Information and FAQ

[Aerie]

What sort of limitations are there for EUIV and CKII?

Mostly that the files do not end up in the correct directory immediately. Its a bit of work getting things things to work properly. Im hoping we can get around to writing a guide for these.

Is there a 3dsmax 2017 Exporter ?

No, only Maya.

I'd really appreciate being able to make custom models using Blender in due course, as some other have mentioned. I make 3d models for a living, and even I don't have a copy of Maya to use at home. Blender support would open up modding to the whole community . Anyhow, I'm not in a rush... I'll be spending most of the next few months actually playing new Paradox games (Stellaris D/L'ing now, and I can't wait for HOI4).

The exporter is the one we use internally. Developing and maintaining another export is a lot of work.

If any of you do work with Maya. You company can arrange for you to have a home use license free of charge. (one per license the company is paying for)

Somehow the exporter doesn't export any models for me? Completely new to Maya so it is possible I mess this up but whenever I select a simple cube to export and run the exporter it just exports an empty mesh.

http://www.stellariswiki.com/Maya_exporter
Only objects with a shader assigned to it, with has the "shader attribute", will be exported.

Does the Exporter support Mac, or is it PC only?

No

Will this work for EUIV trees? I tried making new ones with an unofficial tool a few months back and it didn't work properly.

Yes, but those are very special, they have LOD steps, and a secondary UV set for coloring etc. Would require a extensive guide to explain them.

 

[K-vald]

I've got the exporter to work and all but there's a number of questions that haven't been answered anywhere yet. It starts as simple as.. what unit and scale does my model need to have to make it fit?
I'd really like to see a wiki page for that.. it seems kind of pointless to create anything with almost no info.
E.g. I've tried replacing the mammalian science ship with a basic blockout of my own design.. I ended up with either no mesh at all or a funny colored cube.
Is it the mesh scale, is it some kind of missing data like animations...
I was able to spawn basic (new) mesh entities by "spawnentity" though.

Is there no forum for anything modding related?

The scale in Maya doesn't matter much as you can set your own scale in the script files (either in the pdxmesh and entity with "scale = 1"), but the default ships are around the 10 Maya unit size.

Please paste your full science ship entity that you tried to use and please say which entity you tried replacing.

 

[Aerie]

hey
i dont know if this is the right place for this but anyways
ive managed to get my model into the game but the lighting of the model is extremely weird like this

Spoiler: Image

View attachment 179861

It does not apply only to this model though, its for every model i put into the game. even a simple cube with a single white texture. What am i doing wrong.

What shader are you using? I recommend PdxMeshTerra. Its simpler.
PdxMeshShip, is the "proper" one, but the lighting is more advanced, and harder to set up correctly.

 

[K-vald]

The one I tried to replace was mammalian_01_science(_entity)
The replacement obviously works (I'm using a personal mod right now), but it doesn't show up at all as mentioned.
My mesh is just basic blockout geometry for testing purposes, there's no animation data or anything attached.
Could that be part of the problem?

I'll gladly post the file if it helps you. I'm pretty sure I'm just missing out on something very basic..

Hi again, sorry for being a little slow to respond!

I checked your file and I was able to get it to work just fine in the game. I made it use the original texture files so it looked a little weird, but it works.
First of all I saw that you had exported it with the "PdxMeshRunemaster" shader which is of course an error on our behalf that the default settings include that shader. It should be "PdxMeshShip" (or as Aerie said, "PdxMeshTerra" for a simpler version).

I also saw that you tried to replace the mammalian_01_science_entity which is the frame. We use this to animate the ships and then attach the actual ship that is named "mammalian_01_science_ship_entity" to a joint in the mesh called "part1". Instead of replacing the frame I replaced the ship_entity which worked very well.

You can use the frame as your ship, but you have to prevent the game from attaching a default ship to it. The best way of doing this for this purpose is to just comment out everything in the mammalian_01_ship_entity (except for the entity name). This way it will either not spawn anything should you not have the proper joint naming convention, or it will spawn an empty entity.

 

[K-vald]

I had a look at the mod file, and I got it to work and I used the same file structure as you used. Remember thought that if you don't modify the default file the game will have 2 entities with the same name. You might want to either comment out the default one, or just use the default .asset file and replace the ship_entity with your entity.

You can use "reload mesh" to reload the .mesh file, "reload anim" to reload any animations, "reload assets" to reload all .asset files or "reload assets _mammalian" to reload all asset files with "_mammalian" somewhere in the name (goes faster).

 

[K-vald]

I came back to the problem today and managed to get an actual output from the exporter, but now the next problem rears its ugly head unfortunately.
I am trying to import the model into CK2, but it seems as though the spawnentity command does not exist. Is it spawnactor in CK2? And if so, how do I use it? It gives me a wrong number of arguments error.

Hi, I can see your confusion. And indeed adding units in CK2 is slightly different than our newer games. The spawnentity command doesn't work because there are no entities in CK2, only meshes. You can however use, as you write, spawnactor to spawn the mesh. To use it write like this: "spawnactor my_model_mesh 15 idle", 15 as in province number and idle if you have an animation (replace with your animation name).

Otherwise adding the meshes is pretty much the same, just that you need to have the .gfx file in game\interface instead of anywhere and if you want to add animations you need to have the .asset file with the animations in a folder in game\gfx\assets. For the animation .asset file to find the animations you also need to have an attribute at the top of the .asset file that redirects to the mesh/animation folder, like this: prepend = "gfx/models/[foldername}".

That should be it!

 

[K-vald]

Thank you! I mostly got it to work, now it's just a matter of finding out how to set up the animations and the shader, the shader gives me an all-black texture and the animation makes it twitch out all over the place, but i'll fiddle around with it some more over the next few days, see if I can work out how to fix things.

No problem. The shader you want to use in CK2 is PdxMeshStandard and exporting it again can sometimes solve the twitch-all-over issue (I know, weird, but hey it works...), or check so that the animations are exported at all and check the text/location of the files and animations in the folders.

 

[K-vald]

(Nvm my previous inquiry.)

I have the exporter installed and the plugin works fine in Maya 2016... but I can't open the mesh files in 'Europa Universalis IV\gfx\models\Units'. Maya doesn't recognize the file type... confused. please help. How do I open those damn .MESH files?

EDIT: Seriously fellas, I got Maya virtually just so I can mod EU4, I would really appreciate any help as to how to open up those .MESH files, get them up on the screen.

You can not open .mesh files in Maya, you have to either create your own model, rig and animations or you can try to see if JoroDox mod making tool works for your purposes. I'm afraid I know too little of the tool to be of any more help however, but I'm sure there's more info around on the forums.

 

[K-vald]

Hello, I am interested in stepping into modelling for Hoi 4. I want to create new unit sprites with completely new skeletons and animations. Could someone point me towards documentation on how to properly do this?

QUITE slow answer here, but it has a similar approach as our other games, so if you check here on how to add the entities and meshes to EU4 (ignore sprite levels) it might point you in the right direction!

 

[K-vald]

I meant like, where do we know the names of shaders, some shaders like "PdxMeshPortrait" how do I know this exists, other than someone randomly telling me? Is there a list of all shaders available somewhere?

I don't think we have, but it's a great idea, I added a task to my todo list to publish the shaders for the various projects on the Wiki and here on the forums!

 

[K-vald]

@Sid Meier

Pinging to let you know that I've composed a list of various common shaders added to stickies. You can find the thread here: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/common-shaders.1153425/

 

[K-vald]

I haven't used Blender so I can't say for sure how it works there, but in Maya they should be three separate meshes that are then exported with our Maya exporter tool to one .mesh file. All of them are, as you say, rigged to one skeleton with one set of animations. They can then have their own meshsettings and such in the .gfx file.
It sounds like Jorodox might have an issue with several meshes, whereas some might have different materials perhaps?

If you do have them as one mesh that could still work with the meshsettings, they would just have their own index, however I'm not sure how it would be with the render order in the game as that is taken from the order in the Outliner in Maya (and I've heard that it works similarly in Blender, although it's more of a hassle to move the meshes around there).

 

[K-vald]

Hmm, I can't answer specifically about Blender but you can get similar results in Maya if you for example have deformer history or change the vertex count (as in removing for example) after skinning the mesh. Maya re-assigns the vertex IDs to some extent and you'll get skinning issues.

But it sounds, from your edits, that it might be more of a Blender save/export issue. That's unfortunate indeed. I saw you've been writing with @ross-g to try out that exporter and hopefully that might work, otherwise the only thing I can come to think of is to export all the meshes separately and then attach them with the attach = { } command in the Stellaris asset file.

 

[K-vald]

Alright, yea maybe it doesn't matter then, I was thinking if that worked for your other meshes but not the hair when exported together but it would work on its own. But if that doesn't work either it won't help much. Hope that you can get ross's tool to work for you, seems to be the best bet if the re-skin/re-weight turns out to not work either.

 

[K-vald]

I have unfortunately a different issue with Ross-g's exporter that if solved fix all my issues (the mesh destruction doesn't occur, animations look fine, etc) but the PdxMeshPortrait shader isn't appearing with his plugin. (Clothes and Hair work though, so I got an "Invisible Man" situation!) So I am hopefuly I stumble upon a fix with more testing.

If you can't fix it but those other shaders work you could just put one of those on the body mesh and then overwrite the shader in the .gfx file in meshsettings with the correct mesh instead. So it will have the "wrong" shader in the .mesh file but when read in the game it will have the right one.

 

[K-vald]

Great to hear that you got it figured out in the end!

I haven't checked Reddit yet but I can answer here instead! You are correct in your assumption that the "sad" states never fire. They are legacy states and only a few portraits still have them there. The chance wouldn't matter since the portraits will be in the "idle" state from default and when they end it will be put again in an "idle" state (next_state = idle) so the "sad" states will never be used regardless of chance.

 

[Joror]

Hiya all,

The Maya Exporter has been updated. No major big changes, but lots of small iterative ones.

Download still available at:
https://accounts.paradoxplaza.com/downloads

Changelog (roughly, last update was in 2016):

• Support for newer Maya versions up to and including Maya 2020
• Support exporting only skeletons
• Better support for exporting large models
• Warning message when a joint is not part of a skin cluster
• Supports materials that have their shaders in different shader files
• LOD fixes
• Exporting transformation matrix for locators
• Update exporter to output lod percentages for newer projects
• Warning for Multiple Root Joints found
• Added Create Material script and respective UI, that creates a material, attaches it to the selected object and adds the shader attribute to it.
• `clausewitz.settings` now file uses JSON

Please note that this tool is provided 'as is' and we cannot provide much support on it, but we hope this makes some modding easier for you all.

 

[Joror]

@Joror Hi, are you able to verify that the version of the Maya Exporter that was updated is working?
I've installed it, the plugin loads in Maya 2018 and the "clausewitz.settings" file is placed at "C:\Users\Ross\Documents\Paradox Interactive\PdxExporter\settings"

But the plugin shows no available projects in the UI, meaning none of the other plugin functions are available unless I create all of the expected material attributes by hand etc ... which is tiresome.

Any ideas why the exporter can't find projects? Is the settings file being copied to the right place during installation?
View attachment 586151

Thanks

Did you change the "export_path" and "target_exe" settings in the "projects" part of the to point towards the game location? (you can use the steam directory you installed the game to)
The "path" setting ending with "tools/" can point to any directory.

 

[SaintDaveUK]

What tool does one use to edit the files with GUI file extensions ?

Any text editor.