new/altered siege skeletons ?

[Lord Adherbal]

is it possible to create a new skeleton for siege weapons, or atleast modify an existing one ?

I need to make some small changes to the RTW onager skeleton to turn it into an MTW style catapult, but I don't feel like spending a lot of time learning about skeletons and animations when it turns out to be impossible.

[Sundjata Keita]

No, you can't actually make a new different one. You can copy an existing one to make new animations though. And with the skeleton you should be able to attatch the different parts to any of the bones and make everything go where you want because as far as I can remember siege weapons don't have the skin modifier and you can't actually see the bones in game. So you should be able to make a new siege weapon without actually modifying the skeleton at all.

[PROMETHEUS]

You can just rescale them from what I know...

[Lord Adherbal]

And with the skeleton you should be able to attatch the different parts to any of the bones and make everything go where you want because as far as I can remember siege weapons don't have the skin modifier and you can't actually see the bones in game. So you should be able to make a new siege weapon without actually modifying the skeleton at all.

the attachment point of my catapult is much lower then that of the RTW version, so that doesn't work :(

[Sundjata Keita]

Why won't that work? You can attatch any object to any bone and you can move the bones anywhere, as long as the machine does not require any more bones. Forgive me if I am missing something here.

[Lord Adherbal]

moving bones doesn't work, atleast not when I tried. The length and position of bones is stored in the animation files (I think).

[Bwian]

The relative positions of bones are fixed. You can change the rotation of the pivots, but that is all.

I know Vercingetorix is still working on ways round this, so it might happen in the future. Right now, though, you can only apply new animations to existing bones and trick the game a little by changing the way the model mesh is attached to the bones.

[Sundjata Keita]

Ah, I see, sorry, I thought Verc had made it so this didn't matter but I couldn't really understand that huge long thread that you had about creating new skeletons so I must have got confused somewhere.

[Bwian]

The whole subject of 'skeletons' is a bit confusing!

The term should properly be applied to the underlying structure of bones, which is something which we can DUPLICATE by copying an existing one. This 'new' skeleton can be scaled up or down, but that is about it for now.

We CAN make new animatiosn to hang on the skeletons, but the Holy Grail of RTW modding has got to be making a completely new skeleton with new bone pivot positions and revised numbers of bones.