export.md

Exporting a model

Here I'll show steps on how to export this model from blender to DoW.

1. Open the model

   1. Download the model
   2. Import the model to Blender.
      Go to File -> Import -> glTF and select the model.
   3. Remove Plane and Book meshes.

2. Reduce vertex count
   DoW uses 16 bits for vertex indices, so you cannot have more than 65536 vertices per mesh.
   In practice, DoW fails much earlier at about 8K vertices per mesh and 30K vertices in total in my experience.
   A typical DoW model uses about 5K vertices for all meshes together.
   In the case of this model, the main offender is the Body mesh with 115K polygons.
   Blender offers a lot of options for reducing polygon count. Here I used the simplest ones:

   1. Manually remove extra vertices
      Many meshes in the model actually consist of 2 layers of polygons. You need to select and remove extra layers.

      • Select the mesh
      • Go to Materials
      • Select FullBlack or FullBlack.001 material and click the Select button
      • Delete selected vertices

      For the Body mesh it's a good idea to instead remove vertices with Body material and then switch material for the remaining slot from FullBlack.001 back to Body and flip all face normals of the mesh. This way you can save small details like eyelashes.
      Additionally you can remove parts of Body hidden by other meshes.

   2. Add Decimate modifiers
      For the majority of meshes you can simply add a Decimate modifier and set the Ratio to about 0.2.
      You can use vertex groups to limit a Decimate modifier to a part of the mesh, e. g. keep face detailed while affecting the rest of the Body mesh.

3. Remove unnecessary materials
   Go through the mesh list and remove FullBlack and FullBlack.001 materials.
   The addon cannot export them because they don't have an image and the model looks fine without them.

4. Export the model to .sgm
   Go to File -> Export -> Dawn of War Object Editor model (.sgm).

5. Convert textures
   Since the original model uses .png textures and the addon can only convert .dds you need to convert them to .rsh manually.
   NOTE: Now the Addon can automatically convert almost any texture to .rsh, but I'll leave the manual steps here in case you have issues with automatic conversion.

   By default the textures are exported into the folder with the same name as the exported model.

   1. Resize and convert to .dds The original model uses textures of size 1024x1024, and Object Editor really doesn't like it.
      I'm using ImageMagick here, but there are probably other ways:
      ls -1 -I info.txt | xargs -I % convert % -resize 512 %.dds
   2. Copy .dds textures into the appropriate location inside DataGeneric mod folder (e.g. art/ebps/races/space_marines/texture_share). Check info.txt in the exported textures folder for the correct locations.
   3. Use Texture Tool to convert copied .dds textures to .rsh.

6. Create .whe

   1. Put the exported .sgm file inside the DataGeneric mod folder and open it with Object Editor
   2. Follow this tutorial and setup the default action with idle motion.

7. Export the model to .whm
   Go to File -> Export -> Dawn of War model (.whm).

8. Put converted textures, .whm and .whe files into your mod folder
   I put the resulting techgirl.whm and techgirl.whe into Data/art/ebps/races/space_marines/troops.
   Copy converted .rsh textures into the appropriate location. Check info.txt in the exported textures folder near the .whm file for the correct locations.

9. Configure DoW to show your model in Army Painter

   1. Open your mod with Corsix's Mod Studio
   2. Add an entity to Data/attrib/ebps/races/space_marines/troops
      You can copy an existing file and change entity_blueprint_ext - animator value to Races/Space_Marines/Troops/techgirl
      Also set ui_info - screen_name_id value to Techgirl and the data type to Text
   3. Edit space_marine_race.rgd.
      Find Data/attrib/racebps/space_marine_race.rgd and set teamcolour_preview - entity_03 value to techgirl.