Model Help - Dawn of War

[stewhead]

Hello All,

After an year + hiatus, I'm getting back into model creation and building...I've done the HW and HW2 models, extract, design, build etc. and now I wanted to try my hand at extracting the models from Dawn of War.

I'm not interested in the figures or tanks etc. but I really would like to do paper models of the buildings. My nephew has discovered the Warhammer 40K miniatures game and he really would like the buildings to go with his army he is building.

I thought I could do it like a regular HW model but boy-o-boy I was in for a "treat".

I read the forums on how to mod DoW but they use 3dMax...I can open and extract the meshes and textures but I cant seem to get them to come together in 3dmax...(I really would like to use Deep Explorer as I'm familiar with it and its licensed...3dmax runs out in 17days)...but like I said it is for modding and putting them into a game. I just want to do paper models!!

Can anyone help me get the buildings into Metaseq? I think it would be cool to do a space marine base...kinda of what that guy with the aliens papercraft site did for Hadley's Hope base from Aliens...I'd really appreciate it!

Thanks!
Stewhead

[qwerty59]

I've been trying to get the dreadnought extracted myself and that's been an absolute pain. I don't know about any other method besides 3dsmax. My trial is done too so that makes things hard. If you want to use something besides 3dsmax, I think you're going to have to write software which is WAY over my head. So far I've managed to get a model (with some help from a more techy friend) into 3ds with textures and the like working. I've managed to get the mesh into meta but I can't seem to get textures in. (I havn't figured out how to rename them and .obj only allows short names for texture files)

I'll try and outline what exactly I used to get at the files. (this may not be right as it's been at least half a year.

1: Decompile the archive file and save it somewhere (I used Spooky's Relic Archive Tool)

2: Open a model using Santos tools in 3dsmax.

3: Eliminate overlaps and get the model "paperable"

4: Convert into a format pepakura accepts (I uses metasequoia).

5: Convert to paper.


Now for the nasty stuff, all the things bad about these models.

1: Their HUGE 4000+ polys which makes building them hard.
2: Unlike Homeworld, these models aren't actually closed and tend to have a lot of overlap which requires either better software than meta or a TON of patience. I worked with the Somtaw dreadnought and that was bad enough at 800ish polys.
3: Last and probably worst, Games Workshops specifically prevents the distribution of their models, in any format including paper. In other words, even if we do decompile them (which we're allowed to do) we can't make them available to anyone else.

On a slightly more positive note, if you're interested in working on this, I'd be willing to help out if I can. I think I might be able to get my hands on an older copy of 3dsmax. There's also someone who posted here once who had managed to extract a warp spider and convert it into meta (check some of the more recent DoW related topics). Otherwise, you could try posting on the relic forum and try there too. They probably know more than I do up until it gets into meta.

Best of luck and let us know if you get anywhere!

[stewhead]

Thanks Qwerty59. This is definitely a starting place. I'll also try lookin garound the relic forum too. Like I said, I'm only interested i the buildings so hopefully th epoly count isn't so bad <fingers crossed> I'll try my hand at it shortly!!!

Definitely a positive step!!!

Regards!