Skin Converter

[cptnsausage]

Hey guys Im a bit of a noob when it comes to modding skinds and meshes etc and I was wandering if anyone had any idea if there was a skin converter or at least a way to convert UT2K4 character skin etc to UT3.

I know that the character build is quite different due to the customisable body parts etc on most of the characters and i was gonna attempt to built it up from scratch using the UE3 but it's be really cool if there was a conversion method or converter you could use so im just throwing it out there :P

cheers for any replies guys

[EvilEngine]

Theres no skin converter, but theres some steps you can do to make the textures and models compatible for ut3.This morning I wanted to play with XAN so I am putting him into the game to play with. It's not too difficult, all you have to do is seperate the body into several key pieces and attach them to the skeleton. This looks much better if the model is like Xan, as in a robot thats originally made of these different mesh pieces. Organic models like a human or alien thats originally one smooth piece is a different story and requires different procedures. But back to Xan, just seperate these key sections of his body and use SKIN to attach to the bones used in the skeleton supplied by Epic.
The textures requires some skill though. As you will need up to 3-4 textures per material ID. Such as normal,specular,diffuse(which the original skin can be used) and sometimes an emissive texture for lighting that glows.
Let me get Xan in the game today and I will show you step by step how to do it. Theres no public custom player models out now so this will be fun to play with and learn some new tricks. It's tough to put completely new character into the game compared to UT2004, but if you shared assets with an already made character it gets easier.

[cptnsausage]

that sounds pretty cool, although i dont have the meshes and texture files for the characters, all i have is the completed articles. Can it still be done? - obviously the credits would stay with the original authors

either way though a detailed explanation of the process would be fantastic as i'm sure there are more than just me out there that would like to be able to make custom characters to play with, even if they are made by me and take ages to get right in the first place lol