Neverwinter Nights 2 Toolset

Custom Content Creation Guide

Creatures & Placeables

by

Ivan Leben

version 1.0

Introduction

Thank you, for downloading this manual! Keep in mind that this is far from being a complete and thorough guide, but rather just a collection of all the little details that I came across while surfing dozens of NWN2 forums for hours. At this point it is hard for me to tell, where I got all the bits from, because I have certainly read over about 100 posts or pages, filtering the misleading info and searching for the right clues. Some of them are also purely the result of my own experimenting. This means I am not able to give credit to all the people whose posts helped me individually, but at least I will credit the creators of the much-important and useful tools that a custom content creator needs by linking to their download pages.

I would like to point out that custom content is still not completely supported by the developers of NWN2 and its toolset so many of this things are related to changing the original files of the game, or by overriding them with your own versions. The only thing supported so far is the actual technique of overriding the existing files. That means you will still have to tweak those files manually and without any documentation provided from the developers of the software. However, as the NWN2 team stated in several interview, the support for custom content is planned to be extended somewhere in the future.

Moreover, this means, that this document will probably not be much relevant anymore after the CCC tools get fairly integrated into the original NWN2 Toolset. Anyway, I will be only glad to see that day come, when creating custom content will not require using a dozen of external tools, and the community will be provided with an all-in-one tool to unleash their powerful immagination into great playable modules! For now, this document is just a reflection of the currrent state that the NWN2 community is in, regarding custom content creation.

This guide doesn't teach you how to use modelling software like 3ds Max or Photoshop to create models and textures. It just gives information on how to integrate that content into NWN2 engine.

Note that there are other techniques as well to create and convert your own models to MDB format instead of using 3ds Max. These include the Descreet's free gmax software and NWMax suite for exporting to various formats from it or using the OBJ2MDB converter. These techniques will not be covered in this guide but I believe that much of the process would still remain the same even if you chose an alternative path.

Any feedback in terms of constructive criticism, ideas about improvement of this guide or just a message that it was helpful to you will be greatly appreciated! You can email me at ivan.leben@gmail.com .

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Credits

Bioware Forum Members – For invaluable clues that pointed me in the right direction at the beginning of my experimentation

Thieves-Guild.net Forum Members – Some more useful information, especially cal1s for the detailed info on various techniques of custom content deployment and installation in NWN2.

Martin Wright – DXTBmp program

EwaldTheUnimaginative - TlkEdit2 program

Tanita – NWN2Packer program

tazpn – 3ds Max MDB Importer/Exporter

RMIT University, Melbourne – For offering this great Games Graphics Programming course that I am attending, especially Fabio Zambetta the teacher of GameStudio courses. The environment here inspires me more than ever!

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1. Additional tools you are going to need

Most of these are downloadable from NWVault, except for DXTBmp which features its own website:

DXTBmp (http://www.mnwright.btinternet.co.uk/programs/dxtbmp.htm)

TlkEdit2 (http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NWN2Tools.Detail&id=15)

NWN2Packer (http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=GlobalSearch)

3DS Max MDB Imported/Exporter (http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NWN2PlugIns.Detail&id=27#Files)

2. Unpack the existing content

All the original content of the game is stored in the Data sub-folder inside your NWN2 installation folder. There you will find lots of different zip files. Simply unzip the 2DA.zip and NWN2_Models.zip. You will need the files in those two archives later on.

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4. Prepare a “blank” normal map

There are basically two types of maps that make a low-poly model give an impression of being highly detailed via texturing: bump-map and normal-map. Bump-mapping is simpler and was used by older game engines and some 3D rendering software. Normal-mapping is more complex and has been only recently integrated into graphic card pipelines.

The way bump mapping works is that it uses the luminosity (greyscale) info and interprete it as a height offset from the surface being textured in the direction of its normal vector. This additional height info is then used to calculate the bumped slope and derive per-pixel normals from it. Each pixel is then shaded using its own calculated normal.

On the other hand, normal mapping uses texture data quite differently. The red, green, and blue color channels of the texture bitmap are interpreted as the XYZ values of the normals in a certain unit-space. Now, this could be object-space which means the normal coodrinates are specified relative to the whole object coordinate system for each triangle. Or this could be so-called tangent-space where the XYZ normal values are relative to the already existing normal vector of the triangle (or pixel in case of interpolated smooth-shading).

Apparently, NWN2 engine uses tangent-space, which is quite cool, since you can use just a single color to create a simple normal map that doesn't affect any of the original normals. This means you don't need any specific tools to start off with your model, but just an ordinary painter.

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So, what would this color be? To get to this, you have to understand that the XYZ values taken from the bitmap are actually "signed". This means that when using 8-bits per pixel for each color (24-bit RGB bitmap) the bits are interpreted as -128 to +127 for each of the XYZ coordinate. These values are then normalized by the engine to a [-1,1] range to be able to represent any possible normalized vector (whose length is 1).

However, the way painter programs handle color bits is unsigned, thus 0 to 255 for each color. By doing the math you can fairly easily come to a conclusion that a color value of 128 is actually 0 in the tangent-space normal map and a color value 255 means 1 in the tangent-space.

Well, if we want unchanged normals, this obviously means we want them to point straight out of the triangles. Such a 3D vector in tangent-space would then be (0,0,1) or (128,128,255) as a color in a painter program. Note that some game engines swap Red/Green and X/Y order, but we don't care about that, since they are both 0.

Open up a painter program, create 128x128 rectangular image and fill it with (128,128,255) color. Then save the image to a “blank_normal_map.bmp” file (without quotes).

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3. Creating a placeable model with 3D Studio Max

You can either start from scratch or import an existing model file, delete the mesh and create your own mesh instead. The first technique is completely ok if you want to just create a placeable, but the later one is recommended if you are going to create a custom creature, since this will show the skeleton you are actually using in the editor.

Let's say you want to create a custom placeable and start from scratch. First model your mesh and collapse down all the modifiers you might have on top of your mesh, like Symmetry, additional Mesh Edit or Mesh Smooth. The exporter actually does this for you but I haven't really checked to what extent, so it might be best to collapse the modifier stack until there is only the pure mesh object.

Now, the crucial requirement here is to texture your model. If you don't set up an UVW mapping and assign a bitmap texture to it, the model is either not going to display in the toolset or the toolset will crash! So adjust the UVW coordinates with the standard method of adding / collapsing UVW Map modifiers and spread your mesh over the bitmap space with an Unwrap UVW modifier. You can leave this modifier uncollapsed, since the exporter will go over it and handle that for you.

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Then create a material and assign a Bitmap map in its diffuse color slot. There's another requirement here. The textures must be in a DDS format which is usually not supported by the drawing tools. There is, however, an export plugin for Photoshop, but I still prefer using DXTBmp program that I linked. You simply open a bitmap image and save it as one of the multiple DDS formats. AFAIK all the formats are supported by NWN2 engine, just take care you choose the right one in case you need alpha channel for transparency.

Once you get your texture converted to DDS open up the material editor and create a new material for your placeable. Select a Bitmap map for the diffuse slot of the material and assign its source to be the DDS image that you've just created.

The next requirement is to provide a normal map. Basically the diffuse and normal map are the 2 minimum requirements without which the model wont work in the game engine. The way the exporter maps the texture slots from 3ds Max to respective textures in the MDB format is a bit tricky though. Since some names are not found or just similar in the 3ds Max texture slot naming, the MDB exported maps the slots in the following manner:

3ds Max Material MDB format

diffuse diffuse (required)

bump normal (required)

specular tint

self-illumination glow

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Convert, the “blank_normal_map.bmp” image to DDS format, like you did with the diffuse map. Add another Bitmap map to 3ds Max material bump slot and set its source to “blank_normal_map.dds” file you have just created.

Ok, once you've modeled and textured your mesh, there are just a few more things to do. First you have to create the collision-check meshes. These are two simple meshes, used to provide dynamic-collision for your object so the

player walks around it instead of through it. First of them is a very coarse one (usually just a cube) and the other one is a little more detailed, but still try to keep it very very simple so the calculations don't take too much time. Place this two meshes relative to your object just the way you want them to be used in-game and name them with the same name the object has but with the _C2 and _C3 suffices.

Note that there is a common naming convention for everything related to NWN2 content. The models are usually named in all upper-case letters starting with a PLC_ prefix.

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The last thing you have to do about the model is set its User-Defined properties needed for the exporter to properly set certain property bits in the MDB file. To do this, right click your model mesh, select properties and switch to User-Defined tab. In the textbox enter either "UIFlag = None" or "UIFlag = Alpha_Test" without parenthesis if you want the alpha layer of your textures to be used or not respectively.

Now you are finished with creating your model. Export it into a MDB file named the same as the main mesh. If you are not interested in creating a custom creature, jump to section 5. of this guide.

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4. Creating a creature model with 3ds Max

Unfortunately, things get a bit more limiting here. The skeleton / animation format used by NWN2 for is not documented. It is a format exported from some very expensive Granny 3D software. That's why currently there is no way to create our own skeletons and animations to be maped onto them. This means you have to use an existing model and its skeleton which most closely matches your model looks & movement and start from there. Browse into the NWN2_Models folder which you extracted from the zip file in the preparation stage.

Try to import some of the model files and see which one you prefer as your start point. Note that there are usually separate model files for body / head / helmet etc for each creature / npc. The simplest thing for a start would be to find 1 which only uses a single file or just a body and head file. Try to guess that from the file names. Additionally, note that N_ prefix is used for the npc files and C_ prefix for creatures.

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Once you pick a model to start with, write down the name of the main mesh and delete that mesh (including the two variants with _L01 and _L02 suffices) from the scene. Moreover, a handy trick here might be to also use the Display Floater to hide all the spheres named COLSXX where XX is any number. These are the collision spheres used for collision-detection inside the game.

Now model the mesh of your creature and texture it the same way as described in the placeable creation section. If your starting model uses several files, you will somehow have to separate your mesh into those files and repeate the process for body / head again.

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Next step is to skin your creature. Apply a skin modifier and include the bones you want to use. Since the exporter / importer somehow guesses the actual posion of the bones, the way the are linked and how the envelopes are placed according to vertex weights, it might be a good idea to just paint the vertex weights manually and not relly on envelopes at all. If you use envelopes you might find them shifted / distorted once you export and import the model again. Note that changing the bones structure or their pivot positions and lengths will not result in a custom skeleton being used by your creature! This skeleton setup is just guessed by the importer and the changes are not going to be written anywhere. Only the vertex-weights and bone-binding will be saved.

Once you're done with skinning, there are some User-Defined properties to be set again. Use the UIFlag attribute as described in the placeable creation section and add another property into a new line "Skeleton = [skeleton name]" without parenthesis. Open the Schematic View (usually the icon in the toolbar left of the material editor) and search for the top-most bone in the bone structure. Replace the [skeleton name] value of the user-defined property with the name of that bone.

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Name the mesh of the model exactly the same way the original model was named. This is required, since we are using an existing model and not creating a new one, so we have to use an existing entry in the file holding the list of the appearances (will be described later on). If you followed the guide you should have written the model name somewhere before.

Create 2 additional copies of the model. This are going to be the lower LOD (Level-Of-Detail) meshes used by the game engine when the camera moves far away from the creature. If you don't care about the impact on the frames-per-second of your module (or you are going to use this creature just once in an area) you can use exactly the same meshes for lower LOD as for the full-detail view. However, if you are going to create a pack of these creatures which attacks the player in an encounter it might be a good idea to actually use the MultiRes modifier to reduce the poly-count for 2 LODs. Name the medium-detail version with a _L01 suffix and the lowest-detail version with a _L02 suffix. In case you actually lower the detail level of the two LODs you will probably have to re-skin these meshes again to re-adjust vertex weights according to new vertex positions.

I haven't tried it yet but I suppose you can delete some of the COLSXX-named collision spheres or adjust them to your needs as long as you keep them named in the increasing-suffix fashion starting with COLS00 and without any 'holes" in the numbering. Now you're done with your custom creature model. Export it into a MDB file named the same as the main mesh.

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5. Getting your models into the game

There are many ways to import custom content into the game engine. The technique used depends on the extent to which you want to affect the original content. If you provide your own file, named the same as an original file, your file will override the original one and will be used instead of it. There is, however, a certain hierarchy defining which files override the previous ones. Basically the hierarchy (starting from the lowest priority) is supposed to be like this:

● zipped content

● hak packs

● override folders

This means that files contained in a hak pack override the original content in the zip archives and files in the override content override all the others. This herarchy is right now still a little bugged and its hard to tell how the priority is ordered among all the possible hak-pack destinations (game, campaign, module) and the two override folders (Atari one and My Documents one). Furthermore, certain files don't work (don't really override) from hak-packs and some others don't work from the override folder. This is about to be fixed in the upcoming game patches according to the development team. If you find that a file doesn't work in one place, just try putting it somewhere else.

The way to use the override folder is pretty much straight-forward. Simply copy your modified version of a file along with all the new files used (textures etc.) into an override folder, fire the toolset and the content should change approprietly. This means that if you let's say modified the N_Aldanon_CL_Body01.MDB file and placed your version into an override folder along with the textures used the Aldanon NPC should use your model and textures binded to it instead of the original one when placed into an area via the toolset. But be careful, since this will affect the whole content, probably even when you play the original campaign. You could do the same thing with a placeable if u used an existing model or just named your model mesh and file the same as the original.

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On the other hand, hak-packs might be more convenient since they only affect the content binded to. To create a hak pack, use the NWN2Packer tool linked above. Run it, click "New" and then click "Import" and select every file you want to be included in your hak-pack. Then click Save As, name the file whatever way you want, but make sure you append the .hak ending or the file will be saved as .erf by default. This file must be placed into the "hak" subfolder of the NWN2 installation folder!

The way to bind a hak-pack to a module is the following: open the module in the toolset, click View->Module Properties, move the pointer to the Hak Packs field and click the "..." button that shows on the right.

Now click Add and set the FileName field by browsing for each hak-pack you want to use. The same content in the later ones you add overrides the previous ones. The different content from each of them will stack though.

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6. Custom blueprints and 2DA files

What if you decided to add 100 different trees to your module? Would you override 100 of the original tree models and sacrifice the ability to use them in the toolet? Or would you override 100 of the useful placeables like barrels, tabels, chairs etc.? What if you don't want to lose any of the original content but still be able to import your own? Well, that requires a little more hacking.

Note that what we are doing here is not creating a new creature or placeable along with all its properties as a whole. Rather we are creating just a new appearance that a creature or a placeable can have. The other properies of a creature / placeable are set in its blueprint or specifically per-instance as its placed onto the map. So where is the list of the possible appearances defined?

The list of the appearances is stored in two files, for placeables and creatures respectively. The file used for the placeable appearances is "placeables.2da" and the file defining creature and NPC appearances is simply "appearance.2da". Both files are found in the 2DA subfolder unzipped from the 2DA.zip archive.

7. Hacking placeables.2da

Fire up the TlkEdit2 tool linked above, make a copy of the placeables.2da file and open it. Note that the tool has some problems firing up and sometimes you will wait indefinitely for it to open. If that's the case, ese the Windows Task Manager to kill the hanging instances of the program and try again. Once you've opened the file you will see it's a two-dimensional table or array (hence the 2da file ending). Each row in the table defines one of the possible placeable appearances and entry in a column defines one of the appearance properties. If a field contains the "****" value it means that it is not used. This value must be exactly four stars, no more no less!

The fields important to us are Row.No, Label, StrRef and NWN2_ModelName. The first field obviously defines the order of the row, the Label field defines the internal name used for an appearance and the NWN2_ModelName is the name of the MDB file used for the model, but without the .MDB ending. StrRef number is actually a reference into another file, called dialog.TLK and will be described later.

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We are going to create our own entry now. Select the first row in the file and click on the Copy Row icon in the toolbar. Then scroll down to the end of file and select the empty row under the last row. Click the Paste Row icon.

There are strict row numbering rules. This means that your row should have Row.No value equal to the RowNo above it + 1. There should be no holes in the numbering and you shouldn't insert a row somewhere inbetween. If you do that, you might affect all the content in the following rows up to

the end of file because the indexes will get shifted! You should also not use the rows which are all "striked-out" with "****" values, since those are reserved for potential additional content by the game.

The way you should set the fields in your row is the folowing:

Field Name Value

Label your appearance name

StrRef leave for now

PlaceableModelType 0

Fade 1

NWN2_ModelType the name of your model file withouth the ending

NWN2_LowGore additional model for Low-Gore setting or "****"

NWN2_PartsCount 0

IsAccessory 0

ModelName “RESERVED” (without quotes)

All the other fields “****” (without quotes)

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This is a setup that I am sure to work, since I've tried it. I haven't yet tried to find out the meaning of all the fields but so far I've been successful in using my custom content with these settings.

Now about the StrRef field. This is actually the number of a row in the dialog.TLK file. Open that file (its directly in the NWN2 installation folder) and observe its content. Each row defines nothing but a piece of text. Actually this file defines localized strings used inside the game and the toolset. All the other files that support localized text point to this file instead and switching the language to another one is simply a matter of providing a translated TLK file. Quite smart.

As I said, we are only defining a new appearance for a placeable. This will be available to select in our module for any blueprint or instance we create via the Appearance drop-down menu in the placeable properties. But in order for our custom appearance to actually appear in the drop-down menu, we have to provide it with a localized name in the dialog.TLK file. This means that adding a line to placeables.2da with the StrRef field empty, starred-out or invalid index will make it unreachable from the toolset.

8. Hacking dialog.TLK

Now here's a buggy bug . Custom dialog.TLK files don't work from a hak-pack. Additionally, they neither work from the Override folder. And finally, they don't seem to really work from the "Custom TLK file" field of the Module Properties panel either. What this means is the only way to make it work is to actually mess with the original file, at least afaik. And there's more: if you change the contents of your dialog.TLK file, you will fail to apply any updates to the game, since the updater will rant about the file not matching the original. So you better make a back-up copy of the original file before you try to edit it. You will have to re-apply the changes to a new one after patching though. Actually it is much safer to also apply your custom 2da lines to the new placeables.2da file after a patch instead of still using the old copy, as you might lose some new content introduced by a patch that way.

To add a line to dialog.TLK, scroll down to the end of file and double-click the "String" field (the second one). Enter the localized name for your placeable appearance. Once you deselect the row, its StrRef field (the first one) will be automatically set to previous + 1.

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Hit Save and switch back to placeables.2da. Insert the StrRef you got for the TLK row into the StrRef field of your appearance line and save the file. You're done!

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9. Try it out

Pack all your custom / changed files into a Hak Pack using the technique described above. This means all the custom model files, textures, and the hacked placeables.2da file. Fire the toolset, create a new area and map your Hak Pack to the module using the technique described earlier.

Now create a new blueprint for your custom placeable. Open the Appearance field drop-down menu and scroll down to the end. Hopefully, you should find the localized name of your custom placeable there. Double-click to select and close the menu.

Move the mouse onto the map and place your placeable. If all went ok you should see your own placeable in the toolset!

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10. Troubleshooting

If you can't find your placeable in the drop-down menu, assure your line in the placeables.2da file is ok, that it points to a valid line in the dialog.TLK file and that your hak-pack is mapped to your module.

In case the toolset crashes when you try to place the custom placeable or it is simply not displayed, check again that you assigned both the diffuse and normal (bump map) before exporting your model, that the model is named properly and that its required User-Defined values are set.

However, if the model appears right but the textures are weird (some blue/red/green/yellow rectangles and a text saying "texture missing") it means that the toolset couldn't find the texture referenced by your model. Double-check that you included the texture in the hak file / override folder and that it is in a DDS format.

Creating a custom creature appearance might be a little harder, since there's a lot of fields you have to set right, like target the proper skeleton and body / head / helmet files etc. But with a little bit of experimentation I believe you can achieve that too. If you don't want to bother though, just override an existing model, but then remember its name, so you know what you have to search for in the toolset.

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