-Hey there, in this tutorial/guide I will attempt to document and show the way I make a mod creature for Impossible Creatures (IC) Steam version, since I needed to organize my process for myself anyway. Hopefully you will find this helpful if you plan on creating a creature yourself.

-I might update it from time to time if I learn any new tricks, however I am by no means an expert in 3D modeling or modding, so some things I probably do out of pure superstition rather than necessity… but hey, if it works - it works, right? Feel free to make any suggestions to my process if you have some knowledge to share.

-Also, thanks to the guys form Tellurian mod team – who gave me lots of tips.



- Also you might be interested in an alternate, simpler, way to create new mod creatures by re-texturing the existing ones:
https://cs2bus.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3312399093
P.S. Some sections are split into smaller parts, this is mostly due to steam 8000 character limit for each section (since images are referenced as text strings this fills up real quick).

-Before we get started, I suggest you read through this guide, made by another user, on how to create your first mod folder and few other associated files to get it working in game:
https://cs2bus.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=735413158
-Later on, I will slightly expand on it - so actually do in fact first make a mod folder following the instructions given in the guide above.

-You can also find some useful information in installed IC game files, found in folder:
“\Impossible Creatures\Documents”
-Reading these parallel to my guide or skimming over them might make some things clearer, or give extra insight on how things work.

-Going to rush ahead a bit and mention that we are going to do a lot of work in an old 3d modeling program called “gmax”, so before you tackle this guide, I suggest going through at least 2 of its starting tutorials once you get it installed (if you have 0 experience with 3d modeling), to understand how basic view manipulation and tools work.

-The tutorials should be found opening the gmax program itself under “Help-> Tutorials”, you can also take a look in the “User Reference” – which is a documentation on gmax and its tools:


-If you click these and nothing opens, you should have “gmax12_help.exe” and “gmax12_tutorials.exe” in your downloaded gmax files, essentially these are archive files. Copy them in your main gmax directory - for example "C:\gmax". Extract them like you would any other archive file, and new documents will appear in your "Help" folder and a new "Tutorials" folder will be made (it contains materials for tutorials):


-After extracting the archives, your "Help" folder should contain these files. Now you should be able to open them inside gmax. Alternatively you can also open them outside the program for reading:


-The tutorials I suggest are:
“Getting started”:

And “Modeling a Head”:


-The modeling methods used in these tutorials are slightly different than what we will be using, but they will help you feel more comfortable using the program.

-That being said, here are the programs we will be using along the way:

1. gmax – as I already mentioned a 3d modeling program, a modification of “3ds max 4” modeling program I believe. You used to be able to get it for free officially, however now it’s sadly not the case anymore. I suggest downloading it off some sort of archive/abandon ware site – I got mine off “Internet Archive”. This is the program we will use to model our creature, texture it and animate it. Also, while gmax is a somewhat cut down version of “3ds max 4” sometimes it’s tutorials can be applied to gmax as well.


2. XVI32 – a hex code editor, this will be useful at a brief step near the end of our creature’s creation process, to ensure our animations are working.


3. Krita – or any other image editing program you prefer. I use it simply because its free photoshop alternative and gets the job done. We will use it to paint textures for our creature.


4. Irfanview – image viewer program with limited image editing capabilities. There is actually only one task I use it for - to reduce color depth to 8BPP. This step might be accomplishable in Krita, but I find it very easy and convenient to do in Irfanview.


5. Resource Hacker – a program used to edit text in “.dll” files, this will be used to properly name and add description to your creatures in games localization file.


6. Notepad – a simple text editing program, should come preinstalled with windows, this will be used to edit “txt” files that contain your creature’s stats.


7. IC RDN Tools – modding tools supplied by installed IC Steam version itself, and can be found in:
” \Impossible Creatures\RDNTools”

-For our creature creation purposes in this guide we will be using:
7.1 “ComboTest” - combine creatures outside the game and adjust limb scaling.


7.2 “ObjectEditor” – used to make a “.ebp” creature object that game will use and to set up a few of your creatures parameters.


7.3 ”ModPackager” – used to prepare “.sga” file, necessary to publish your mod on steam.


-You can also skip most of the programs presented here for now, and just start with gmax since that is where we will spend the bulk of our time, and acquire other programs once the time is right.

-Once you have your gmax installed you need to add some additional functionality to it through the use of “gamepacks”. If you have IC steam version installed navigate to the folder named:
“\Impossible Creatures\RDNPlugins\RDNGmax”

-And copy these 2 files called "msvcp70.dll" and "msvcr70.dll" straight into your main gmax directory:
” C:\gmax”


-Then open the folder called “gamepacks” located in the same IC folder:
“\Impossible Creatures\RDNPlugins\RDNGmax\gamepacks”:


-And copy the whole folder “Rdn” over to your gmax directory folder named “gamepacks”:
“C:\gmax\gamepacks”


-Now open the “Rdn” folder you just copied into gmax folder “gamepacks”:
“C:\gmax\gamepacks\Rdn”

-From now on you will need to launch your gmax program through this icon, to be able to use the specific tools meant for IC creature creation:


-Once launched you should briefly see this splash screen:


-On first start up you might be greeted with this window, that offers you to choose “gmax Driver Setup”, now since I have no idea what this does, I just picked the first option and clicked “OK” (I guess this determines how your computer renders the 3D model real time in your viewports):


-you can change this anytime you want by navigating: “Customize-> Preferences -> Viewports” and there will be section called “Display Drivers”:


-This should be the programs title, once open, that means you have the correct version open:


-Now we need to manually add some of the extra tools in the program, find button on the right side, called “Utilities”:


-From here on out I will generally refer to the right side panel and all its tools as “Command panel” and in this case specifically we just clicked “Utilities panel”:


-Then find and click button called “Configure Button sets”:


-A new window should pop up:


-First have number 13 written in this window, that way we add 2 extra buttons for our new tools:


-Then scroll down the “Utilities” list until you see the new 2 empty buttons:


-First click on one of the empty buttons, so it gets highlighted:


-Then double-click on “BoneCopy” and then on “BoneMirror” from the list on the left:


-These tools should be added to our empty buttons - once that is done click “OK”:


-Now they should appear in our “Utilities panel” and will be available to us once we need them:


-Now 2 other things I do once a fresh copy of gmax is installed, first I switch my units to meters (sorry my American friends). Under “Customize -> Units Setup”:


-Then I simply tick in “Meters” and click “OK” to close it.


-Then I also open "Customize -> Preferences...", and in "General" tab change the field under "System Unit Scale" section to "Meters" and click "OK" to close it. Not sure if this affects that much, but just so you know where my “m” letters come from when I am dealing with numbers:


-The other thing I do is I add an extra toolbar on top as well, under “Customize -> Show UI -> Show Tab Panel”:


-A new toolbar should appear on top:


-Most of these tools should be available in the “Create panel” and “Modify panel”, I just sometimes find it handy to have them on top:


-Now while I do encourage you to try out the tutorials I mentioned earlier, a short description of the navigation tools, found at the bottom right corner:


-“Arc Rotate” will allow you to rotate your model around and have a look at it from another angle:

-“Zoom Extents All” – instantly zoom all your viewports to see the whole of your model:

-“Min/Max Toggle” – maximize current active viewport, useful if you have to work on smaller details:


-And a bit about the Viewport options (the 4 windows through which you can look at your model). Originally you will be presented with 4 viewports - normally 3 of them will display your model as “wireframe” and one as “Smooth + Highlights”.

-You can customize the layout to your own liking in “Customize -> Viewport Configuration ->Layout tab”. I just stay with the default layout and set their viewing angles to “Left”, “Front”, “Top”, “User”.

-You can also change how each viewport displays your model, by right-clicking its title in the left top corner of the viewport. I mostly just use the “Smooth + Highlights”, “Wireframe” and “Edged Faces” options:


-In this same menu, if you have rotated your viewport to hell, you can simply reset it to one of the “Views” – Top, Left etc.

-If you start rotating/changing the angle at which you look at your model in the current viewport, it will automatically be renamed to “User”.

-First (of course) you need to decide what creature you wish to create, in this tutorial I am going to make a simple 4 legged land creature. As I am currently working on a dinosaur mod, I am going to make “Lufengosaurus”.

-Here are some reference images I used for it. Keep in mind - IC has a cartoony art-style so you don’t need to go hardcore and make it photo realistic:


-First let’s navigate to folder in IC files:
“\Impossible Creatures\DataSrc\IC\Art\EBPs\Stock”

-In here you can find 3 “Stock” creatures – Wolf, Archerfish, Lobster. These are the only “.gmax” files for IC creatures we have available. I like to make my creature in this same folder for convenience’s sake, and also later on we will need to export it from this very same folder as well.

-Remember to back up your work regularly and make new version every time you make big changes, so you have something to fall back to if something goes wrong.

-Essentially to make our creature we need to end up with a folder that has the same structure and content as the other three creature folders already there. Let’s prepare our folder by using “Wolf” folder as our base, since this will make a few things easier. Copy the wolfs folder and rename it to your creature’s name:


-Now let’s open the folder and see what’s Inside:


-Folder “Reference” will contain your main gmax 3D model, animations will be made later on by saving copies of this file into the “Animations” folder (renamed to appropriate animation like “Walk.gmax” or “Run.gmax”);
-Folder “Animations” will contain all your creature’s animations as gmax files;
-Folder “Model” will contain all your creature’s textures.

-We begin our work in the folder “Reference” – open it. As you can see it contains 2 files. Why? - well, you can actually use the original “3ds max 4” program to edit and create creature models, in that case we would open the file with “.max” extension. To us however it is useless as we are using “gmax”, so we can safely delete it, since we are only able to edit files with “.gmax” extensions. Also, your main 3D model’s file should remain titled “Ref.gmax”, otherwise you won’t be able to export your creature once it’s done:


-Once we open the “Ref.gmax” file you will be greeted with this sight. The small dialog window appeared because program is letting us know that it can’t find its path to the Wolfs texture files, but since we are going to make a completely new creature, we can ignore it and click “Continue”:


-Note – if your “Ref.gmax” file does not open with special version of “RDN game pack” by simply double-clicking it. You can also open an empty ”gMax - RDN” instance, and drag and drop the file you want to open into one of its viewports (this is the way I do it).

-There are many ways to create 3D models, but in our case all IC creature models are made out of something called “Patches”. Patches are rectangular surfaces/segments that make up creature’s skin, it is important to distinguish it from other modeling techniques that for example employ Polygons or Meshes since tools and modeling approach differ across these styles of modeling.

-A patch will always be a rectangular shape with 4 edges and 4 vertices. You can’t weld its own vertices together or add any extra (as it turns out there are also triangular patches – but let’s ignore that for the sake of our sanity…).

-In the image I have selected a single patch – outlined in dark red:


-We want to keep wolfs “bones”, but delete its “model”, the plan is to use its bones (colorful boxes) for our new creature (and yes, you can tweak existing 3 stock models and create new creatures from them, but I am going to make it from scratch, if you can do that, surely you will be able to tweak existing models if desired).

-While in “Create panel”, select wolfs model by left-clicking, and click “Delete” on your keyboard, all that should remain are wolfs bones:



-Since we won’t use bones right away, select all of them by drag selecting, right-click and apply “Freeze Selection” from the menu, so you won’t delete them by accident in the modeling process:


-Frozen objects may not be selected or deleted - you can recognize frozen objects by their dark grey color. Next - with nothing selected, right-click anywhere in the viewport space and click “Hide Unselected”. This way you will hide all your frozen bones, so that they don’t get in the way, once you begin modeling process:


-You should be left with grey empty space. You may return the bones any time you please by right clicking anywhere in the viewport, and clicking “Unhide All” – for now let’s leave them hidden:


- Let’s begin making our creature by making a simple “Box” shape:
In the “Create panel” find and click a button called “Box”:
“Command panel -> Geometry -> Standard primitives -> Box”:


-And make a box freehand of any size and shape in the User 3D viewport:


-Once done either click “Esc” on your keyboard or select “Select object” tool (top toolbar), so that the box button is no longer active (active tool will have an orange background):


-Select your box, look to your “Command panel” and find rollout called “Name and Color” (rollouts are these tool sections that can be collapsed and expanded with the little “+” and “-” symbols next to their names), rename it to your desired creatures name, you can also change the basic color if you wish so:


-Next we need to make sure our box is set to 0,0,0 coordinates. Select your box, while it is selected, pick a tool from the main toolbar called “Select and Move”:


-Then look at the “coordinates display” found at the bottom, and write 0 in all of them, to move the box dead center of our world coordinates:


-While in “Create panel” your creature’s model must always remain at 0,0,0 coordinates, pay attention you don’t move it later on by accident:


-Now we can switch over to “Modify panel” by clicking Modify button in the Command panel:

-Select your box and change its size to a less random shape in the “Command panel” under “Parameters” rollout. I like to go with (0,1, 0,4, 0,4), think of this shape as a segment of your creatures torso, we will add 5 more - just like it, thats why I went with “0,1” for its “Length”:


-Now it’s time to right-click your box object and click “Convert to Editable Patch”:


-Once the object is converted to “Editable patch” you can see that “Editable Patch” modifier has been applied to your object and added to your object’s modifier stack (it should always remain at the bottom of the stack, when later on we will add other modifiers).

-All of the sculpting and modeling will be done in this modifier:


-Select it by clicking on it, so it becomes active, you should notice a bunch of parameters and tools appear in your “Command panel”:


-Now our box is set up and ready to be molded and shaped into our desired creature. Before we begin - a brief explanation of how creatures visually appear in game:

-There are 3 levels of detail (LOD-1, LOD-2, LOD-3) all 3 appear in game.
-LOD-1 can be seen when combining 2 creatures in army builder in the two small side preview windows;
-LOD-2 can be seen as the final result of 2 combined creatures in the center window of army builder;
-LOD-3 can be seen when actually playing the game.





-You can see that the creature becomes more rounded and smoother, less “boxy”, as the level of detail increases.
-Now LOD-1 does not really matter, as you will only briefly see it, however LOD-2 is important as it will be the players first impression of your creature’s quality close up, once they combine it. But the main focus should be put on LOD-3 as it will be the actual in game model.

-Basically, try to model your creature so at each level of detail it appears as following:
-LOD-1 – who cares;
-LOD-2 – pretty ok;
-LOD-3 – godlike.

-In gmax you can see and judge this level of detail while “Editable Patch” acts as the active “Modifier” in your modifier stack. Scroll down the list of tools and parameters in your “Command panel” (on the right side) until you find this section “Surface”:


-By changing the “View Steps” number from 0-2 you can change between the three levels of detail:
LOD-1 – 0;
LOD-2 – 1;
LOD-3 – 2.

-You can go way beyond 2, but it is unnecessary as the game will apply these levels of detail as it pleases itself, once model is finished and exported. It also does not matter at which “View Step” you leave it at, once you export it. Change this parameter purely to have an idea how your creature will appear in the final result.

-Now with that out of the way, for now leave the View Steps at “0” and un-tick the “Show Interior Edges” in the “Surface” section, as this might appear confusing to later determine which are our main patches and which are simply their interior edges.

-While in “Modifier panel” and “Editable patch” as the active modifier take a look at these Sub-object selection options presented:


From right to left they allow you to select:
-Element - A whole object;
-Patch;
-Edge;
-Vertex – blue points that connect edges.

-Choose “Element” as your Sub-object selection method and click on your box object, it’s edges should change to dark red once selected, and with “Select and move” tool active, move it using the XYZ widget arrows by clicking on them and dragging:


-Move it vertically up from the “ground level” to about where you think your creature’s torso will be positioned (consider this darker grid line as the ground level, while looking through the “Right” viewport):


-But wait didn’t you say it must remain at “0,0,0” coordinates? Yes – it will remain at 0,0,0 coordinates in “Create panel” however in “Modify panel” we can pretty much move it as we please. We will need to switch from one panel to the other later on, so keep a good track of which panel is active at any given moment. Generally think of it this way - “Create panel” is meant for working on multiple objects, while ”Modify panel” is meant for working on a single object and its various details and parameters:


-Remember - you can also use coordinates display, if you wish for a more precise control over where your object will end up, for now move it along Z axis “up”. I have moved my box object by 0.6m up:


-Now switch over to “Vertex” Sub-object selection method:


-And in the “Front view” viewport select each vertex one by one and move them to the 0 coordinate along the X axis – use coordinates display for this. Until you end up with what looks like half of your original box shape in the “Front” viewport:


-We just made a starting shape of the right half of our creatures model. Think of your creature being split down the middle along its spine. Its going to be easier to model one half of the creature, then simply copy and mirror it, and attach the two parts thogether.

-Now its time to extrude the rest of the creatures body in simple rectangular shapes. I suggest doing all the biggest extrudions at this point, while the “vertex handles” havent been yet used. These green small squares attached by a line to a Vertex are called “vertex handles”– used to shape your model and make it smoother. Each Vertex has one of these for each other vertex conneted to it by an edge:


-Also, I suggest turning on “Edged faces” in your “User” viewport. As it will be easier to follow what is going on. Do this by right clicking the “User” text in the top left corner of the viewport and click “Edged faces”:


-You should notice that now edges of our shape are highlighted with white color and more easily noticeable in your “User” viewport.

-To begin extrudion switch over to “Patch” Sub-object selection method:


-Now let’s begin by extruding the torso of our creature. In the “Command panel” scroll down until you find “Extrude & Bevel” section and toggle “Extrude” button:


-Next click on the frontal “Patch” of the object, and either extrude it freehand by holding down left mouse button and dragging, or write your desired value in the “Extrusion” window:


-Repeat this process until you end up with 6 such segments, as our plan is to create our creature’s topology as close to what original IC developers would have done. Wolf has 6 segments for its torso and so will we (once you get more experience you can do wilder things and experiment). Also, we want to keep it as simple as possible – since this will impact how hard the texturing will be later down the line.

-At this point you can also open another instance of “gmax” with the Stock Wolfs model next to your project to use it as an example:


-Also remember that your creature should face the way the original wolfs bones did, if you are unsure you are extruding in the right direction, remember to “unhide” the bones, to see which way they are facing.

-You should end up with something like this, this is going to be right half of our creature’s torso:


-Next I will extrude neck and tail. On wolfs stock model we can see that IC developers used 2 segments for its neck and 4 for its tail. However, in my case since I am making a creature that has a rather long neck, I am going to use 3 segments for its neck. You can adjust/fix this later on, however the method is somewhat messy, so I suggest to try and plan out your creature’s topology beforehand:


-For neck and tail I am going to extrude segments that are slightly longer (0,15 units) so I can easier tell the difference between the torso and the rest of my creature’s body parts:


-For Wolfs models head it seems like IC developers used 5 segments. Since my creature’s head is somewhat simple with no ears, horns or other special features, I feel like I can get away with 4 segments:


-Next we add the lower jaw. Simply extrude it from the bottom of your head, you will bend and rotate it in the correct position later on, for now it will be as if its fully open. I am going to extrude my jaw from the second segment counting from the neck side. In order to align with the upper jaw, it’s also going to be 2 segments long:


-Remember, the more complex you make your creatures topology the harder (or rather more time consuming) it will be to later texture it, so I suggest keeping it as simple as you can (yes I am repeating myself, but I can’t stress this enough).

-Next we add legs. Both legs will be positioned at the second segment counting from torsos end points, with 2 segments left in the middle:


-First, extrude these segments outwards from the side of the body:


-Then extrude downwards as many segments as your creature’s legs will require. Generally, 7 segments should be fine, for both back and frontal legs – seems like that’s the number IC developers went with for the Wolf. From my experience (if we don’t count the part that’s attached to the creature’s torso) its:
- 3 segments for creature’s shins;
- 3 segments for where the creature’s leg will bend like joints to act as a buffer between shins (animations will look much better if you take this into account);
- 1 segment for foot:


-Now since I am making a dinosaur, I might decide to extrude additional individual fingers form the final foot segment, instead of leaving it just as a box, however texturing will become more time consuming. Also, look at what IC developers actually got away with for their bird legs… I mean… come on:


-Anyway - after extruding 7 additional segments for both legs this is what we end up with:


- Now we need to delete all the “Inside” patches - the ones facing towards our future left half. To essentially make our model “hollow”. Turn your view of the model around and select the inner patches and click “Delete” on your keyboard, while “Patch” Sub-object selection method is active:


-Be careful though, not to select the patches on the other side of the model, make sure the patch you want to delete is highlighted with the dark red stroke around it, so delete them one at a time. While doing this you can also tick “Ignore Backfacing”, this will help you to avoid selecting the patches you cant see:


-End result should look something like this:


-Looking at our creature template from the top you can see that its middle vertices are still at the 0 coordinate on the X axis, try to keep it that way throughout the modeling process and move them only vertically, along the centered dark grid line:

-To ensure that your model looks consistent all along its surface, select all of your current model using “Patch” selection method and in “Command panel” scroll down until you see this panel “Smoothing Groups”, while all of your patches are selected click on number “1” and leave it there:



-Before you begin actual shaping of your creature, there is one trick I can suggest. You can create “Instanced mirror copy” of your right half, so you have an easier time judging your creature’s final appearance, this especially helps to avoid your creature ending up looking too “fat”.

-First return to ”Create panel” by clicking it’s button and select your creature object using “Select object” tool:


-Then in the “Main toolbar” find and click tool called “Mirror Selected Objects”:


-A dialog window will appear.
-In “Mirror Axis” section make sure “X” is ticked in and add a small offset, so you can visually see slight separation between the two halves (0,01 should be fine or you can go lower);
-In the “Clone Selection” section tick “Instance” – this will create instanced copy of your right half, and click “OK”:


-You should see something similar to this. As before you may freeze the other instanced half so you don’t select it or move it by accident:


-The “Instanced copy” will copy actions we perform on the original right half while we work in “Modify panel”. As you can see, I moved a Vertex up and the other half mimicked our actions on its own:


-Important – we will NOT attach this mirrored left half to our creature, as it will mess up your creature’s topology, once we are done shaping our right half, and are happy with the result, we will delete this left “Instanced mirrored copy”. It is merely acting as a placeholder, and guide, we will mirror our right half using another method that I will explain down the line.

-Ok all of the ”busy” work is done, we are all set, at this point something like this should be visible in your viewports:


-Now return to “Modify panel” while your right half is selected, it’s time to shape your creature:


-Shaping your creature is done activating one of these 3 Sub-object selection methods and moving around selected objects with “Select and move” tool, its best to use the “Vertex” selection method:


-I will attempt to describe and show the process of my creature taking shape, however the process involves a lot of trial and error, and individual “artistic approach”, so you are kind of on your own to figure it out - sorry.

- Frist I like to work in the Side view Viewport, to work out my creature’s silhouette shape:


-Also, I like to push these corner vertices in towards the center, so creature’s torso form starts to appear more rounded (hexagonal):


-Important – your creature’s neck and tail should connect to its torso by 6 vertices. And all your other limbs should connect to its torso by 4 vertices. This is to ensure the connections with other IC creatures.

-While shaping your creature – worth keeping in mind, the squarer you keep your patches – the better the textures will look on your creature (less stretching and warping).

-If you need to create a sharp end point, like a horn or a tip of the tail, you can simply pull out the vertex this way, and slightly move it up relative to other vertices:




-If you want to work on a specific part of your creature in one of the wireframe viewports, but there is just too much clutter, I suggest to hide the patches you aren’t currently working on. Do this while having patch Sub-object selection method active, select all the patches you want hidden, and then right click and choose “Hide (Patch)”, to return hidden patches back to visibility simply right click again in viewports space and click “Unhide All (Patch)”:


-For example, I wanted to work on my creature’s head in the front view, but it looks too cluttered to tell what is what, so I made all of the body’s patches hidden except its head:


-Model your creature’s legs as if this dark grid line seen in the “Left” viewport is ground level:


-Both leg connection spots should be about the same size (the 4 vertices). If you want to for example create large back legs, and skinny frontal legs by comparison, its best to first create sort of a base for your skinny leg, that is about the size of your back leg, and then shrink it further down it’s length. This way you will avoid other stock creature legs looking weird on your model.

-Patch “Sub-object” selection method is best used to move large portions of your creature in the right place. But the vertex “Sub-object” selection method will help us to make more finer adjustments in combination with the “vector handles” attached to each vertex.

-Here is what I got after moving around vertices. However, we will need to make some major adjustments in a bit:

-For now you can see that my creature still looks blocky - while on view step-0 (LOD-1). Now we will begin using the “vector handles” the little green squares attached to each vertex. By changing the position of these ”vector handles”, you can “bend” the edge that connects two of these vertices, and by doing this we get smoother and rounder appearance of our creature.

-To see the changes made by manipulating the "vector handles" at this point you need turn your models “View Steps” up to 2 (LOD-3):


-Unfortunately, now it turns to WRINKLED mess, it was expected and is part of the process, once you turn up to the view step-2 (LOD-3). Because we moved our vertices around the vector handles got all messed up.


-Now if it does not look too bad, you can simply continue by adjusting the "vector handles" to further shape your creatures appearance. If its so bad you cant tell whats going on however, there is a way to reset the "vector handes" to a "deafult" position.

-First, in "Modify panel" turn the View Steps back to “0”. This is important:


-Then go to “Create panel” and right click your model, and pick “Convert To -> Convert To Editable Mesh”:


-Now select your creature, and go to “Modify panel”, here we need to add a “modifier” from the “Modifier List” called “Turn to Patch”:


-Your modifier stack should look like this:


- With the “Turn to Patch” modifier selected look at the panel on the right and un-tick the option called “Include Soft Selection”:


- Now right click the “Turn to Patch” modifier in your stack, and click “Collapse To”:


-All of the modifiers in your stack will disappear and your model will be turned back to “Patch” type model.

-By performing this conversion from Patch to Mesh and again back to Patch type model, the model has forgotten the “vertex handle” positions, now creatures initial look will be boxy on pretty much any view step. Here you can see the model on the same view step “2” before and after this action:


-Now if you preformed this “vertex handle resetting” action, you will need to unfreeze and delete the mirrored instance half, and remake it, otherwise it will no longer mirror your actions.

-Now our job is to smooth out the skins surface by adjusting the “Vector handles”, you see them once you select a vertex.:

-By pulling the vector handles in certain direction we can bend the edge in certain way and make our shapes more rounded:

-Remember from time to time look at your creature in view step-1 (LOD-2):

-To make the edge more straight simply have the vector handles of the connected vertices point towards each other:


-I have decided to add fingers, just like before I used extrude tool. I extruded 2 segments to the sides, and 3 separate segments forward, then shape the foot by moving vertices and vector handles around:

-If you see weird visual glitching like this - don’t worry, as far as I know it’s just the nature of the program, for some reason it really does not like thin shapes, or if the patch surfaces are close to each other (this actually might be because of the gmax Drivers I picked at the very beginning, but I can live with this, you can choose another driver setup if you wish):

-Ok I think I am pretty happy with what I got so far by moving the vector handles, so now it’s time to make the left half of the creature:


-First unfreeze your instanced copy and delete it:


-Before you continue you can check how many vertices run along your creature’s center part, and keep this number in mind. I suggest doing this in “Front” viewport - select them, and check this number in the “Selection” rollout. I have 40 vertices along its middle (be careful not to select any vertices super close to the center though):


-Now while “Create panel” is active select your creature in the “Front” viewport:


-Then pick “Select and move” tool and while holding down “Shift” on your keyboard move it
along the X-axis towards the right side. What you will end up with is a copy of your creature’s right half.

-After you release your mouse button you will be presented with “Clone Options” dialog window. There should be nothing you need to change, “Copy” should be ticked in and “Number of Copies” should be at “1”, click OK:


-Now select the new copy we just made and switch to “Modify panel”:


-From the dropdown menu called “Modifier list” find modifier called “Mirror” and click it, it will be added to your modifier stack:

-Make it active in the modifier stack, if not already selected, in its parameters you should see that it mirrored it along “X axis” by default, if not make sure it is, offset also should be 0, and we get a mirrored copy of our creature using this modifier:


-Now return to ”Create panel”:


-And move your new mirrored half to coordinates 0,0,0, so it aligns with the original down the middle, use coordinates display for this task:


-Your 2 parts should be aligned like this:


-Now select your original half and go to “Modify panel”, pick “Element” Sub-object as your selection method:


-Select your original half again, it should highlight dark red:


-Scroll down the command panel until you find section called “Topology” toggle the “Attach” button and click on your copied half (your cursor should change visually when hovering over it), it should highlight white once clicked. Then click “Attach” button again to disable the attach tool:


-Now we should have a single creature object, you can test this by switching back to ” Create panel”, select and unselect the model there, it should no longer highlight separately but highlight as if it’s one object and it also should be under a single name (your original creatures name):

-However, once you return to “Modify panel” you will see that your object still consists of 2 “Element” Sub-objects, you can test this by selecting one half or the other while using “Element” Sub-object selection method:



-We need to make it a single “Element”, in order to do that we will perform an action called “Weld”.

-Its best to use the ”Front” viewport for this next task, I would even suggest to maximize this one viewport by clicking this “Min/Max Toggle” icon, click it while the “Front” viewport is active, on the bottom right corner. It will maximize your view of this one viewport, to return to your original viewport layout, simply click it again:



-Have “Vertex” Sub-object selection method active:


-Now select all the middle vertices that run along the creature’s center line (from both of your halves):


-You should have twice as many vertices selected as you had for one side, and it should definitely be an even number, you can see the number of vertices currently selected in your command panel:


-Now with the vertices still selected in the command panel scroll down until you find section called “Weld”:


-Change the number right next to the “Selected” button to something like ”0.001” this number defines the tolerance of our weld, the higher the number the more vertices will be welded together. Since we only want to weld together our creature down the middle and both of our halves are identical, we should be right on the money, so we can decrease the number to avoid mistakes:


-Now click the button “Selected”, and our vertices should be welded together, now after this action the number of selected vertices should be half of what we started with, that means everything was welded correctly. If for some reason number is not half of what you started with, undo your welding action by pressing “Ctrl+Z” or use the “Undo” icon in the main toolbar, tinker with the number next to “Selected” and try again:


-Now both of your creature’s parts should be welded together you can test this by using “Element” Sub-object selection method and selecting it and deselecting it, it should all highlight dark red:


-To see if you missed any welds, you can also right click and then click “Select Open Edges” if none were selected, you’re good. In the final model no open edges are allowed, that means even if you want to make like a thin fin type of part for your model you can’t use a single plane, it has to be a really thin box:


-Small intervention - you can also “reverse” this process by deleting a half of already finished creature, adjusting it, and then making it whole once more. This way you can speed up your modeling process when starting a new similar creature (this way you can also save time on either texturing or animating, depending on how large the changes made were).

-Do this by deleting half the original creature’s patches. Beforehand you can check and see how much actually is half by selecting the whole creature first:



-Now one last thing before we are finished with modeling, we need to scale the creature to its proper “natural” size (that is, if you did not account for this at the start). While the game itself will limit your creature’s size, to preestablished values 1 through 10 (which you will be able to set later in game files), If your creature is put into map via map editor as a neutral roaming creature, it will keep your models original size.

-First things first, we need to find out how large our creature is. According to various sources my Lufegosaurus is about 6 meters tall - tail to nose, and around 2 meters high - spine to ground.

-In the upper toolbar click on “Helpers” tab, and in the “Left” viewport using the “Tape measure object” gauge your creature’s potential size:


-You can find the same tools here as well by the way:


-The dark grid line will be our “ground level” click and drag your creature’s length while observing the command panels parameter “Length” on the right side. Once desired length is reached, release the mouse button and tape object will be created:


-Now do the same for your creature’s length if you deem it necessary, these will act as our guides:


-Now click your creature object, and switch over to “Modify panel”:


-From the dropdown menu called “Modifier list” find modifier called “XForm” and click it, it will be added to your modifier stack. Next click “Gizmo” tool under the “Xform” modifier:


-A yellow box should appear around your creature object (Rescale only with this active!):


-Select “Select and Uniform” tool form the main toolbar:


-And rescale your creature to appropriate size while clicking and holding down your left mouse button on your creature and dragging, release the mouse button once you are satisfied with its size:


-Now it should be scaled to its real-world size, delete the “Measure tape objects” and right click in the “Modifier stack” space and click “Collapse all” to remove “XForm” from list but keep its properties intact:


-If this warning window appears click “Yes”:


-In the end your “Modifier stack” should be clean (with only “Editable Patch” remaining) and your creature should have kept its new size:

-Important - When ”Create panel” is active your objects parameters must be:
-Scaling should be set to +100%, +100%, and +100%;
-Translation should be set to 0, 0, 0;
-Rotation should be set to 0, 0, 0.
You can check this by having your creature object selected and go through “Select and Move” tool, “Select and Rotate” tool, “Select and Uniform Scale” tool, and observe your coordinates display:


-When you finally will export your creature, for some reason the creature and its animations will be mirrored, not an issue, just keep that in mind if you are making an asymmetrical creature, and also when you ponder the existing ".ebp" files (as you can see my stegosaurus swings its tail the other way once exported):


-To make your modelling process easier, you can use "Viewport Background...":


-First have a viewport active in which you wish to have a background image, and then click "Viewport Background...". A new window will pop up, click "Files..." and find a file you wish to use as your background image, have "Display Background" and "Match Bitmap" ticked. Then click "Apply" and then "OK" to close it.


-An image should show up in your viewport positioned at the center of your modeling space, to aid you in your modelling. To "resize" it you can tick "Lock Zoom/Pan" in the "Viewport Background" window. Then zoom in or out on the image to somewhat scale it, then un-tick the option again:


-I suggest a somewhat small resolution images for this, as gmax will get upset if you try to zoom more and more into the viewport with the image in it, and ask you if you wish to still display it.

-If the grid gets in the way just press "G" on your keyboard to toggle the grid on/off for the active viewport.

-Ok now we are done with modeling, we can move on to adjusting our creature’s bones.

-Right-click anywhere in the viewports space and return the wolfs bones, that we hid at the very beginning, by clicking “Unhide All”:


-Your creature may or may not be different form the wolfs size, as you can see mine is much larger, so I will need to make the bones slightly larger as well and also reposition them to the correct spots in my creatures body.

-For the next step you may “Hide” your creatures model while in the “Create panel” by right clicking on it and clicking “Hide Selection”.

-First we need to prepare the wolfs skeleton, by removing the bones we definitely wont need. First of all my creature does not posses any ears or insect like antlers so ear bones and antler bones are unnecessary to me.

-Just like with your creature object’s name, you can also see bone names on the right side (Create panel) and as you might have guessed “l” and “r” letters in its name are used to identify left and right side bones of the creature:


-I deleted ear and antler bones, so my skeleton appears a bit simpler and it will be easier to work with:


-Do not change bone names or their naming style, as game needs to recognize them by their name, when making combinations. Also, I suggest not to delete any spine or neck bones if you are trying to simplify your skeleton, as in some combinations there are other creatures that may rely on those bones for animation, if deleted - animations might look ugly and glitchy once creatures are combined. Also don’t delete the top most bone of every limb – I will touch on the hierarchy of the bones a bit later.

-Now depending on your creature, you might actually need to remove bones or attach more bones, in my case my creature’s properties are a bit abnormal – it has a long neck. So, for animation purposes I probably want to add another bone in its neck structure (wolf has 3).

-First, I will select the bone “neck3” and copy it by holding down “Shift” on my keyboard and using “Select and Move” tool to move it – this way creating a copy:


-I will rename it so it fits with the naming convention as “neck4”, also, if you do copy new bones, I suggest changing the color of the bones that are next to each other as this will be helpful to later distinguish which vertices are attached to which bones once we start the skinning process

-Now we need to reestablish or make new connections between the new bones and the old ones, if we made any, or deleted some bones in the middle of a limb’s skeleton.

-Select all your bones:


-Click “Display panel” (its next to Create and Modify panels):


-Then scroll down in your “Command panel” until you find section called “Link Display” (roll it out by pressing the little “+” sign if not rolled out already). And tick in “Display Links”:


-Now you should see all the connections between the bones:


- Now by moving creatures head bones slightly forward and zooming in, we can see that our freshly made bone’s connection is the same as the bone we chose as our copy target. Right now it connects one bone over (the little “extra” squares that lay between connections, sometimes even outside the bone box are the bones “pivot points”, connections are established between those):


-First, we want to break the wrong connections:


-Select the bones whose connections you wish to break:

-Then click icon in the “Main Toolbar” called “Unlink selection”:


-Links are broken:


-Next click Icon in the “Main Toolbar” called “Select and Link”:


-Then left click and hold on the bone with no connection and drag and release the connection to the bone you wish to connect it to:


-And now lets restore the connections towards the “head” bone:


-Now let’s slightly reposition it, to see what we got – looks good:


-Now that we have reestablished the necessary bone connections, we can turn off the link display, by once again - selecting all bones, and unticking the option:


-Now we need to delete all the bones on one side (either ones with “l” - left or “r” – right, designator in their names). Once we have placed our bones in the right positions we will copy them over to the opposite side, similarly like we did with modeling, we will be saving time by working on one side of the creature:




-Before we go on, a bit about the weirder bones you can see in the skeleton. These two bones are meant for wing connections, even if your creature does not possess wings, you still need to keep these. Why there are two of them? I think one is meant for insect-like wings the other one is meant for bird-like wings:


-The two frontal bones also need to be kept, even if your creature has no arms, as these are meant for arm connections, such as lobsters pincers:


-What are the green cubes for, at the tips of the limbs? – I honestly don’t know, but I keep them around anyway – superstition, remember?:


-Ok let’s continue, now it’s time to return our creatures model, (right click and then click “Unhide all”), and to avoid accidentally moving our creature model Freeze it by right-clicking it and click “Freeze Selection”:



-Before we begin moving our bones around, you should also know that there is something called “Bone hierarchy”, if the top most bone (parent bone) in the hierarchy is moved the rest (child bones) will follow along its movement. Pelvis is the top most parent bone in the hierarchy, every single bone will move along with it. You can test how this works by moving around a single bone using “Select and Move” tool (bone hierarchy is mainly meant for Animations). You can also select the parent bone and all its children by simply double-clicking a bone (this is what happens when I double-click the top most bone in a leg’s hierarchy):

-However, preferably - we don’t want hierarchy to work while we reposition bones for our new creature’s body layout, so we will disable it for the time being, click “Hierarchy panel” (next to “Create” and “Modify” panels):


-And under “Pivot” section find and toggle button - “Don’t affect children”:


-While this “Hierarchy panel” remains open with “Don’t affect children” toggled, you may move bones without hierarchy effect working.

-At this point I would also suggest opening the original wolfs model in another gmax instance next to your project and try to mimic bone placement relative to its body part segments.

-Also, if you feel you need to make the bones larger, to better decide on their placement, IC developer documents warn against using any kind of scaling tool on them. Instead click on the bone whose size you wish to change, then head over to “Modify panel” and find “Parameters” section, here you can adjust its size numerically by changing Length, Width, Height parameters:


-Bone dimensions won’t affect your model’s animations, it’s simply meant for you to better visualize the way your limbs might move, the important part will be the bones pivot point placement.

-Here is how I repositioned and resized bones for my creatures right half and its middle/spine section (and by the way, originally wolf’s ”pelvis” bone is slightly off center, you might want to properly center it):


-Now you also need to reposition each bones pivot point – as this is actually the important part. All the rotation animation will happen relative to these points (you could for example position the bone box object 10,000 units outside and away from your creature model, but have the pivot point in the right position, and animations would work just fine, you could, but don’t, I am just saying…).

-To reposition pivot points, again head over to “Hierarchy panel”:


-But this time toggle “Affect Pivot Only” and as before while this “Hierarchy panel” remains open with “Affect Pivot Only” toggled, you may move bone pivot points:


-Pivot point appears once you select a bone, pivot point looks like this thicker axis gizmo. By using “Select and Move” tool, the bone will remain in place, while its pivot point moves:


-Basically, a pivot point is the place around which the skin that is attached to the specific bone will rotate and warp, and most of the animation for IC creatures is done using rotation.

-As before to get a better Idea of where to put your pivot points look at the original wolf model.

-Main idea, with these pivot placements is - you want to avoid the model from clipping into itself once its animated. I know I’m kind of skipping ahead by starting to talk about animation, but pivot/bone placement goes hand in hand with animation, so you might even need to do some adjustments to your bones and pivots during the animation step.

-For creature’s shins I have found that by putting your pivots around where the knee or ankle points are you can get reasonable effects, for example for the middle shin I normally would place my pivot point around the knee, and for my lower shin I would place it around the ankle, now this is also why I recommended adding extra segments for joint spots, it will act as a buffer zone between the two shins and model wont clip into itself as much:


-With the pivot points set, now we can return the bones we deleted on the other side of the creature, and this is simply done by using tools we added to the gmax at the very beginning. First select all of the bones you want to copy to the other side – the ones with either “l” or “r” identifier, and then click “Utilities panel” (next to “Modify” and “Create” panels):


-Now with all the bones we want to copy to the other side selected click button - “BoneCopy”. Tick in the “Include Subtree” and click “Create Copy” button:


-And bones for the other side should appear, also they have their identifier automatically flipped to either “l” or “r”:


-That’s it, we now have a full skeleton for our creature, now let’s move on to “Skinning” - adding our model’s surface to the bones.
 

-First select your creature’s model and head over to “Modify panel”:


-From the “Modifier list” find and add “Boner” modifier to your modifier stack, it should be at the very bottom, now the bulk of our work will be done inside this modifier (this is also one of the tools we added to the gmax at the beginning). Select the “Boner” modifier in your “Modifier stack” to make it active:


-First, we need to assign all of our bones to our creature, in the “Boner parameters” rollout click button “Assign”:


-A dialog window with all the bones present in our current project should appear:


-Now select them all by simply clicking the “All” button, and then click “Assign” button:


-The window should close, and now your bones are assigned to the creature object.

-For the next task I recommend turning the model’s level of detail down to LOD-1, as it might be easier to understand what’s going on. It can be done while you work in the “Boner” modifier, look over to Command panel and put “Steps” value to 0 (LOD-1):


-Now we need to set up - what part of the skin needs to move and warp with which bone. To do that we will be working between the two “Boner” modifier’s Sub-modes called “Vertex” and “Bone”, to use them you can either expand the “Boner” modifier by clicking the “+” next to it in the “Modifier stack”, or switch between them in the lower “Command panel” by clicking the corresponding buttons:


-We attach the skin to bones, by assigning individual vertices to specific bones. I will demonstrate the process, by attaching these tail point vertices to the end most bone in the tail:


-First have “Bone” Sub-mode toggled and select your bone, it should light up bright yellow (you can only select a single bone at a time, since a single vertex can’t be attached to multiple bones):



-Now move over to “Vertex” Sub-mode (the bone will remain selected and highlighted):


-All your model’s vertices should appear colored Orange – this means a vertex has not yet been assigned to a bone yet. Once it’s assigned, it will take on the target bones color (also a good idea is NOT to have your bones be colored this shade of orange, or bones that are next to each other to be the same color – remember?):


-Now select all the vertices you want to add to the bone, you just selected in the “Bone” Sub-mode. Selected vertices will turn yellow:


-And click the “Assign Vertices to Bone” button over at the command panel:


-Now if you unselect the vertices, you will notice that they have taken up the blue color of the bone, that means they have been assigned to the bone:


-Now you need to have every single vertex of your creature assigned, otherwise your model wont export. As before have wolf model open on the side, to have a general idea of what vertices should be added to which bone. And remember when assigning leg vertices not to do it in the side view as you might accidentally assign both legs to one leg’s bone.

-As you can see there are two extra buttons you can use. Button “Remove Vertices from bone” as you might have guessed removes all vertices from currently selected bone and have them become “unassigned”:


-Button “Select bone Vertices”, as you might have guessed again, allows you to quickly have all the vertices associated with the selected bone to be selected, this is very useful if you have to make some changes:


-Now repeat the process of going over to “Bone” Sub-mode, selecting a bone, switching over to “Vertex” Sub-mode and assigning vertices to the selected bone using “Assign Vertices to Bone”. Do this until all the vertices have been assigned to their corresponding bones, here is my end result (colorful):


-One final thing IC documents suggest is selecting all your bones and making “animation key frames” on frame “0” and “10”. First select your creatures bones (of course if you are using wolf bones this might already be done):


-Have the time slider at frame “0” (I will talk about this tool more later on during Animation):


-Right-click your time slider, so a dialog window appears, and click “OK”:


-A blue rectangle should appear:


-Now move your time slider over to frame “10”, and do the same thing:


-And we are done modeling our creature.

-Now as the next step I suggest Animation, since you are about to see how your creature moves, you might decide you need to make some adjustments to your model, that means again deleting half your model, fixing up one half of your creature and mirroring it again. If you perform that action all of your other work (limbs, connections, and texturing) may go to waste, so first make sure you are happy with the way the model looks and moves.

-For a list of possible animations you can check out IC Documentation files found in:
“\Impossible Creatures\Documents”

-The document by the name “IC_Boner_Documentation”.

-You can also later on poke around other creatures “.ebp” files, to check out what additional animations they possess and are possible, that are not mentioned in the IC documents.

-But generally, for a melee, 4-legged ground creature - like what I am making, bare minimum what you will need animation wise is:
-Idle1;
-Melee1;
-MeleeLow1 (Can be a copy of Melee1, just renamed, but must exist);
-OAttack;
-Walk (Can be a copy of Run, just renamed, but must exist);
-Run;
-Stumblegetup;
-StumbleDie.

-From this list all these animations are looping, except for “StumbleDie”, looping means that your animation’s first and last frame pose needs to be the same for it to smoothly transition.

-First navigate to your creatures Animations folder and delete the wolf ones, as our creatures body plan is too different and they will simply mangle our model, we need to create our own (of course if you simply adjusted the wolfs model and made something dog-like, you might just reuse the wolfs animations).

-Animations are made as separate “.gmax” files by simply saving your main “ref.gmax” file as the new animation under its name, for example “walk.gmax” (I will continue using walk animation as an example):


-Make sure you don’t start animating your main “ref.gmax” file by accident as the creature in there should remain in its neutral position and act as your main “source” file.

-To begin animating your creature first go to “Create panel” and freeze the creature object, since we will be rotating our objects in the “Create panel” we don’t want to select and move our creature object by accident (only bones):



-First let’s set up our animation’s length, this does not set our creatures animation speed in game, so you can set it as long or as short as you wish, (speed will be set later on in game files). Click this icon called “Time configuration” in the bottom right corner:



-A dialog window should appear. We set up our animations length by changing the value named “Length” and clicking “ok”. Pick the value of this number based on how many frames you think you will need to squeeze in its animation and make it look good, this of course you can only tell by experience, but since just like me you probably still don’t have it, just pick the same Length as wolfs animation length – manageable 26 frames:


-During the animation process we will use a tool called “Track bar”, found along the bottom of the program’s layout, as you can see it already displays our 26 frames, we set up just now:


-We will move from one frame to another using this slider called “Time slider”:


-First Select all your bones, you will notice two blue rectangles (the ones we added at the end step of our modeling)– these are called “Key frames”:


- These key frames are remains of our “ref.gmax” file requirements, we don’t need these particular ones in our animation file as we will make new ones so let’s delete them. Once a key frame is selected it will turn green, you can select it by simply clicking on it or drag select multiple keyframes over the “Track bar”, click “Delete” key on your keyboard:



-Now to begin animating make sure you toggle this button called “Toggle Animation Mode” to activate the “Animation mode”:


-Your trackbar and the currently active viewport should be highlighted with dark red color:


-Sometimes it’s easy to forget this, and mess up your bone positions while not in this mode, so try to pay attention.

-As is tradition, we will do our work only on one side of the creature’s bones and copy animations to the other, so for now let’s hide bones on its left side:


-Now we can begin animating - for walk animation we will need an animation that is Looping, which for a standard 4-legged creature means that at frame “0” and at frame “26” our bones have to be at the exact same pose, and for frame “13” (our mid-animation frame) it should be a “mirrored pose” of either frame “0” or “26”

-Set your “Time slider” at frame “0” (the current frame will be highlighted yellow):


-For walk Animation I suggest to use only “Select and Rotate” tool to pose our creatures bones by rotating them around their pivot points that we positioned earlier. Basically, we will be rotating bones and moving the vertices we attached to them and the bones that are children of the current bone we are working with, according to the bone hierarchy:


-Generally, for animation only use either “Select and Rotate” tool or “Select and Move” tool, that’s it. For creatures "Select and Move tool" is used to only move its "pelvis" bone - this moves the creature as a whole in the 3D space, for the rest of its bones only "Select and Rotate" is used":


-To create a keyframe for a bone, first select a bone and rotate it by a certain amount (for legs its mostly a good idea to rotate them only along X PLANE):


-Now with the bone still selected, right click your “Time slider”, a dialogue window should appear. This allows us to create a key frame on either the current frame we are right now, with the current rotation we just made, or copy current bones rotation from another frame. With this you can also create key frames out of the interpolated key frames that you didn’t originally make yourself – this can be useful at times. For now, leave it at “0” and “0” and click “OK”:


-A blue “key frame” rectangle should appear on your “Track bar”, you have just made your “first key” frame, for ONE of your bones, now you need to pose the rest of them:


-As before look to the wolf for guidance what a walk should look like, for legs start animating the bones from top to bottom along its “bone hierarchy”. Also, for walk the first key frame should be your creature stretching out its frontal right leg – because all original 4-legged IC creatures start their walk cycle this way, this will appear more natural once they are combined. Also, you don’t have to create a key frame for each frame, as the frames in between your key frames will be interpolated by the gmax itself.

-As I previously wrote - legs probably should be animated only swinging along X PLANE:

-But for walk you should also add some pelvis rotation that will add more natural movement to your creature’s hips. However, remember that the bones higher in the Hierarchy will affect the bones that are children of said bone, so if you give some rotation to pelvis the rest of the bones under it will also gain extra rotation.

-So, in order to isolate pelvis movement, form the rest of the bones under it, head over to “Hierarchy panel” here you can toggle “Don’t affect Children” button to stop it from messing up rotation of the rest of your creature’s bones, while “Hierarchy panel” is open, you can rotate a bone without it affecting its children:


-However, remember to turn this off once you are done with pelvis and continue to work with other bones.

-Pelvis rotated without toggle (whoopsie!) and Pelvis rotated with toggle (aww yeah!):


-As you can see what really matters is bones pivot point placement, and its relation to other bones pivot points, by rotating my ankle bone, it “pierces” the skin but it doesn’t matter, as these bone objects won’t be visible on the final result anyway. Vertices associated with the bone - move relative to the pivot point:


-But if I had my pivot point placement higher up it would rotate the ankles vertices in a much different way:


-So, at this point you might need to backtrack, and reposition your pivots in the “ref.gmax” file and once again save it as a new “Walk.gmax” animation file again, once you conclude if some parts of your creatures body rotate and warp the skin in undesirable ways.

-Once you have made your first key frame, new key frames should start to generate themselves once you perform a rotation on a bone, so you should have no need to right click your “Time slider” every single time.

-You can make a separate keyframe for each individual bone, so not all of your bones will be on the same key frame.

-This is the pose I ended up with - for the “0” key frame ( don’t worry about the other side for now):


-Remember – the children bones will inherit the rotations of its parent bone, so don’t be surprised when you first made rotation inputs for a children bone, then for its parent bone, and suddenly child bones rotation value increased by the amount its parent bone was rotated.

-Now if you are happy with the result on your “0” key frame, slide your “Time slider” over to frame “26” and with all your bones selected right click your “Time slider” to copy your bone rotations from key frame “0”, by typing “Source Time” as “0” and our “Destination Time” as “26” and click “OK”:






-Now we have the same starting and ending position to ensure a smooth looping.

-Now it’s time to work on the frames in between, I suggest sliding your “Time slider” over to frame 13 and setting up this position first, work on this one imagining that the other side (that we are ignoring for now) will look just the same as your current halves “0” or “26” pose only mirrored:


-Also, while on the “13” frame don’t forget about your pelvis and other center bones (spine/ tail/ head), if it was rotated “backward” for your right leg on frame zero, now it needs to do this the opposite way, you DO need to adjust this yourself manually instead of using the “Time sliders” copy function. To DO this precisely use the “Coordinates display” and make the value positive by removing the “-” sign in front of the appropriate value to “mirror” your pelvis rotation (Don’t forget about “Hierarchy tab” so you don’t mess up the children bone rotations):






- “Coordinates display” will become your best friend during animation process, in order to create symmetrical nice-looking animations.

-Also, worth mentioning - only “horizontal” (side to side) values should be inverted, vertical (up and down) movement values should be kept the same for key frame “13” as they are on key frame “0” for your center bones (spine/ tail/ head).

-For the “13” keyframe I ended up with something like this:


-As I said before make this key frame trying to imagine the other side being in this mirrored key frame “0” position:

-Now we need to work on the frames in-between, while interpolation will move your legs in-between your key frames “0” “13” and “26”, you will notice they appear somewhat janky and are “clipping trough” our assumed ground level.

-Try to think of how the limb at frame “0” would end up at frame “13”, and inspect your animation frame by frame until you are happy with your animation.

-When you have worked on your animation for a while on one side, you can copy animations to the other side with a slight offset, to see how your moder looks when its moving as a whole.

-To do this - return hidden bones to vision from your creatures other side (right-click -> unhide all), then select all the bones on the side you just animated and click “Utilities panel”:


-Find a button called “BoneMirror” and click it. With this tool you can mirror your creature’s animation cycle from one side to the other with an “Offset” by “13” frames (half our animation length), by clicking button “Copy Keys” (Also have “Include Subtree” ticked this is probably unnecessary since we selected all our bones from shoulder to toe, but it’s better to be safe):


-This tool is meant for bones with either “l” or “r” marker in their names. You can also choose your offset to be “0” if for example you are making a running animation for a creature that would lift both of its front legs up simultaneously while on the run, or like kangaroo, that jumps on both of its back legs simultaneously.

-Unfortunately by offsetting your mirrored frames, by any amount, to the other side, animation for some reason does not copy perfectly (for example feet might slightly hover above ground level when they should slide along its surface instead), so you will need to slightly fix bone movement in the mirrored frames manually as well. If you copy the key frames with no offset however (by making the "Offset" as 0) the animations should play symmetrically, as long as they aren't affected by bones higher in the hierarchy, like pelvis for example.

-Interestingly tough the frames we just made using “BoneMirror” for the other side are “pushed out” of our animations 26 frame Length, as far as I can tell this is by design. They will function within your 26 frame animation limit, even while not visible on your “Track bar”.

-You can see these offset frames, by increasing your Animation Length by pressing “Time configuration” button:


-I increased my animations length to “50” and by selecting my creature’s bones on the other side I can see that their cycle begins at our chosen offset “13” and goes beyond our 26 frames:


-It’s useful to know where to find these offset key frames for 2 reasons:
-First if you make some new adjustments to your creature’s original half and then want to once again copy the improved animation to the other side, you need to delete the old copied key frames (especially if you improved your animation by deleting frames), otherwise your animation might end up looking messed up, since “BoneMirror” does not delete key frames for the other side, it just adds them.
-Second if you need to do some slight adjustments since it does not copy perfectly over to the other side, you need to pull the frames into your current animations frame limit. and adjust them there.

-To properly do this first you must select all the bones from the mirrored side:


-Then in your track bar COPY (by holding down shift and dragging with your mouse) the final key frame of your animations intended length to frame 0:




-Then MOVE the rest of the key frames that are outside your animations intended length relatively to the 0 key frame as they were to the final key frame (in walk animations case the 26 frame):


-Now you can return animations length to its original number, and tweak the mirrored key frames.

-As I wrote previously in the process of animation you might find out that your model deforms in undesirable ways while moving it, like for example when I was working on my creature, I spotted ugly clipping at the connection to its frontal leg when bent back, and some “spikes” at back of its feet:


-Now in that case If you decide to make adjustments to your model’s vertex assignments, bones pivot point placement, or even to return to only one half of you creature to make major adjustments in its appearance - do it in your main “ref.gmax” file. But to make use of the animation work you have done so far there is a way to export your animations and reuse them.

-While still in the original animation file with the glitchy model “Unfreeze” your creature’s model and select it to access the “Modify panel”:


-Then click the Boner modifiers “Bone” Sub-mode:


-And look to the rollout on the bottom of the command panel called “Bone Options”:


-This panel allows us to export either Bone rotations or All animation as a “.BRF” file and then import it in our fixed model.
-Use “Export Bone Rotations” if you used only “Select and Rotate” tool to make your animation. Use “Export All Animation” if you used both “Select and Rotate” tool and “Select and Move” tool to make your animation.

-In a way you can also use this to filter out all undesired animation made with “Select and Move” tool. You can also see how you can use this tool to make animation for one creature and later on reuse its animations for another creature with the same bone names and similar body structure - think tiger and house cat for example.

-To export your animation, click “Export Bone Rotations” button and you are presented with a dialog window, you can click “All” to select all of the bones and click “Export”, or you can pick bones manually to filter out animation you might not wish to bring over to the new file:


-Save it where you will find it later:


-When you are finished with improving your model, and ready to return to animating, again save your fixed “ref.gmax” file as a separate “Walk.gmax” file meant for animation, in your creatures animation folder. In your new walk animation file do all the steps as before - delete key frames ”0” and “10”, set up your animations length and navigate to “Modify panel” while your creature model is selected:


-Then click the Boner modifiers “Bone” Sub-mode:


-And look to the panel on the bottom of the command bar called “Bone Options” once again, this time however click either “Import Bone Rotations” or “Import All Animation” and find your saved “BRF.” File and you should have your animations back:

-Next I will try to give some additional tips about how to make certain animations.

-For idle animation you don’t need to do anything crazy, just move your creature’s tail (if it has one) and its head as if its breathing. But remember this animation also is Looping, so the first frame and the last frame need to be the exact same pose.

-You can get a nice wavey motion for the tail either side to side or up and down with just a few frames.

-On FIRST and LAST key frame have it slightly bent in half circle, as if the segment closest to creature’s body is about to move the other way, but tail’s tip is still catching up and still moving downwards:



-On the CENTER key frame have it bent in half circle the other way (for symmetrical side to side movement have the numbers be exactly the same as on first key frame, only with negative value):



-On the key frames in-between have it extended straight one way or the other:




-And that’s it, the tail should look smooth and natural.

-For animations such as “Melee1”, “Stumblegetup” and “StumbleDie” you will not only need to use “Select and Rotate” tool, but also “Select and Move” tool. However, use the “Select and move” tool only on all your creature’s bones as one – essentially, move it by only pelvis, its most top bone in its hierarchy.

-In fact, I suggest you move the pelvis bone first, only then adjust the rest of the bones accordingly to its movements through space. I find it that if I move my pelvis bone after I have adjusted some of my leg bones, they do some whacky stuff on interpolated frames.

-I find that for ”Melee1” animation - on “impact” key frame (around the center of your animation), pelvis bone should be located around where creature’s torso center used to be:



-If you like the current interpolated frame pose creature is in, you can right click your slider and copy all bone rotations for that frame and make it into a key frame, so it doesn’t get disrupted by changes you do in other surrounding frames.

-In the attack animation have the creatures body curl up, and on impact stretch out to strike. To make animation appear sharper and faster move frames of one state closer to another.

-For “StumbleDie” and ”Stumblegetup” I animate the “StumbleDie” first, by keeping in mind that I will use the first few frames for my “Stumblegetup” animation. Animate your creature being knocked back, let’s say up until frame 10, then copy your animation file, make it shorter, and make “Stumblegetup” out of it.

-When your creature dies in “StumbleDie” animation, have it fall to its right side, just like all other original IC creatures die, by falling to the right. This will ensure better blending between animations.

-While do try to avoid limb clipping as much as possible, even IC developers themselves couldn’t get it perfect so don’t dread it as long the motion itself looks natural:


-Here are the final contents of my animation folder:


-Once you are done with all your essential animation files, we return to our main “ref.gmax” file to continue our work on setting up Limbs and Connections.
 

-Now when we are happy with the way our model looks, and our animations, we can set up the actual limbs that will be interchangeable in-game. Open your main ”ref.gmax” file and with your creature object selected open the “Modify panel”:


-Now we are going to use “Boner” modifier’s “Limb” Sub-mode. Click on it either in your “Modifier stack” or in the command panel:


-We will be working within a rollout called “Limb Options”. As you can see in the list, it has already automatically generated a list of limbs for our creature, this is the list you always will be presented with.

-For my creature there is one unnecessary limb (TopFin) and two are missing (LFArm and RFArm):


-Here is the complete list of limbs the game will recognize:

-List also includes bone names that must be in your creature’s skeleton, as these are the same across all IC creatures, and will act as connection points when limbs are swapped. As you can see even archer fish has leg bones:


-Also “Flags Checked” column shows us what we should tick in “Classification” section when making a new limb for our creature.

-First let’s delete the unnecessary limb “TopFin”, simply select it form the list, and click “Delete” button, a dialog window will appear, click “yes”, and it’s gone:


-Now let’s add the two of my missing limbs, click “Create”:


-It will ask you for the new limb’s name. You can also see the Limb naming structure in the table above, for me the first limb will be “Lufengosaurus_RFArm” - then click “OK”, it will be added to the list:


-Next in order to edit your new limbs classification, first you need to toggle “Edit” button:


-Again, refer to the table above, to find out what your new limb needs ticked, here is what I ticked in:


-And that’s it, the new limb is added to the list.

-Add any other limbs your creature might be missing, I just needed to add “Lufengosaurus_LFArm” and I can continue.

-For this next step I suggest turning edged faces OFF if you had them on, for your main “User” “Smooth + Highlights” viewport:




-What we are going to do next is designate specific “Patches” and “bones” as one of the limbs from our limb list that we just set up.

-I like to start with the “Patches” selection and then follow up with “Bones”.

-Before you begin a few tips:
-In order to make our work easier we can use these buttons in the “Visibility” section, if you click on them you can cycle through 3 states for Patches (Mesh) and Bones - visible, transparent, invisible:


-So first make your bones invisible by clicking on the “Bones” button two times:


-Also, sometimes in this “Limb” Sub-mode you may accidentally unselect your creature’s model and it will become invisible and unelectable (even in other viewports). To once again select your creature, click on a tool in the top toolbar called “Select by Name”:


-And in the window that pops up you should be able to select your creature from the list and click “select” to return it to vision and select it:

Ok let’s get to it, as before have “Edit” button toggled, first pick a limb form the list you want to start with, I usually start with torso:


-Then simply select all the patches that will belong to the torso part of your creature, either by drag selecting or clicking on each patch. Selected patches will light up red, you don’t even need to keep down any additional buttons while selecting. In case you selected patches you didn’t mean to select hold down “Alt” key on your keyboard and unselect the mistaken patches, a “-” symbol will appear next to your cursor. Rotate your view around the creature to inspect if you selected all the right patches:


-Next we can simply go to the next limb down the list – the head:


-You will notice that when you select the next limb from the list, the one you already designated will disappear from the view – as it should, as it also makes things easier:


-Keep going until you have designated your creature’s whole body:

-Tail:


-Left Front leg:


-Right Front leg:


-Left Rear leg:


-Right rear leg:


-Now by the time you are done, all of the creature will be “gone”, as you will notice we didn’t do anything with these last 6 limbs so far. Since our creature does not possess any modelled wings or arms on its model, these limbs will only be designated in its bones to ensure the connections work, which we will do next:


-Now let’s start from the top again - from the list select your creatures torso:


-And return the bones back to vision, but this time hide the patches (mesh), for more convenient selection, using “Bones” and “Mesh” buttons in the visibility section:



-And just like with the patches, with “Edit” button toggled select bones meant for the current limb on the list, you can also refer to the table to see which bones are pretty much mandatory to be included:


-Head:


-Tail:


-Left front leg:


-Right front leg:


-Left rear leg:


-Right rear leg:


-Now we are left with wing and arm bones:
-Left side wing


-Right side wing:


-Left top wing:


-Right top wing:


-Right frontal arm:


-Left frontal arm:


-And so, we are done with designating our bones and patches to the appropriate limbs.

-We can return both bones and patches to the full vision now:

-The next thing we need to address are the connections between limbs. Both Head and tail connections must be 6 vertices large. And all other connections must be 4 vertices large. All creatures across IC have been made this way.

-While still in the “Modify panel” switch over to “Connection” Sub-mode in the “Boner” modifier:



-This time we will be working within rollout called “Connection Options”. Just like before we have the auto generated list, with all the same unnecessary and missing limbs as we did in the “Limb” Sub-mode (In my case, unnecessary - TopFin, missing- LFArm and RFArm):


-Just like before you can delete the unnecessary limbs from the list by pressing “Delete” button, you will be presented with a dialog window – click “Yes”:


-Next let’s add the missing limbs to our connection list, click the “Create” button, and name your missing limb just the same as you did in the “Limb” Sub-mode or simply refer to the table, click – “OK”:


-And just like before we need to set up our new limb’s classification, first toggle “Edit” button:


-Then look to the section below called ‘’Classification”, first make sure “Parent” is ticked in and tick in “Torso”:


-After that tick in “Child” and tick in all appropriate boxes for your limb, here is what I needed (refer to the table):


-Torso is always going to be “parent” of all limbs. You will notice that it recognized Limbs we set up earlier and filled in automatically the “Parent Limb” and “Child Limb” fields in the bottom, once we finished ticking in our boxes.

-Now with our list set up we need to designate these connections on the creature’s model itself. For each limb we will need to set up the connection hole on the creature, and then pick parent bone for the said limb. You can perform both of these actions at the same time, or first select the “Anchor Vertices” and later go through the list again and “Choose Parent Bone”, when performing one action or the other have the corresponding button toggled:


-Let’s begin with head, select it from the list, and toggle “Choose Anchor Verts” button:


-Vertices, colored black, will appear on the creature’s torso:


-Zoom in on the hole where your creatures head will connect, then while holding down “Ctrl” on your keyboard, select the vertices that make up the hole, starting from the top left-most vertex, and select them clockwise, until you go “full cicrcle” (the starting one is colored green):


-If you select a vertex by accident, simply click in the empty space in viewport - to deselect them all, to once again attempt the connections selection process from the start.

-That’s it, the “Anchor Verts” are set up for the head, now you can move on to the next limb from the list and the connection hole on the model, or you can choose the head’s ”parent bone” before you move on to the next limb, to do this, toggle “Choose Parent Bone” button:


-And click the bone closest to the head (it should be called neck1):


-That’s it both - your head’s connection vertices and parent bone are set, now perform the same action on the rest of the connection holes for the rest of the limbs from the list.

-Tail:


-Left frontal leg:


-Right frontal leg:


-Left rear leg


-Right rear leg:


-Wings and arms however connect to the patches instead of the holes for creatures that do not have them originally modelled:

-Left side wing:


-Right side wing:


-Left top wing:


-Right top wing:


-Right arm:


-Left arm:


That’s it - your creatures Limbs and Connections should be set. Now we can move on to texturing.

-Once you are happy with your creature model’s appearance it’s time to start the texturing process. From this point on it is a good idea to make sure you don’t want to add any new geometry to the model (extruding new segments and such). Since most times that will render your texturing work obsolete.

- I have found out how to use the "Boner" modifiers “Topology” sub-mode to speed up the texturing process and use the texturing work you have done even if you do decide to add new geometry, in certain cases, but I recommend you attempt this method only when you finish this tutorial and texture your creature the usual way at least once:
https://cs2bus.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3353171920

-If you do need to slightly adjust your model, you can work with the existing number of vertices by moving them around, as long as you don’t add anything new, in that case you won’t lose your texturing work in the process.

-First click button called “gmax Material Navigator” in the main toolbar:


-Once open, you should see that the wolf textures are still around. There is something called “Wolf (Multi-Material) []”, a “Multi-Material” is a collection of multiple textures in one package which can be applied to a single object:


-Pay attention to the way all the materials under the “Multi-Material” are named, creatures name, followed by body part name. And also pay attention to ID’s - the number in the brackets next to it. You should follow the same naming and ID assigning convention, for example tail’s ID should always be kept as “3”.

-You need to have all the ID’s in order, even if you don’t use them - just keep them blank. For example, even if your creature model is some sort of a fish, with no legs, still keep the ID’s for its legs, just empty and unused. Since my creature has no ears, you will see that as an example.

-For now, we can close it, we will return to this window a bit later. First, we will assign material ID’s to our creature object’s patches, I simply wanted for you to see where the ID numbers come from.

-As before if you have creature’s bones still visible - first hide them (with your model selected -> right-click -> hide unselected):


-Now click on your creatures “Editable Patch” modifier in your “Modifier stack”, and have “Patch” Sub-object selection method active:


-Now in the command panel scroll down until you find section called “Material”, we will use this to assign ID’s to our creatures body parts:


-It’s possible that all of the creatures body already has an ID of “1” so I will jump over to “2” and show you how to assign it.

-First select the body part’s patches you wish to assign. We want our creatures head to be on “2”, so we first select it, and then in the “Material section” type “2”:


-That’s it, the body parts ID has been set, no need to press anything to confirm, now you can do the same for the rest of the model.

-Limbs that are a pair, such as front legs for example, both left and right should be assigned under the same ID:


-To be able to assign your mouth ID to “9”, or other areas that might not be visible normally, use “Hide (Patch)” command available upon right-click:


-You can also use Hide (Patch) to have an easier time assigning your feet ID’s:


-To check if you have all the body parts assigned correctly you can use “Select by ID” button, first click it:


-You will be prompted to write an ID number, then click “OK”, and you should have all the patches with the associated ID selected, go through them one by one, if you wish to make sure you have done it correctly:


-Now a small break from gmax, and let’s open our creature’s texture folder called “Model”:


-We still should have our wolf textures in the folder. Since our textures are going to be the same size dimensions wise, I like to slightly modify the existing textures in this folder and use them as prototype/first draft textures:


-First of all, I won’t need an ear texture, so will delete “awolf08.bmp”

-Then I like to rename them according to my creature’s name for example “lufengosaurus01.bmp”

-Then I like to slightly edit them by drawing an arrow, that is generally pointing towards its front and some sort of a symbol, that I can identify once it’s not in its correct orientation, like “P” (“A” or “T” would be bad choices since mirrored they look the same). Use whatever image editing program you have available, once you save it, it might become “uglier” don’t worry about it as these are not the final product anyway:


-These symbols will help us to better understand how to orient our textures in the right way, this is how my texture folder looks at this point:


-Remember for head, tail and torso - the bottom of the texture is its front and the top is its back, this is important not to mix up for blending purposes once creatures are combined.

-Now with our draft textures ready, lets return to gmax and set up our creatures “Multi-Material”.

-With your creature object SELECTED - Open “gmax Material Navigator” again:


-Now you can either delete the wolfs “Multi-material” and create new one from scratch, or simply rename it, open it by double-clicking:


-Write your creatures name, and click “Apply”:


-You will probably notice your creatures color changed once you clicked “Apply”:


-Alternately you can have your creature object selected and your multi-material selected in the “Material Navigator” and click this icon to apply the selected multi-material to your creature object:


-Also, you will notice that the old wolf’s “Multi-Material” is still left in our “gmax Material Navigator” lower in the list, open it by double-click and click “Delete” as we will no longer need it:

-Now while still in your “gmax Material Navigator” rename the “Standard” material body part names to your creature’s name, double-click your “Standard” material to open it:


-And rename it here, no need to click any buttons to confirm, just move on to the next “Standard” material to rename:


-If there is a body part that you do not need a texture for, as I mentioned before - keep it and its ID around anyway, you can simply rename it to “Null” like this (I renamed the ears):


-Now let’s load in our draft textures, let’s start with creature’s body/torso, double-click its Standard texture material:


-Then in the materials window that pops up open up the “Maps” roll-out by clicking “+”:


-And click this “Map” (Texture Map) from the list:


-Alternatively, you can open the same “Texture Map” straight from the “gmax Material Navigator” window:


-Under the rollout “Bitmap Parameters” click this button that displays a link to an image file:


-Navigate to your creature’s texture folder and load in the appropriate texture by clicking “Open”:


-Now again go down the list of your “Standard” materials and load the appropriate “Texture Maps” for the rest of your creature’s limbs.

-Both front foot and back foot can refer and use the same texture file, in fact every body part can refer to the same texture if you wish.

-For the ID’s that will remain empty we can delete its “Texture Map” so we aren’t greeted with this window every time we open our model in gmax:


-Open the “Standard material” whose “Texture Map” we want to remove:


-Then click “Reset”:


-You will be presented with this dialog window, have “Affect mtl/map in both the scene and in the editor slot?” ticked in, and then click “OK”, the “Texture Map” should be removed:


-Here is my end result:


-Now that our “Multi-Material” is all set up, we can begin the “Unwrapping” process, you can close the “gmax Material Navigator” window.

-Before you begin the unwrapping process though you need to perform one action. Have your “Editable Patch” modifier active, and have your “Patch select” selection method toggled:


-Select your whole model, and right-click it. From this menu make sure that “Linear Mapping” option is ticked in/ enabled:


- This will prevent your unwrapping view from looking like this:


-And instead, it will make it look like this, and make your work that much easier (notice the missing vertex handles, we don’t want to see them):


-Ok with that set, lets begin. For the “Unwrapping” process we will add 3 modifiers to our “Modifier stack” for each of our creature’s body part ID, that means in my case I will be adding 3x8=24 new modifiers to my stack. Yes, quite a lot, but I feel like this way it’s easier to organize your texturing.

-I will demonstrate the process of adding these 3 modifiers for creature’s body/torso. Select your creature object and move to the “Modify panel”:


-Add the 1st modifier - “Patch Select” to your modifier stack from the list:


-Now with “Patch Select” modifier active select the “Patch” Sub-object selection method, and select all the patches that belong to the torso:


-You can use this section in the command panel “Select by Material ID” to select all that you need much quicker. We can use this since we already set up our body part ID’s beforehand, simply write in the ID number and click “Select”. Simply leave them selected in this modifier and move on:


-The goal with this modifier is to specify for our next two modifiers with which patches we want to work with:


-Add the 2nd modifier – “UVW Mapping” from the list. It should be on top of “Patch select” modifier in your stack (in the modifier list it’s called “UVW Map” for some reason…):


-At this point you might start seeing the actual texture on our creature’s model, or at least parts of it:


-With this modifier we will orient the way we want to project our texture on to the model once we start to lay and sort it on our model’s surface:

-With the “UVW Mapping” modifier active look at the command panel, have “Mapping” section ticked as “Planar”:


-Then change the alignment, for torso I go with “Z” plane (to look at it from the top), and click “Fit” it will calculate the boarders for us automatically:


-Now leave everything set up and move on to the last modifier.

-Add the 3rd modifier – “Unwrap UVW” from the list, on top of “UVW Mapping” in your “Modifier stack”:


-And now we are set up to correct and adjust the way our “Texture Map” will appear on our creature object’s surface. The last thing I like to do is rename these modifiers to include the corresponding body parts name, in order to keep it organized, since we will have 24 of these things. Right-click it, and rename it like so:


-The first two modifiers can now be left alone, since the rest of the work will be done only in ”Unwrap UVW” modifier.

-Now to adjust the way our “Texture Map” appears on our creature’s surface, with the “Unwrap UVW” modifier active, in the command panel under “Parameters” rollout click “Edit” button:


-You will be presented with this window “Edit UVWs”:

-If at first your “Edit UVWs” window didn’t open on the “correct” texture map (meant for your torso), we can pick the correct texture map to be displayed in our background in the top of the window, there is a list. For me, my torso is designated as “Map #11”:


-You can check what “Texture Map” number is assigned to each texture by opening your “gmax Material navigator”, to avoid guesswork:


-Now what we want to achieve, is to place and organize the patches over the texture map, think of these patches as viewports though which the Map will be reflected upon creature’s model’s surface.

-To do that select all the vertices currently on display:


-And click “Break Selected Vertices” icon, this will split the torsos surface into individual patches:


-For some creatures limbs you might need to separate each patch individually and place it again in the correct position relative to other patches. For torso I have sort of a workflow I will demonstrate.

-Using the “Move” tool, so you can individually work on each patch and its vertices, you may use the gray zone to organize them if you need more room:


-For torso first split it down the middle, by moving each central vertex more to either left or right, by the end no edges should be crossing the center, but try not to move them too far from their original position:


-Make use of the zoom tools in the bottom right corner, if the vertex bundles become too much to handle from afar:


-Now select one of the halves, and move it up:


- So that both of the halves don’t occupy the same “Y” coordinates I just doodled in (use the zoom tools to see more of the “gray space”):


- Now you can deselect it and access this small dropdown menu at the top, by default it should be set at “UV”. To pick other options you need to press and hold it for a while:


-Pick “VW”, this way we get to look at our patches from another angle:


- You can use this view switching option to have an easier time with the patch placement and unraveling if you are dealing with complex shapes.

-Now as the end goal we want to have our patches neatly arranged in regularly shaped squares in the “UV” view. While we are in the “VW” view - for some patches we can weld the vertices back together. For that we first need to click “Unwrap Options” button to set some things up:


-Tick in “Constant Update In Viewports” and set the “Weld Threshold” to 10 (the bigger the number the better, 10 just happens to be the max) then click “OK”:


-The large “Weld Threshold” will allow us to easily weld back the vertices that might actually be pretty far from one another in a different projection than they might first appear.

- The “Constant Update In Viewports” will help you better understand how to position our patches, now by moving around the patches in the “Edit UVWs” window, you will see that they update live in your viewports, moving forward I suggest you keep them side by side, the 3D viewport will help you better understand how the patch is oriented in your “Edit UVWs” window:


-Now we can begin welding certain vertices together as if to create a blanket out of these patch segments. For example pick these 2 vertices and click this icon “Weld selected”:




-The vertices will become one, alternatively you can use shortcut key combination to avoid clicking this icon every time, to speed up the process - “Ctrl+W”. Repeat this for every vertex point where the patches meet (since we broke them all up, next time you can actually break up just the center vertices…). Even in this point there are actually 4 vertices simply occupying the same coordinates:



-If the background texture map make it harder to make out where the vertices are located you can turn it on and off in this workspace using this icon at the top “Show Map”:


-Now with the vertex welds restored we can organize the patch placement and shape, still while in the “VW” view select the bottom vertices of one of the halves:


-With the vertices selected switch back to the main view “UV”, as you can see the vertices you picked remain selected, at this “UV” top view/projection it would be much more harder to tell which ones are the bottom vertices and which ones are the at the top:


-Now using the “Move” tool move them to the side:



-Next return to the “VW” view and repeat the process for the next row of vertices:


-Then You can move these vertices around to make a somewhat cleaner looking grid for now:


-Repeat the same process for the other half (only this time pull the vertices to the other side - right side, since the bottom vertices must be located at the corners of the texture map):


-By the way, you can simply close the “Edit UVWs” window, and it will remember your changes. But you can also save the current patches layout in a separate file, by using “Save” button, and reload it, if necessary, by using “Load” button. You can use this if in the process of texturing you do decide to make additional adjustments to the creature’s model, and you need to split it in half. You can later reload the work you had already done for the texturing once you restore the model and both of its halves (remember – this will only work as long as you don’t add any new geometry).

-Button ”Reset UVWs” will return your patches to their original state – like what you first saw when you opened them, you probably never want to use this one, unless you somehow made it messier:

-In practice not all limbs are going to be this easy to unwrap, you might need to go patch by patch and get them in the right position relative to other patches. By selecting and moving a patch across your “Texture Map” you can see and identify it in your 3D viewport whether or not you have the correct one selected:


-The next few statements illustrate what you might need to do with other more complex limbs, where you need to separate patches one by one (our torso now should be at a pretty good spot so you don’t need to perform these next few actions).

-Sometimes might need to make sure your patch is facing the correct way, and also isn’t mirrored. You know how you can resize an image until it flips over and becomes mirrored? – this is pretty much the same principle with patches and the way they project the texture map on to the 3D model:


-This is also the reason why we put that arrow and the letter “P” on our textures, to easier tell if it’s facing the right way.

-Hower the patch over the arrow and the letter “P” of your texture map. In this example you can see the arrow points the other way, and also the letter “P” is not displaying correctly:



-To fix this - reorient your patches vertices in the “Edit UVWs” window until it flips around the right way (yes you don’t really need the arrow as long as you have the “P” symbol for example, but sometimes it’s easier on my brain to look at the arrow and the letter both to confirm I am not messing something up):


-You can make use of this mirror tool to quickly flip around a patch or multiple patches (again to access multiple options this tool provides simply press and hold the icon):


-If you later on realize you accidentally welded together the wrong vertices, you will once again need to use “Break selected vertices” button on your mistaken welds. Which means - you once again will need to weld the “vector handles” back into the vertex. So, before you begin big welds, use the “Save” button I mentioned earlier to back up your work, in case of a mistake you realize later on:


-Remember, for torso patches there will be patches “missing” for holes where your creature’s legs will attach, keep that in mind when laying out and welding your patches:


- Finally weld the two patch bundles down the middle as well:


-Now if you want the patches to be laid out symmetrically for your creature’s torso, you can use the coordinates display in the bottom of the “Edit UVWs” window:


-Coordinates for this space are in 1x1 long units, “U” are horizontal values, “V” are vertical values, “W” is a value for a third dimension which you can ignore, since as you remember the “UV” view is our main one , but don’t make it 0 universally for all vertices, it actually becomes useful when unwrapping as you already saw:


-You can move multiple selected vertices at the same time, by selecting them and typing in the coordinate in the coordinate display, or click on the "up" and "down" arrows next to the coordinate number to move them in small increments:




-Not sure if this is simply the way gmax depicts the textures, but I don’t put my vertices right on 0 or 1 coordinates, I put them close to the edges but with a small offset like 0,01 and 0,99. Because for some reason the texture won’t appear when vertex is dead on an edge.

-Maybe useful to know - precision of this coordinates space is 0.000.

-And so finally the torso patches are symmetrically organized over our texture map. Later on, we might need to do some adjustments once we begin texture painting, but for now it’s finished. We can move on to the next body part. Essentially the process is the same, add the 3 modifiers for each limb ID and unwrap them, I will just provide a few extra tips:


-For head and tail unlike the torso you don’t need to paint two “mirrored” sides for your texture, you can’t do this for torso however because of the texture blending that happens when it’s combined with other creature’s limbs).

-IC developers made head texture this way:


-But you can also paint only one half of the head (and tail) and overlay patches from both sides in “Edit UVWs” window, this actually makes the adjustment easier, since you don’t need to have perfectly mirrored coordinates for both your head parts - to keep them symmetrical:


-First, I like to organize one half of the patches over the Map:


-Then I select all the already laid out vertices and freeze them, by “Right-click -> Freeze”:


-And then one by one move the vertices of one part over the frozen ones, unfreeze them again by right-clicking, and weld them together it’s easy to mix this up so take your time with this process:


-As you can see if I adjust one half, I will adjust the other half at the same time:


-When laying out the patches try to keep patches proportions as close to the models as possible to avoid texture distortion and stretching. My creature’s model has abnormally long neck (it might have been smarter to make head and neck separate ID’s and therefore separate textures), and since I have included it in my creature’s head texture, the head itself is actually 1/4 of the texture:



-Another thing to keep in mind, you might experience texture stretching because of your models patches interior edges. You can observe this with your “Editable Patch” modifier being active, and having this option “Show Interior Edges” toggled:


-This option will display extra edges inside your patches. In the elongated parts the texture will appear more stretched, while in the shorter parts it will appear more compressed. Its not always a problem, but sometimes you might want to project a very specific feature that suffers from this distortion. This can be adjusted by shortening or elongating the patches vertex handles, try to make their size as even if possible among themselves if its important:

-For legs we can really make use of the 3rd dimension (W) in our “Edit UVWs” window coordinate layout.

-For legs my “UVW Mapping” settings are as follows (for my legs I “look” at them from the side, rather than top, like the torso):




-Now when you open ”Edit”, both legs are going to be overlayed over each other, so untangling the patches is going to take a lot of time + sorting which patch is for which leg:


-To somewhat make this task easier, like we already did with the torso, before you begin untangling, you can change the “view” by pressing this button in the top of the “Edit UVWs” window, and switch to “VW” view for a moment:


-You can see both legs being separate here from a different perspective - move one of them “higher” than the other:


-Now return to the “UV” view, and you will see them separated here as well, this should make sorting the patches easier:


-For spots like mouth, you can once again use ”hide patch” option on your model:


-Or, you can rotate the bone connected to the jaw, to open the mouth, but remember to return it to its original rotation once you are done:


-Ok this is the end result, for now it looks terrible, but the annoying unwrapping part is over, now we can paint the textures:


- There is one last thing to do which most of the times is optional (this might be more important if you wish to continue making more creatures and employ the “Faster UVW Unwrapping” method I mentioned at the beginning of texturing).

-Once you finished unwrapping the whole creature, your modifier list should look something like this:


-You can now actually “apply” the modifiers to the model, or you could also say you “bake” them into the model.

-Select the last unwrapping modifier right below the “Boner” modifier, right-click it and pick “Collapse To”:


-All of our texturing modifiers will disappear and get applied to the model:


- If you once again want to perform some actions concerning the unwrapping, at this point then perform the following actions.

-With the “Editable Patch” modifier being active, select the “Patch” selection method and select all of the creature:




-With the patches selected add only one “Unwrap UWV” modifer to the stack so it sits on top of the “Editable Patch” modifier:


-Now return to the “Editable Patch” modifier, and un-toggle the “Patch” selection method. This is important, don’t unselect the patches by clicking somewhere else, simply un-toggle the selection method, with patches selected (they appear unselected in your viewports, but any changes you do in the “Unwrap UVW” modifier will now respond):


-Now you can open the “Unwrap UVW” modifier and make any changes you wish, as you can see the model “remembered” the way we unwrapped our creature, and if you use the “Reset UVWs” button this time, the UVWs will be reset to this new state we baked into the model. Opening the modifier at first you will be presented with all of the limbs in one huge mess, but you can display specific ID’s using the menu located in the bottom of the window:


-Generally, these 3 modifiers are all that we will need until the end of our creatures creation process (this is the way the original source creatures modifier stack looks as well).

-To apply the new textures simply replace the old texture in the folder “Model” with the same name, you need to restart gmax, or reload the map trough “gmax Material Navigator” to see the changes.

-For textures I mostly keep the original sizes like 128x128, 256x256 and so on. But you can also pick different sizes like 256x128 for example, all that gmax requires is that your bitmap dimensions are a number that is "power of 2". Try to pick texture sizes for each limb so that on the final creature object the pixel density looks somewhat even between them. For example if your creature has small tail use smaller texture for it as well.

-I paint my textures in program called Krita, it’s a free Photoshop equivalent, still getting used to it but gets the job done:


-I like to first make up my creature’s skin base surface like feathers, scales or fur, in gray scale. And then add color in another layer. And then combining them by giving one of the layers some sort of a blending option.

-To get a general idea how my layout will look like once loaded in gmax, I also take a screenshot of a limbs patch layout form “Edit UVWs” window, with the Map’s visibility turned off, using button “Show Map”:



-Then resize the image to the textures size, for example torsos 256x256, and load it into your image editing program in a separate layer, so you have something to guide your painting process.

-You can find textures online and mash them together, or use what’s available in your IC folder. For this one I actually just mashed up walrus, crocodile and archerfish textures:


-Then in Krita I converted the whole image to grayscale, then back to RGB.
-To do this navigate:
Image -> Convert Image Color space.


-Remember to return it to RGB right after.

-Once you load in your new texture, it might not quite line up, that’s okay, you can now perform slight corrections in “Edit UVWs” window by moving the vertices around (also keep in mind that in gmax the texture will look slightly more pixley, than when you will finally export your model):



-Now you can also return to your image editing software and fix up additional spots. Go back and forth as much times as you need, until you are happy with the result, here is what I ended up with for its head:


-Funnily enough, I think the mouth texture is the same across almost all original IC creatures, so I am going to use the same texture as well, only adjust the white fang spots, since my creature has none:


-If painting textures by hand, you can also make use of “Horizontal Mirror tool” in Krita:


-Still figuring out the best way to paint textures, but here are final layers for my back texture:
-Grayscale skin base:


-Base colors (Overlay – blending, 70% opacity):


-Pattern details (Overlay – blending, 70% opacity):


-additional details painted by hand:


-In the end the gray starting skin bumps do become more lost due to my coloring, but as I said, still figuring this out…

-One trick you can use in creative ways is by making the texture transparent. For example, this is useful for teeth, fins or fur to make them appear more complex in their shape. To do this simply have the parts you want invisible be this pink color (you can use “Color sampler tool” to get exact match):


-Only I would suggest keeping the part as thin as possible, since you can slightly see “trough” the model once this is done, from the edges where the pink color was applied (since our models can’t have any dangling planes out of them, we need to use very thin boxes instead):


-Here are the final “Model” folder contents:


-One last thing you might need to do (especially important if you use the transparency trick) is to convert your every texture to 8 BPP color depth. The gmax will warn you if this is not done upon exporting. I like to do this in “IrfanView” since its very simple:


-Open the image and find:
“Image -> Decrease Color Depth…”

-And pick the “256 Colors (8BPP)” option, click “Ok” and save your image over the old one.


-And here is the final result in gmax, after tweaks to vertices in “Unwrap UVWs” window for Maps:


-If you wish to remvoe the texture material from your model, then first select your creature and click "Utilities panel" and click button "UVW Remove":



-Lower in the command panel a rollout called "Parameters" should appear, in it click button called "Materials" and the material should be removed, returning your model to its original base color:

-Ok let’s see - we have our Model and its:
-Bones;
-Limbs;
-Connections;
-Animations;
-Textures.

-it’s time to export our Creature.

-As far as I know your creature’s folder must be found in:
“\Impossible Creatures\DataSrc\IC\Art\EBPs\Stock”
Once you are ready to export, that’s why I simply work out from this folder from the beginning.

-Simply open your main “ref.gmax” file and open “Utilities panel”:


-And click “MAXScript” button:


-And in its rollout from the Utilities list select “Export model (relic)” (select it again even if it appears to already be selected from the list):


-And in the “Export model (relic)” rollout simply click “Export” button (in the list you can see “REF” and the names of all your animations it will export along with it):


-A dialog window will appear, click “yes”:


-Wait for a moment, and once it’s done your gmax might be open on an animation file of yours, that’s it exporting is done, you can close gmax.

-Your model will be exported to a folder as a “.sgm” file:
“\Impossible Creatures\Data\art\ebps\stock”

-Also, I have noticed that sometimes after I made additional updates, and exported my creature repeatedly, my model did not update, until I deleted files found here, before my export attempt:
“\Impossible Creatures\IntDataSrc\IC\Art\EBPs\Stock”

-Now, we need to use hex editor on our newly made “.sgm” file and edit a few lines, since gmax, does a “faulty” export, for this task I will use program called “XVI32”:


-Open it up and, this is what you should see:


-Now click “Search -> Find” (Alternatively click Ctrl+F on your keyboard):


-And set it up to find text string “.gmax”, click “OK”:


-As you can see these “.gmax” extensions are attached to your animations, found inside this “.sgm” file, we need to remove them:


-On the HEX code side, simply type in 10 zeroes ”00 00 00 00 00” until “.gmax” on the right side is gone:




-Now search for the “.gmax” text string repeatedly, by clicking “f3” on your keyboard, and repeat the process (I had 8 animations, so I had to do it 8 times), until you are informed there are no more such text strings, click “OK”:


-Save the file, and you can close your hex editor.

-Now let’s make an “.ebp” file from our edited “.sgm” file, open one of IC RND Tools programs called “ObjectEditor” found in:
“\Impossible Creatures\RDNTools”


-Once open click “File -> New EBP”, and find your creatures “.sgm” file:


-Once you find and open it an “.ebp” file for your creature will be created in the same folder:
“\Impossible Creatures\Data\art\ebps\stock”

-Also important - you can open and inspect creatures “.ebp” files only if it is placed in this particular game files folder, anywhere else the “ObjectEditor” will throw out an error message:
“\Impossible Creatures\Data\art\ebps\stock”

-It can be put in the game right now, but there are still some things we need to tweak before that. For now, close the “ObjectEditor”, we will have to return to it a bit later:

-By the end of our actions we want to have a collection of 5 files, that together will make up our creature, we already got the first two files, the “.ebp” and “.sgm” file, now let’s get the rest of the three:


-Wherever you put your creatures “.ebp” file, it should always be accompanied by its torso texture file, slightly renamed - “creaturesname_torso”.
-So put a copy in “\Impossible Creatures\Data\art\ebps\stock” and rename it accordingly, we got our third file “.bmp”:


-IC will use this torso texture as a reference for texture blending once your creature is combined with other creatures.

-Now for this next step you should extract the existing “Data” files from files such as “Engine.sga” using “ModPackager”, as shown in this tutorial:
https://cs2bus.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=735413158

-Because we want the “.ebp” files from other creatures to be available, if we want to inspect and adjust how they will combine with our new creature in game.

-Once you have extracted the existing game files, find and navigate to this folder from your extracted files. This is where all the original creature “.ebp” files should be located:
“\art\ebps\stock”

- Copy its contents to the same folder where your new creature’s files were exported:
“\Impossible Creatures\Data\art\ebps\stock”

-Now with all the creature “.ebp” files in the same folder we can use “ComboTest” program, one of the IC RDN Tools programs, located here:
“\Impossible Creatures\RDNTools”


-Once open you can pick any 2 creatures you added to the folder and combine their limbs and play their animations to see how the swapped limbs interact with each other:


-In the Options menu, you can also turn up the level of detail (the texture blending however is not visible in this program, you will only see it once in game):


-But what we actually want to use this tool for is limb scaling.

-In the bottom right corner, you can see this panel, with this you can control how large or how small the limbs will appear once your creature is combined with the other creature’s torso and vice versa:


-For example, I combined my Lufengosaurus with Sperm Whale, and the whales head appears slightly too big for my liking:


-So, I select “Head” Limb from the list and click “Edit Scale” button, a dialog window will appear prompting you to enter a multiplier, I went with “0.7”:


-Now it looks a bit more… uhh, natural, coming out of that torso. Your changes are Automatically saved in limb scaling files “.lsc” that accompany the creatures “.ebp” files. Also, one automatically will be made for your creature once you start adjusting limb scaling beyond the default “1.000” (so in theory you can do without this file if you think all the limbs look good at their original 1.000 scale).

-So, the idea would be to go through all the current creature list, and combine your new creature model with other existing ones. You should swap between both torsos and apply all the limbs from the other creature, and then do the same other way around and inspect the combination - if the limbs need to be adjusted for leg clipping or ugly looking connections at tail and neck:


-Once you do that, we got our fourth file “.lsc”, now it’s only one more left:


-The last file we need to add to our creature’s package is “.lua” file, this file will contain information about our creature’s stats, such as attack and health for example. I suggest in the process to peek inside the “.lua” files of other creatures as examples, if something is unclear.

-Important - you won’t be able to open a creature’s “.ebp” File if a “.lua” file is present in the same folder, not sure why its happens but “ObjectEditor” will crash upon opening. So if you want to edit the “.ebp” file just cut the “.lua” file and place it somewhere else for a while, and return it once you are done with “.ebp” file and “ObjectEditor”.

-To make a creature’s “.lua” file, I like to simply copy an existing creature’s file, and do slight editing to better fit my new creature. I want my creature to be around lvl 2-3, so I will copy a Giraffe’s “.lua” file and rename it:


-Now open the new “.lua” file using the humble but mighty “Notepad”.

-At first glance there its quite a bit of information, so I will try to break it down block by block, however I haven’t had much experience with balancing yet so expect a lot of “I don’t know” and “I think” to follow.

-The lines that start with “--” are comments – meaning they don’t affect the “code” of the file, however do change the creature’s name to yours just to be neat and tidy. The next 2 lines following the name, as far I know don’t do anything, so you don’t need to touch them at all:


-“endurance_bonus” – by entering a value in the second slot, like 0.35, you automatically give your creature “High endurance” ability, if you don’t want your creature to have “High endurance” leave it as a “0”. I think the number also determines how much more energy the creature will have for its special abilities.

-“size”- gives creature one of the 10 standard in game sizes, type in a number from 1-10 in the second value slot and leave the first “1” value as it is. I will leave my creature at size 4;

-“sight_radius1” – the first number should remain 4, and the second is its value. For my creature I want the vision value to be slightly worse than giraffes;

“night_sight_radius” – another leftover from the game development of IC. I guess they had planned day-night cycle at one point, this does nothing and we ignore it;

“stocktype” – determines how the combination buttons will look like for your creature in the army builder. These limb buttons:


The list of values is:
0 – Bird-like;
1 – Land animal with 4 limbs;
2 – Land-insect;
3 – Sanke-like;
4 – Flying-insect;
5 – Fish-like.

-The first value should just remain “1”, and I will leave my second value also as “1”, since it’s a 4-legged land creature.

-You should also know that in the context of this file every type of limb has a number assigned to it:
1 – I think this means body as a whole, like “pack hunter” applies even if no parts of the creature are used in the final combination;
2–Front legs;
3–Back legs;
4–Head;
5–Tail;
6–Troso;
7–Wings;
8–Arms.

-This next block as you might have guessed, gives creature its “defense”. Value “exp-armour” is a multiplier, if your creatures size increases by combining it, for each size increase armor value will grow by this multiplier, but this value is left as 0 across all original creatures, and so will I. What “exp_dodge” means, I have no Idea, but this value is equal across all creatures, I just ignore it.

-As you can see the limb numbers are written as the first number value and the defense values are written as the second value (for some reason the defense values are multiplied by 0.01 here, so just look at these armor values as if you would multiply them by 100).
-I will give my creature slightly more defense than giraffe, let’s say - 18 that means:
100 * ( 0.03 + 0.04 + 0.04 + 0.07 ) = 18:


-This next block as you might have also guessed, gives creature its “health” values. As before the first value points to the limb, and the second to its health value. This “exp_hitpoints” value determines by how much your creatures health will increase if its size increases. Among the original IC creatures, this number is the same, so I will also keep it at the same value.
-I made my creature slightly beefier – 175 health, across all its limbs:


-This next block determines the creatures speed on land. I don’t know what “speed_mid” values are for, so I simply ignore these 4 lines, maybe this is also something developers dropped.
-The “speed_max” values on the other hand are the ones that determine your creatures in game land speed, so adjust these. As before, the first value is its limb, the second the speed value. As before the speed values will adjust according to your creature’s size once combined with larger creature, this time the “exp_speed_max” value will decrease your creatures speed with each size increase since it has negative value.
-I made mine slower than giraffe - 17:


-Next there are values for “airspeed” and “waterspeed”, once you add a value to these, your creature becomes either flying or amphibious, if you want your creature to be purely swimming just make all your land speed values “0”, since my creature is neither flying or swimming I am leaving them as they are :


-Next block concerns our creature’s melee damage, you can put your melee damage on any body part you want, for example if you want to have damage on your creature’s torso use the value “6” and write similarly structured lines as you can see for “melee2” – front legs, and “melee4” – head.

-Now there is a bit more to uncover here so let’s go line by line for “melee2”.


-“melee2_number” – simply shows in what order this value will be displayed in army builder, first value shows the limb, the second value it’s order, in melee2 case its Nr.1:


-“melee2_dmgtype” – as before the first value simply points to the limb (last time I mention this I swear) the second determines the damage type:
-here is the list of damage types:
0 - Normal;
1 - Poison;
2 - Horns;
3 - Poison + Horns;
4 - Barrier destroy;
5 - Barrier destroy + poison;
6 - Barrier + horns;
7 - Poison + horns + barrier destroy.

-I don’t know for sure if all 3 or 2 attack types can actually be applied at the same time and work, but they show up in army builder. Also, apparently there are more values to this, some of which give the same attack types, but others are weirder, like plague attack. I haven’t really tested that stuff out so for now I won’t try to describe it.

-“melee2_damage” – simply determines the damage value of your creature.

-“melee2_rate” – its attack speed.

-“melee2_contact” – I don’t know what this value does, but as before it seems to be the same across all IC original creatures.

-Now, with the next 3 lines things become a bit more “complex”, as for these we will need to use program called “Resource Hacker”, if you remember I told you should have made a mod folder, following this guide:
https://cs2bus.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=735413158

-I am going to assume that you did, so we will navigate to the localization files for your mod. For my mod its:
“\Impossible Creatures\Locale\English\dinodawn”

-Open the “modtext.dll” file with “Resource Hacker”:


-Expand the “String Table”:


-Next click this button “Create resources from Blank Script”:


-It will add another “blank script” where you can add your new text strings, seems like each “script” has a limit of how many lines can be added (I call the things on the left with a star next to them a “script”).

-Sometimes by compiling a new “blank script” the previous page can get messed up, so I like to start the next text string with an “ID” number of “59001” to make sure I don’t mess up games original text strings. In the original ".dll" file the "58001" is the final string.

-To properly compile your localization file each new page must contain this structure:

-The text you wish to add to the game will go in between the brackets.

-We will add the following text strings to the game, and I will refer to these numbers in my “.lua” file going forward. I describe the text I added a bit further down the line (strings 59001-59007 I used for my T-Rex):


-Once you added the necessary text strings click the “Compile Script button”:


-And a new “script” should be created at the very end of the list indicated by the red star:


-Before saving, check the previous script, to make sure text isn’t all messed up. Not sure why, but sometimes it rewrites the previous script with a few strings from the new script.

-String ID’s don’t have to be consecutive if you skip a few this actually sometimes avoids the issue of rewriting the previous script.

-If everything seems fine save your ".dll" file to keep the changes.

-The values written in our “.lua” file for “melee2_name”, “melee2_shortdesc” and “melee2_longdesc” refer to these strings in this “ModText.dll” file.

-Type out the text strings in your localization file as seen in the example:
1. Your creature’s name.
2. Its description, that will appear once you press the “information” button in army builder:

3-4. The next two strings will determine how your combined creature will be named “Komodo Dragon with the Skunk and you get…”
5. This value will appear in the army builder, and the number in brackets will be taken from your “.lua” “melee2_damage” value and replace “%1DAMAGEVAL%”:

6. This text string will display once you mouse over the attack:

7. Not sure what these “XXX” are for, but every other creature had them at the end of their attack description and also “melee2_longdesc” refers to this value.

-We will keep the localization file open on the side in our “Resource hacker” as we continue editing our “.lua” file, so we can remember the numbers we need to reference.

-And now back to where we left off, here are the values I changed for my creature. Just like giraffe it will be able to attack with both its head and frontal legs.

-For some reason you also need to have its whole attack sum value defined in the “melee_damage”.

-The “exp_melee2_damage” as before shows by how much creatures damage will increase if creatures size increases. Since this is the same value across all the original creatures, I will leave it as is as well:


-The next block is simply the various abilities your creature can possess, if you wish to give your creature an ability, then pick the first value on which body part the ability should be placed, and type in “1” as the second value, to enable the ability. I am leaving my creature vanilla, so all of these will remain as “0” for me:


-On to the next block. “front_foot_type” and “rear_foot_type” will determine how your creatures footprints will sound like once it walks, here is the list of sounds:
0 – none;
1 – paw;
2 – hoof;
3 – claw/piston like? (this is on elephant and crocodile);
4 – insect like.

-I went with Nr.3 for both of my creature’s legs.

-“vocal_type” – will determine what response sounds your creature will make once you select it in game. As far as I can tell - you can only use what other creatures have, so for my creature I am going to use “Komodo dragons” vocal type – “30”, both are kind of lizard like I guess – no?

“Hide_type” – the sounds that will go off if creature is being damaged:
1 – cloth (for human characters);
2 – carapace;
3 – fur/feathers;
4 – scales/hard skin (lizards/fish/elephant);
5 - Smooth (dolphin and whales);
6 – Steel (yes buildings also have hide type).

-I am going to give my creature “Hide_type” value “4”.


-The next block is the same across all original IC creatures, except for “selection_sloppyness” it seems like this value is bigger on smaller creatures, not sure what its purpose is though, so I am going to leave it the same as giraffe:


-These next 2 lines are also the same across all original creatures, so you should probably not change them. However, you can change these values for your own amusement, as the creature upon death will remain on the ground and exist as a blocking object for other units on the game map:


-This block also is the same across all original creatures:


-And finally the last 3 lines, fill these with the values from the localization file you still have open in “Resource hacker”:


-Save your “.lua” file and close it, we are done with it.

-Now we have all 5 files necessary for our creature to be put in game. But before that now we can open our “.ebp” file with “ObjectEditor”.

-On the right side there is “Animation List” think of these as the raw materials we made when we animated the creature in gmax. And above it there is “Motion List” – these motions are what will actually appear in game and they are generated from our “Animation list”.


-For some reason when an “.ebp” is made the Motion List gets 2 of each motion, to remedy that, simply click “Delete All” button, and when prompted click “Yes”:


-and then click “Generate” button, it should make all the necessary motions automatically, when prompted once again click “Yes”:


-Now you should have one clean set of motions.

-Now switch over to “Attribute Editor” tab:


-On the right side there is section called “Simulation Tuning”, for creatures the “Controller Type” needs to be set as “2”, I think this determines how IC will handle the creature’s actions if it’s put on a map as a simple stock creature:


-The “Build Placement” determines the space your creature will occupy on the game map. For now you can simply click “Calc Info” to calculate the area automatically, and then click “Set Info”.

-You can see this space the creature takes up by going back to “Animation Editor” tab and toggling “Footprint” under the ”Options” menu, you will see red squares appear under your creature, if you think your creature takes up too much space, you can change these numbers around:


-Now back to the “Attribute Editor” tab, a bit lower there is a section called “UI Info”. For the “Blueprint Name” once again refer to the values you wrote in your localization file using “Recource Hacker”, remember to write a “$” symbol in front of it though. For icon you can tick in “Has Icon” and click “Auto generate” for now, since the easiest way to get an icon is to take a screenshot in-game once we have added our creature:


-Now we can move over to the “Event Editor” tab. With this you can actually do a lot of fun stuff for your creature, but I haven’t yet explored it that much. But the easiest way to set this part up is to simply import these events from another creature. These events are responsible for FX and sound effects your creature will produce while on game map:


-Simply open another creatures “.ebp” file and open the “Event Editor” tab, select all the events form the list:


-And click “Export Events” button on the right side (preferably you use a creature that has a very similar ability setup, since I already used komodo dragon for my vocal type, I am going to use its events as well):


-Once you export one of the original creature’s “events”, a file will be created in location of your choice:


-Now return to your creatures “.ebp” and click the “Import Events” button and find the file we just created:


-Ok now save your “.ebp” and we can put our creature in-game to see how it behaves to see if we need to adjust certain things.

-To see our creature in-game, navigate to this folder in your mod, if you don’t have this kind of folder structure in your mod, create one:
“Impossible Creatures\YOURMODFOLDER\data\art\ebps\stock”

-And copy in your 5-file collection that we just made:


-Next you want to navigate to this folder in your mod, (again if you don’t have this folder structure in your mod folder, create it):
“Impossible Creatures\YOURMODFOLDER\data\combiner”

-In this folder you should copy a file called “stock.lua” that you can find in the extracted game files, in folder under the same name – “combiner”.

-Once you have copied it into your mod’s folder, open it.

-Here you need to add your creatures name, so it will appear in-game, to keep it organized you can also add your mods name on top of it (if you wish to remove original creatrues form the game, delete its name here, or “comment it out” using the two dashes “--” just like it’s done with “KONG”):


-Now we can open IC and see our creation in-game (remember to select your mod from the mod list in-game).

-First thing you can do is, while in army combiner take a screenshot of your creature that you will use for its icon, since it still has its auto generated one:


-Make various combinations with it and play a round with it, mainly observe it's run and walk animations (creature generally will "run" if it is its own size, and "walk" if it is larger).

-It might look like its either moonwalking or sprinting in place as if on a treadmill, baisically its speed is not compatible with our animation.

-To make these adjustments exit the game, and return to its “.ebp” file located in “\Impossible Creatures\Data\art\ebps\stock”. Remember - you can edit “.ebp” files only in this folder, don’t forget to replace files in your mod folder once you edit them.

-Once you have the “.ebp” open, in the motion list open its “Run” motion, by selecting it and then clicking button “Edit”:


-You should see this window pop up. In here you can do various adjustments to your animations:


-To adjust the way animation is being played, adjust this value “Reference”, I think this number refers to your creature’s speed value, so you should probably enter a value that’s close to it, not necessarily the same value though. Tinker with this number until you are satisfied with the way your creature moves in-game (remember to do the same for your walk motion, however it’s number should probably be lower, since it will play once your creature becomes slower if combined with larger and slower creature):


-While we are here, we can also add our icon, the icon needs to be 64x64 pixels large “.bmp” image file, so crop the screenshot you took and resize it:


-Then in the “Atribute Editor” tab, click on the “Load Icon” button and locate your image, if it does not load right away switch between the tabs and it should appear:


-Save your adjustments and place the updated files in your mods folder, we have our new creature:

-To publish your mod on Steam workshop, follow the instructions in file called “IC_Wokshop_Manual_v1.0.pdf” which you can find in this folder:
“\Impossible Creatures\WorkshopTool”

-You can launch the ”workshop tool” mentioned in the file, trough steam IC, by opening its “properties”, and changing its launch options:


-One thing that’s somewhat tricky to get is “.sga” file. Now as I mentioned earlier, I will slightly expand on this guide:
https://cs2bus.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=735413158

-Open your mods “.module” file with notepad again, and add additional lines according to your mods name, by adding a reference to an “.sga” file, which we will create right after:


-Now let’s create the “.sga” file for your mod, that is required in the instructions. To do this open “ModPackager”, found in IC RDN Tools folder:
“\Impossible Creatures\RDNTools”


-Click “File->New”:


-A window should pop up, select “Create Archive” and click “OK”:


-It will prompt you for a name, simply call it your mods name and click “OK”:


-Next another window will pop up, fill it out accordingly, the Root folder it points to needs to be the "data" folder that contains all your mods files:


-Next you should see something similar to this:


-Right-click your mods name and pick “Add folder” or “Add Files”:


-Find your mods “data” folder, and add its contents one by one.

-Now by expanding this directory, you should see files that your mod folder contains, so it has a structure like this:


-Click “Archive->Build Archive”:


-Name it your mods name + data at the end and save it:


-Now wait for a moment, while it does its thing, and a window should pop up once its done, click “OK”:


-You can close the “ModPackager” now.

-Now locate your new “.sga” file, and add it to the files you will publish to steam workshop, we should now have a full set of files required by the instructions manual:


-Now follow the instruction manual's steps, and that’s it your beautiful creation should be in game.

-Good luck in your endeavors. Hope this helped!