[OSP] Mackie's Weapon Pack- BL Conversion

[xenoargh]

TLDR ppl: link here.​

I have recently figured out how to export and remaster the weapons Mackie and I made for Warband into Bannerlord-compatible TPAC files. I would like to offer these to everyone to use. There are 44 new weapons, all with diffuse, normal and specular maps designed to work well with Bannerlord's default pbr_metallic shader. These weapons cover a wide gamut of cultures and points in time; Mackie and I were both more interested in unusual designs than just another pack of swords / spears.

For newbies and non-modders: This file merely contains the TPAC files for the meshes and bitmaps. This is not a "mod". It won't add any of these cool weapons into Bannerlord without additional work.

These meshes were originally made by Mackie or me. They were unwrapped, mastered and painted by me. Neither of us requires crediting, although we'd appreciate it. There are some aspects of Warband weapons I haven't yet figured out, largely because of the state of the current documentation, like how to use vertex animations, so in a couple of cases where scabbards existed, they have not been ported forward at this time. Use as you wish.

 

[Welcome_To_Hell]

Great work! Is your workflow based on extracting meshes from OpenBRF, or did you still have the source files in 3d modelling software you were using Blender, etc?

 

[xenoargh]

Essentially, these are dumps straight from Blood and Steel. See detailed instructions re: import / export here.

Process in OpenBRF was to squint at the meshes, decide what LODs needed to come with, then shift-click to select them, and then the "export all meshes" right-click command to dump them into a folder (thank you ever-so-much, mtarini, you really wrote an excellent tool).

Then fix any little stuff (edge hardness, etc.) that was borked in Wings3D. Then into Blender for the final export to FBX, after importing the mesh and LODs.

LODs in Bannerlord are not separate files, like BRF, so you have to have them all in the FBX at export. They do use the same naming convention as Warband, thank goodness, so as long as your files are named "my_cool_sword" and "my_cool_sword.lod2" etc. when you build the FBX, it Just Works in-game, so far as I can tell.

I presume, but have not tested, that multi-mesh works the same way: "my_cool_sword" and "my_cool_sword.1" should show up as meshes that you can assign different Materials to in the BL editor, but are all treated as the same LOD. I'll be testing that soon.

In terms of fixes, most of that was really minor, but it'll be more of a pain for stuff so old that it doesn't have a normal map; you'll at least need to provide a "blank" one.

Specular textures were updated to play nicely with PBR- that was basically just conversion to grayscale and dumping an additive layer on top (I suggest RGB 140,140,140 is a good default for weapons- it'll bring up the blacks and near-blacks a bit without making things look like plastic). A few normalmaps needed minor edits (mainly, just toning them down a bit on blades; the BL shader needs less help to show detail) but that was pretty trivial.

 

[xenoargh]

Hey presto, I've got an even faster export method for Warband exports figured out.

Note! This only works for Warband weapons. See 5, below.

1. Export the item and its LODs from OpenBRF, per above.
2. Import each OBJ into a blank Blender project. Use standard settings, don't change a thing.
3. Fix up any geometry issues (edge hardness, etc.) there or in <tool of choice>
4. Export the item with the LODs as a single FBX. Again, keep settings standard.
5. Import into Bannerlord. When importing, "convert to unit" should be set to M, and "convert to Z-Up" should be unchecked. Check it for anything that uses "helmet" orientation or armors.

Now that I know this works, I'm getting kind of eager to see what happens with armors, lol. But I'm going to complete exporting the stuff I made with Wheene first, as a demo for additive materials and making your own atlases, etc.