I wouldn't really know where to grab them all to recreate a place like Eversong Woods with all the bridges and planters and gardens.

Anyone here know of ways to accomplish this?

[Kjasi]

There's a number of tools I've used in the past to do something similar, but with Lightwave. (I even upped the exporting capabilities of the LW exporter to do this.)

WMV should be able to do a full export of Silvermoon City into OBJ, but it won't include doodads, or vector coloring. The Lightwave exporter will be able to export the model and doodad's locations as nulls. In LW, you can then export that as an FBX file to get it into Maya. After getting these nulls, you can export the doodad objects then replace the nulls with the proper models.

I'm hoping we can get v0.8.0.0 to a point where we CAN export an "entire region" into a file, but that'll depend on how much we can get done in time. Earliest projection for a release date for v0.8.0.0 is around the same time as the Mists of Pandaria expansion.

[Kardonn]

There's a number of tools I've used in the past to do something similar, but with Lightwave. (I even upped the exporting capabilities of the LW exporter to do this.)

WMV should be able to do a full export of Silvermoon City into OBJ, but it won't include doodads, or vector coloring. The Lightwave exporter will be able to export the model and doodad's locations as nulls. In LW, you can then export that as an FBX file to get it into Maya. After getting these nulls, you can export the doodad objects then replace the nulls with the proper models.

I'm hoping we can get v0.8.0.0 to a point where we CAN export an "entire region" into a file, but that'll depend on how much we can get done in time. Earliest projection for a release date for v0.8.0.0 is around the same time as the Mists of Pandaria expansion.

My main problem right now is that I can't actually load up something like Silvermoon City without WMV crashing out. I don't really know of a good work around for that, unless this tool you're talking about is from another program? I've got no problems with grabbing a copy of Lightwave if that'll let me get the job done, then export back into Maya.

With the feature you're working on to export entire regions, would that include all doodads, buildings, terrain, etc? Literally a full export of a portion of the world?

If so that would be utterly incredible and get me well on the way with doing massive scale renderings of the world and favorite zones...once I had that data exported, I could go through and replace all the trees with 1M+ polygon ones, sculpt more detailed terrain, do fluid simulations for rivers, etc.

I would be very very glad to beta test a feature like that for you if given the opportunity.