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Web:www.smithanimation.com

Email: iceace17@msn.com

Now pay no attention to the size of your character (He is probably huge) We will be copying info from a character already in the game and pasting it to our own new character.

Click the second pull down menu and select the UT 2004 character that was there before you imported your mesh.

Now click Mesh > Copy Mesh Properties.

Now click the second pull down menu again and pull up the character you imported.

Click Mesh > Paste Mesh properties.

Your mesh should be the same size and orientation as the UT 2004 character you copied it from.

Click Edit > Linkup anim and mesh. This should assign animations to your character.

*Note that we are still working inside a pre-existing animation package and we will be saving it as a new package later.

Importing into Unreal – The Texture Package :

Once in the texture tab, Click File > Import > your texture.tga and your bio pic.tga (the bio picture is something made for the GUI) A window will pop up and ask you to assign them to a package and give them names. My settings are below.

Once you have your textures imported click File > Save > “texture package name. UTX” and you have completely made your own texture package.

Now we must assign textures from the texture package we created to our model. Highlight the texture used for your model in the package then click the animation tab. With the texture highlighted, Click Skin > Material > [0] > USE. Your model should now be using the texture that you had highlighted.

Importing into Unreal – Finishing the Animation Package :

Once the texture is on your character and all of the animations are working correctly, Click Mesh > Rename Mesh. Now we are taking the info from this animation package and renaming it to what we want. I used “AustinXyle” as my package name and “Xyle” as the name.

Once you renamed the package it will not store it as a new package so you must now click File > Save > “AustinXyle” (the name you just used)

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You have now created your own Animation Package (.UKX) that is using data from your own texture package (.UTX), congrats, the hard stuff is done.

A few minor touches need to be added.

Click Mesh panel > Attach > Sockets > [1] > BoneName change it from Bone_weapon to BoneWeapon.

Under the same panel click Animation > Default Animation. Set it to MeshAnimation(whatever kind of animations you used)Biped. Mine is MeshAnimationHumanMaleABiped. This will allow your character to loop an animation while being idle. Save your package changes.

If you saved your two packages, everything is ready to go except we still need to tell Unreal Tournament 2004 to load your packages by writing a script and adding a few lines to an existing script. After that, your character should appear as a selection in the game!

Importing into Unreal – Writing Script :

First of all, I just want to say that I hate writing script, but it makes me feel smart so I will explain it in detail to you. The script below is a .UPL file found in the ut2004/systems folder labeled my characters name “AustinXyle.UPL”

[Public]

Player=(DefaultName="Austin Xyle",Race="Hellions",

Mesh=AustinXyle.Xyle,species=xGame.SPECIES_Merc,

BodySkin=AustinXyleTexturePackage.texture,FaceSkin= AustinXyleTexturePackage.texture ,

Portrait= AustinXyleTexturePackage.BioPic ,Text=XPlayers.xyleAA,Sex=Male,

Menu="",CombatStyle=+0.5,Tactics=+0.5,StrafingAbility=+0.5,

Accuracy=+0.9, Jumpiness=+0.9,BotUse=3,TeamFace=1,BotUse=5,

FavoriteWeapon=xWeapons.RocketLauncher)
These lines of code tell the game where to look for the packages and some basic info on your character. Some lines are pretty explanatory like “Sex=Male” some lines need more explaining.

Player=(DefaultName="Austin Xyle"

This line defines your characters name inside the game like bobby or Marcus

Mesh=AustinXyle.Xyle

This line tells the engine what package to look for “x” model

In other words Mesh=YourAnimationpackageName.ModelsName

BodySkin=AustinXyleTexturePackage.texture,FaceSkin= AustinXyleTexturePackage.texture

This line of code is telling the engine what texture package to look for your textures. A lot of UT 2004 characters use a texture for the face and one for the body. Since I only used one for both, I just used the same path to avoid a crash.
Portrait= AustinXyleTexturePackage.BioPic

This line of code tells the engine what image to use for your character on the player selection screen and GUI actions. I didn’t explain that a lot because its any image you want 256x512 to represent your character (it must be included in your texture package)

Text=XPlayers.xyleAA

This line directs us to another file called XPlayers.INT in the same ut2004/systems folder. This file already exists. We just need to add a line of code at the bottom of it describing our player. That line of code is this:

xyleAA="Name: Austin_Xyle|Age: 20|Race: Human||Data:|”YourStory”

Open this code in notepad; write the code at the bottom then save.
*Note: there are no spaces or indentations in code, its one long line of code.

Concept Design & Modelling

Unwrapping & Texturing

Rigging & Importing

Page 10

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