Few questions about Tileset creation, what tools are relevant in 2021?

Neverwinter Nights 1 General
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Hello :slight_smile:

I’m messing again with the NWN toolset, hopefully I’ll learn a thing or two this year. I want to learn to create, edit / merge tilesets the most. And I’m wondering what tools do the pros in this place use in 2021? Tools which work and greatly help you to develop the tilesets.

I wish that it was as simple as doing it all in Blender (as it’s free and all), and I know there are a few scripts for Blender as far as models go. But I have a strong feeling, that 3ds Max should be used instead for almost anything in the NWN territory, as it has the most guides and script/tools available. Is it even true?

I do wish to try out 3ds Max for NWN :slight_smile: as I really haven’t had any kind of luck with Blender, but mainly cause it looks like everyone prefers 3dsMax mainly. What versions of 3ds Max do you guys use for NWN1 and for what (if you gotta use a lower/higher version like 3dsmax 5, 7, 10, 2014, 2015 etc)?

Do you really have multiple versions of 3ds Max installed in your system, just to be able to do different things for NWN? I would love to hear such tips from the pros :smiley: all what could lead us beginners onto something great. I wish I could upload something presentable to vault one day in my life xD

Oh I would like to mention that I always go to this website (Tileset topic this time): http://neverwinternights.info/cc.htm#tileset whoever keeps this site up, thank you so so much it’s too valuable!

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Ok I have been doing some research on the community’s preference on 3dsmax. It looks like it is really preferred, so is Gmax. It looks like 3dsmax is preferred more over Blender generally in the NWN modding community.

And I also found, certain plugins require a specific version of 3dsmax in the workflow! This was exactly what I was trying to understand.

I found that there exists something called Discreet 3ds Max and it has these versions: 4, 5, 6, 7. Btw, these are not big files like 300mb. I’m going to try out the 6 and see if I can do anything with it, example try out this plugin: https://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn1/other/tool/nwmax-8 which looks promising!
Edit: Had trouble installing Discreete 3dsmax 6 on Win10, trying Gmax next instead (and I do it just to check out nwmax xD)

We are not done yet!

Oddly for this plugin: https://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn1/other/tool/nwn-tileset-creator we need 3dsmax 2014 or 2015, these are the bigger 3dsmax releases. I will do testing, which will work better for this plugin 2014 or 2015 cause on this given moment (as I’m trying to figure this all out) I’m in the dark here :smiley:

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Ugh! Sadly I got so many errors for the nwn-tileset-creator plugin with 3dsmax 2014, I can see the author wrote “with few edits it works great”.

I’ve been jumping back and forth, between all of this. Trying to find 1 tool which will work, be it even 1 thing. And, I will document my findings :smiley: if I find ANYTHING which works out. Even if for creating a mesh for some object, that would be fantastic. I do have focus for tilesets, but I need to start from somewhere.

I found this amazing channel and I’m going to try to follow the series, maybe I am able to make 1 tile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypnDKd8nMRM he is using Blender, which looks promising at this point.

The issue with 3ds Max + the NWN plugins is, that I can’t pinpoint the version of max which I need for specific plugins where they work flawlessly. I’d really appreciate any tips on this. Gmax 1.2 worked out for me, and one of the plugins worked just fine there.

Back to… the stuff! I will write, after a few days how the Blender method worked out for me for tilesets.

Edit: BOOM! I have been living in a cave for so long, now I found also this amazing resource! Tutorials - Neverwinter Nights 1: EE - nwn.wiki now this is so promising, so much Blender related stuff! I love this community! :smiley:

Ok! I understand something now, and I managed to finally get a custom mesh into game engine. Thanks to the nwn.wiki tutorial using NeverBlender. That’s an massive start for me!!! Not only that, I also figured some things out about the placeables.2da + making it into a shareable .hak file!

The glorious result (it’s with a walk mesh just as in tutorial and it’s cool that it works so simply!):

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Oh god. So I don’t really even need 3dsmax / Gmax, as I understand in this point. I always liked Blender more anyway (just a personal preference, it’s what I have put my time into learning in the past)!

God this thread starts to look more stupid and stupid :rofl: I’m sorry! But I honestly had nowhere to lean to, I wanted to be able to make any CC for NWN! And now I can begin from here. It just felt like confusion to me, and finding out what works and not. And I wasn’t aware that now, Blender is so beautifully supported for this stuff.