EPTFor the longest time I have wanted a Proto Drake (from WoW) in my AoW2 mod. I have a model of the Proto Drake from Lick King beta - it lacks some of the updates the release model has, like eyes, but it'd work fine for what I need it for.
Surely enough, with a bit of work and pain, I was able to get it into 3ds max. By a stroke of luck the beta model's UV's never changed, so I could put the release textures on it; the beta textures are really awful.
With some time and elbow grease I have something to show for my efforts:
![[image loading]](http://img693.imageshack.us/img693/4049/animation71.gif)
However, as I wrapped up rendering the animations, I came across an issue.
In WoW, the flying death animations for dragons have three parts - Enter death, where the animation enters a state of falling, and falling, which loops, and then when it hits the ground. Due to the immensely confusing and messy way the animations get globally introduced, I have to use the importer's m3 (Starcraft 2) conversion function to list the animations and go through them that way. I also have to timescale the animations - when imported the Proto Drake has around 800k frames, only 200k of which actually contain data, and 150k of which is just transition blending from War3's format and are totally useless.
This ultimately meant that I did not have a functional death anim because the people who port these models to wc3 don't tend to ever put any work into tidying up the animations, one of the reasons why people are reluctant to use the model that is exceptionally large as a result in their map. For me, size is no issue, but I know nothing of animations and couldn't fix this.
So, HKS randomly suggested over vent to have it shatter like the old-school 3d animations (Shadow Raiders, Beast Wars). With previous experience in dealing in shattering huge objects (A 100k poly terran battlecruiser) I felt up to the challenge.
It took some time to feel my way around and figure out what I actually needed to use for creating particles out of the drake's body (PArray), but eventually I got out my very first render with a basic animation.
![[image loading]](http://img718.imageshack.us/img718/1088/animation72k.gif)
I was giggling from the start. Completely unrealistic and outrageous, plus the pieces went well outside the frame boundary. With some refinement and adding the rest of the body, I got this:
![[image loading]](http://img710.imageshack.us/img710/9751/animation73a.gif)
Give or take some spamming of Drag warps and playing with the bomb itself, I finally perfected the shrapnel.
![[image loading]](http://img809.imageshack.us/img809/8697/animation74.gif)
So, somehow a big dragon turns into pieces of glass that stab perfectly into the ground. This isn't really too far outside the bounds of the LoL universe, so I just smiled and went with it.
The time came for the best part - the blood! This was territory totally new for me, but I knew max somehow had the ability to make something like a liquid, which all those old animations used for magma and such. The answer laid in Blobmesh and a ParticleFlow object.
![[image loading]](http://img813.imageshack.us/img813/4328/animation75.gif)
For some reason a gigantic red chunk was appearing and not actually blobbing. That's because of some damn particle in the array not getting turned into a blob - I managed to find one out of a billion options that made them invisible but left the blobs visible.
After perfecting the animation I then ran into this weird problem. The gif is a bit screwed up, try to ignore that.
![[image loading]](http://img580.imageshack.us/img580/327/animation76e.gif)
Somehow a bunch of weird geometry made its way into the scene when I had changed NOTHING and was visible even though it was hidden! Being so clueless in max I just accepted this as something occuring due to my ineptitude and simply deleted the objects. I then got this.
![[image loading]](http://img143.imageshack.us/img143/1600/animation78i.gif)
Buahahah! Okay, it's way too thick and globby and not very blood-like, but any thinner and more liquidy and it'd keep rolling out of the frame boundary and thus get clipped out ingame. I was satisfied with a job well done and learned something new in 3d work for the first time in 4-5 years. A job well done.
Also the scene looks like a disaster now.
![[image loading]](http://img42.imageshack.us/img42/7342/loladeen.jpg)
I'm just happy I was finally able to break out and do something new for the first time in years.
