Convert Total Annihilation 3DO to SupCom SCM (and now SCA too)
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There are some plugins for blender to import / export Supreme Commander SCM and SCA files. But unfortunately the process of getting from Total Annihilation's 3DO format to SCM, complete with textures and correctly placed, oriented and named bones, isn't straight forward (or at least I couldn't find an easy solution). So I put together a tool to help. I released it on github for others to use, maybe it can save you some hours. See https://github.com/Axle1975/3do2scm/releases/
Big shout outs to Michael Heasell for writing the Robot War Engine (https://github.com/MHeasell/rwe) and the many developers who worked on the Blender plugin itself (https://github.com/Oygron/SupCom_Import_Export_Blender). The 3do2scm converter makes heavy use of code from both of those fine projects.
For your porting pleasure, as of release 20200907, 3do2scm includes a tool to assist you convert TA animation scripts to SupCom SCA format.
As of release 20200911, 3do2scm is able to generate SpecTeam (team colour) textures, and now saves textures in .PNG format. The user interface to nbos2sca.exe is also simplified, allowing user to drag/drop nbos files onto the exe.
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good to know although i think most of the models that we didn't already have, have been done already but i'm sure a few more will turn up so this should be helpful thanks
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Ah that's awesome. You must've got a decent workflow down pat if you did a fair few conversions already. For my own curiosity and the benefit of the thread and those that follow, what tools did you use?
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well, because i'm needing to updated the models, for copy write purposes for vault legality, im going through them one by one (very long process) the extra work involved in my method is negligible compared to the one listed above, i use an app called upspring which allows you to save 3do files as an obj file which i can then import to blender to work on. considering i need to change the geometry which leads to having to redo the textures anyway the fact that i lose the uv map is of little concern, the same goes for the bones while they are lost in the process it's not to much more work to add them in manually (depends on the model) this is the method i use for models that haven't already been ported, for models that have been done already i work from the finished scm, although i generally need to redo textures and reassign vertex groups, the main thing i find is that the models have an excessive amount of vertices as, at each intersection they are stacked instead of merged so i can quite often cut the amount down by around 2/3 and then i can add detail and arrive at about the same as before
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Very interesting, thanks MadMax. Yeah I can see how if you need to edit the models and re-texture them anyway, Upspring and Blender works well.
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Axle the github missing the .exe file
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The .exe is in the zip file in the release. Here's a direct link to the zip file: https://github.com/Axle1975/3do2scm/releases/download/20200905/3do2scm-20200905.zip
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Check out release 20200907, now with a tool to assist efforts to convert TA animation scripts to SupCom
(please note the new release also fixes a bug with SCM bone/vertex coordinates that showed up when trying to apply animations)
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Check out release 20200911, which now generates team colour textures in PNG format, and some improvements to nbos2sca interface (it is now possible to drag/drop .nbos files onto the exe without opening a command prompt)
