Eu4 Unit Modding Tutorial[updated]

This tutorial describes some new stuff about unit modding it's still not meant to describe modeling and other more or less complicated things that could get guides on their own. Note that this is suplement to the previous guide and while it covers most of it some parts that havent changed at all are untouched.

Introduction

Hello I finally decided to polish up and update the old guide into unit modding
many things had changed with new plugin for blender made by ross-g this plugin allows to export and import models directly into blender and dose not break the original structure of armature, like jorodox does.
With this plugin you can just import model introduce changes you want to and then export it and it will be working perfectly fine with existing animations that are meant to be used with it.

Plugin for blender and maya made by ross-g https://github.com/ross-g/io_pdx_mesh in my opinion version for blender 2.79 from bugfix branch is best the 2.8 version had some problems when I tested it out back few months ago.

if you read previous guide some steps becomes redundant with this plugin and sometimes even cause some minor problems

Blender

Blender its 3d modeling and animation tool which is free to use

What you need to know after you learn how to create unit model:
-First of all you need to know its that you should use armatures exported from game however creating own armature its possible you can find info about it in next chapter of the guide.
So export model form game files, best one will be one of western models. this model will help with adjusting the proportions.

UVS

-Build exact model from multiple Parts it will be really helpful when you will split the object into uvs
-Next thing which can make problems is UV try to make UV split as object are. Do not leave loosen polygons it may cause that model will have gap in places where this polygon should be connected to rest of UV. This only refers to animated objects static ones can be split as you want.
-Model should be merged into one object, there is one exception its situation when you want to use multiple shaders however use it on static object. its possible to use this on animated object however it may be complicated to keep animation work without breaks in model.
-using pins may become very useful to get desired shape of uv
-So if you want to assign the flag you need to separate it as object and also create new separate UV in vertex groups tab in properties their names should be different

Jorodox

First of all The JoroDox, this tool will allow:
-converting models from dae to pdxmesh and vice versa
-extracting anims from dae files
-assigning textures and shaders to model
-checking do model, animation will work properly

JoroDox its quite intuitive tool however have some drawbacks, especial in compare to his alternative pdxconverter however this converter is supported only by maya.
With ross-g plugin that allows direct conversion and export JoroDox is useful only as preview tool that allows to see in depth all the properties of model, animation etc.
Using this tool its easy its also have other tools which are useful in modding.

Animations

-So there was some inaccuracies with the problem I presented earlier while its true that eu4 has different frame rate its only part of the problem. The very reason why models acted weird was joint relation transformation between axis, where blender have different default axis than maya.
With ross-g plugin its possible to create models without any major problems connected with animations you can import it and export and it will be working 100% fine.Also if you're planing to create new animations it is possible to set frame rate with the tools provided by plugin.

Animations creation

if you want to learn how to create anims you should watch some tutorials about it i cant help you much this tutorial would be very long if i focus on describing how to animate also its hard to show it by text.
however this tutorials may be usefull for very basics:
Rigging
Tutorial about move cycle

Creating own armature

While plugin is very useful its quiet hard to create IK on imported armatures mainly because the axis transform changes that are applied on import/export so bones end up with weirdly positioned joints.
I haven't made any anims for Eu4 with use of plugin only for IR and that's bit more complicated and funky setup than Eu4.

Misc

-with ross-g plugin there is special set of shaders for materials and small tool to create a preset materials that are same as the pdx ones.

GIMP

I'm not an expert when it comes to texturing so you should look on other tutorials
how to assign country colors to model texture sadly i couldnt find the guide i posted link to before
in very big shortcut specular map rgb colours are representation of country colours where the grayscale colours work for specularity itself and alpha of specular works as glossines where 100% of alpha is so bright that it will melt your eyes and 0% is like ethernal darkness.
values of glossines for various materials by trial and error
1%-4% alpha shineless materials 5% - 10% normal materials like cloth etc where 10% is semi metalic like gloss 10% - 16% metalic glossiness. technically 17% - 20% is kinda mirror gloss level everything above will shine very brightly.
I can say something more about normal maps from my experience so when you have your diffuse to achieve smooth looking bump like in pdx made units you need to double the size of diffuse blur/smooth it a little then use normal map plugin

[Khorne Flakes]

So I tried following this guide for HOI4 and it worked, but when I try to use the mesh in-game it doesn't use the textures assigned to it, resulting in a black model in-game. Do you know why this might be?

[MrAdrianPl]

Im not sure what did you mean. You can pm me on discord and i can explain anything you want.

[RobDaFlob]

Hello MrAdrian. I am wondering if eu4 models are exactly made just like in eu4 (like the way to make it not like pikemen into ww2) Thanks for reading :D

[MrAdrianPl]

Yeah sure you can pm me on discord i have same nick right there.

[Sutixela]

Could you help me? When previewing my unit model in JoroDox my UVs has moved out. I'm using Blender 2.8 and exported as collada with default settings