New bodies anybody?
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New bodies?
In “the olden days” it was said you couldn’t mess with the dfm files, but these aren’t the those days.
If anyone has broken out the dfm files where I can import to ANY 3D modeler (You name it I’ve got it or can get it) then with an easy 1000 hours of character modeling, rigging, walk cycling, lip syncing, everything but hooking them up to a lightning rod and shouting “It’s ALIVE!” I should be able to get some upgraded heads, bodies and even character motion into the game! Yes the art is just short of rocket science and just short of brain surgery, but hey, it’s a living.
So if any of you code twisters have cracked those pesky dfms then let’s get cracking! I’m rearing to rig!
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So here’s a brief on the steps for character creation:
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Okay I’m getting warm. Old copy of 3dsMax from the day
Recognizes skeletal data from UTF->XML dump if given old character studio header & footer and packed as old 3ds character file. So I have skeletons, but mesh data and vertex weights I’m beating my head against. Plenty of tristrip tools, none recogize their format. Has Anyone cracked DFM’s.? Would appreciate some help here. Somebody in Discovery came close to or did mesh overhaul from file dates, but might have been a texture overhaul as they are solidly different. The whole .dfm structure smells like early Character Studio, but they packed the body meshes differently and as I found the skeletons come out. I think they encoded into .3dm or CMP
Edit: (Disco Was re-texturing. Darn good job too.)Edit (again): Another modding community got into this and and handed me a trove of 3ds and gmax inport - export plug ins and scripts they bundled.
22 mb worth so here’s the link:https://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn1/other/gmax12-3dsmax4-importexport-plugin-script-collection
Team at a company called 3D Convert is looking into mesh converter for .dfm’s.
Company tossed back to creators of the Delphi format. Natch it’s tied into 3DS Max. They THINK there WAS a DFM to CHR converter (when dinosaurs trod the earth). The say they are scouting their archives. Yah…. Right. It was in mainly a way of binary compression for AutoCAD, but they thought it would compress any 3DS files so data in UTF to XML is binary compression. Great. Akin to encryption. The skeleton data was just vertex splines. Who needs compression? The CHR to DFM just stripped the header-footer. If the don’t get back to me it’s into the dll’s and engine to find the “encryption key”.
