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Import models and animations to Blender; setup

Head to blender and import all the GR2s, and the MDB in one go. That makes sure your MDB ends up with a usable skeleton. The skeleton is the thing that animates the MDB skin. When you select all the GR2s and the MDB for import, one of the files you’re getting has "skel.GR2" at the end of its name. That’s the skeleton the animations should end up copied onto when you import them. Only one can be imported at once though for some reason, so when you did the batch import, you'll have only one on it at the time.

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• Once this is done, to get the animations off the animated skeletons you import and onto the one attached to the creature mesh, simply select the skeleton, select it’s animations, and copy in the usual fashion. You can now left click the skeleton attached to the creature, put the timeline cursor bar wherever you want the animation to turn up on the animation timeline, and paste in the usual fashion. Voila. You’ve got the imported animation off it’s imported skeleton and onto the creature one.

• Rinse and repeat for each animation you want. Don’t forget to reposition the timeline cursor or you’ll end up overwriting anims after the first time.

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Batch import your animations

Make an entry in your table (like above) for the first animation that was imported.  Note the Begin and End times.

Start importing the rest of the animations, one by one:

• Import your next animation by selecting the animation's GR2 file and the "skel.GR2" file.  It will create a "skel.001" object.
• Go to the "skel.001" object and look in your animation dope sheet.  Find the frames and right mouse button copy them.
• Go to the master "skel" object and place your timeline cursor at an appropriate interval after the existing last animation.  I usually increment it to the next sequence in 10, so if the prior ends at 191, start at 200.
• Right click on the dope sheet timeline cursor, with the cursor located at the end of your existing timeline, and click paste.  The animation should copy over.  
• Review and double check your animation is good.  Note the ending location and put it in your table.
• Delete the "skel.001" object.
• Rinse and repeat the above until you have all the animations.

SPECIAL NOTE: NWN expects the on-hit damage animation to be 10 seconds, and the NWN2 animations for that are generally 30 seconds or a bit more.  Unless you scale the NWN2 animation down to 10 frames, it will clip over your death/knockback animations.  So, when you import the on-hit damage animation, scale it to 10 seconds first by pressing "S" for scale and a modifier.  Usually it will be ".33" making you have 10 frames.  The NWN2 animations for on-hit damage are generally "_damage01" and "_damage02", etc.  Everything else will be fine in terms of the NWN game engine will auto-compensate for animation length.

SPECIAL NOTE: Don't forget to place your timeline cursor out or you will overwrite existing! 

SPECIAL NOTE: Take notes like the table above or you will regret it later.

Create your pseudo-bones

Once you are satisfied with your animations you will use Neverblender to create pseudo-bones.   That’s because NWN EE doesn’t recognize actual skeletons, unless there’s a pseudo-skeleton there to do the exact same thing.

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Select the "skel" object and go to the Object Data Properties tab.  Find the "Generate Pseudo Bones" button.  Uncheck "Add Aurora Base" and "Add Rootdummy".  Press the "Generate Pseudo Bones" button.  A new object should be created with your pseudo-bones with the name of "skel.001".

Fix object hierarchies

Basically, here you need to create your root and move out the armature in favor of keeping the pseudo bones.  You can do it several ways, but this one works fine:

• Take the new "skel.001" psuedo-bones object and parent it to the main "skel" armature object you've been working with.
• Now create a new root of the name of the creature model with Shift-A=>Empty=>Plain Axes , eg "c_umberhulk".  Parent your "skel" armature object to that.
• Now take your "skel" armature object and unparent it from the root since we don't want it in the NWN mdl file.  Rename it to something new like "skel_arm".
• Rename the "skel.001" pseudo-bones that is still in the root hierarchy by removing the ".001".  

Change model type to Skinmesh

Highlight your mesh(s) in the model and change them to type "Skinmesh"

Add your nodes

Don't forget to add the below nodes and parent them to the root.

• handconjure
• headconjure
• impact

Place them where appropriate relative to the mesh

• Anyways, all you need to do is select the skeleton with all the animations on it and hit ‘generate pseudo-bones’ from the bone menu. Voila, pseudo-skelly. Select this and make the base object all the NWN2 model/skeleton stuff is parented to, it’s parent. Might be easiest to shift + left click it and drag it onto said base object.

• Almost there. The NWN2 mesh/skin object isn’t the right type by default. You just need to head to the Neverblender aurora mesh panel in the object menu while you have that mesh selected, then change it’s type to ‘skinmesh’.

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• You can now export to MDL via the export menu. Unfortunately, there is one more step if you want the textures to work right. Open the new MDL in nwnexplorer and export the ASCII version of it, then open that in Notepad++ or a similar editor and search for the word 'bitmap'. You need to check that the main texture files for the creature - not the strange lighting map ones you sometimes get but the tga with the creature texture as it should show up in game - is the file named after 'bitmap'. Look through the file and you'll find several instances of it to change. It might be actually that there's several textures you need to change in this way for some models that use multiple base textures but I haven't encountered this yet. Either way, once you've done this, just save the text file as MDL once again and...

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