Importing/riping wow models?

is ther an easy way now for importing wow bosses etc? say i wanted a model from tbc or somthing and importing it from a wow program and inn to wc3 reforged world editor? couse most website dont have the models i want, so i wanted to just be able to rip the models myself and put them inn. or is it still a pain in the but and time consuming still?

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Why would you want to? Reforged sucks; you can’t even play custom campaigns with it.

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Well i still like making a 10 unites raid for my self and have a little funn xD i tought they would realse a programm of some sort to do this riping models stuff?

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That’s one of many things they said they would do.

Textures should be a fairly easy conversion job. The model formats are still the hard part since WoW has extra WoW related model stuff that does not really apply to WC3.

If you can code a converter is quite easy…
if not mmm… no idea^^

Some folks managed to convert WoW models to pre-1.32 versions of Warcraft 3, so it’s not something that’s never been done before.

I just don’t think this guy should waste his time with 1.32.

In which case they will still work…

Texture conversion is pretty trivial. Download some third party BLP2 viewer and save the images as an uncompressed format, then use GIMP (GNU, free, open source) to save as DDS using DXTC5 compression. Image dimensions must be a multiple of 4 pixels, but WoW textures would likely use powers of 2 dimensions anyway.

The model conversion is more tricky as it requires a binary parser which then processes the model data to rig it in a WC3 compatible way. This is one of the reasons why WoW ripped models are notoriously buggy and poorly optimized.

Of course, these Blizzard owned models should only be used inside Warcraft III or other Blizzard owned games.

The .mdx format hasn’t changed at all then?

Does that mean all these new Warcraft 1 models being made in the Classic graphics style on the Hive will work for my backup copy of 1.30.4?

I remember back then you could easily open wc3 models with 3dstudio max. There was a tool to import/export from the format stored in the mpq.
Textures used a very old format to be stored (now I don’t remember which one exactly) but there was a free converter to png.

Anyway, as I told you before, knowing both 3d formats you could program a parser yourself.
Problem is: is it worth?

Depends if they are made using Classic MDX or Reforged MDX standard. Classic MDX has been unchanged pretty much since release and still works. Reforged MDX added additional stored data to support Reforged features. Reforged MDX might not load when classic graphics is selected and for logical reasons cannot be loaded by versions older than Reforged.

BLP2? It was my understanding that World of Warcraft has pretty much always used that format, unless they decided recently to migrate to .DDS.

Warcraft III: Beta → BLP0
Warcraft III: Release → BLP1
World of Warcraft → BLP2

This is why the textures required conversion to be used in Warcraft III. BLP2 is not compatible with BLP1 despite having the same “.blp” file extension.

it was this I guess (or something similar used even before that)

The extraction format was the very old .tga, not .png, but anyway, once you have the tga you can do whatever you want. The tool also allowed you to go back to BLP.

The tricky part is not do deal with the file formats, but, which layers do you have on one side and which in the other?

If it actually implemented BLP1 properly. (it did not)

Also one needed a WoW specific converter to convert the textures since BLP2 was not supported by Warcraft III or the Warcraft III only converters despite using the same file extension. Some converters did add support for BLP2 so they could also be used with World of Warcraft, but again care had to be taken since BLP2 files never load in Warcraft III.

That is defined by the model. Specifically how the mesh is defined and the UV mapping. Usually it is only 1 sided and the same texture would be used for both sides to reduce draw calls. Reforged changed this slightly where separate textures are used for model equipment to make modifying the models more user friendly at the cost of more draw calls.

Ye I guess it may not work so. These are all pre-wow tools. There are many conversion tools anyway. I suggest, if you can find a direct one split the problem in 2 and use a png in the middle.

Sorry I was talking about composition of the shader. Nothing to do with the model. If you have different channels in wow or reforged you need to bake or convert them manually.

Check this btw:

Mmm is it DrSuperGood messing with buffer overflows?^^
What were you trying to overwrite?^^

It’s easy. Use wow Export tools, blender, warcraft 3 model editor and retera’s model Studio (reforged version). The workflow in detail is a bit long for me to explain, maybe i’ll make a tutorial later cause I’m busy making my own map but the workflow would be: You export from wow tools to blender ( you can use 3dsmax, Maya or whatever instead of blender), then you export from blender to warcraft 3 model editor (only if your model has some transparency on it, else you can skip this part), and then you export the model to retera’s model studio (reforged), to adjust the texture paths, maybe do some fixing or animations, and convert the model to .mdx and you’re done. Talking like this might make you think it’s complicated but unless you’re gonna do some fixing on the model or customize something or make new animations and stuff this process can take 10 min max to import a wow model into warcraft 3.

Here they are, some screens of the imported models that i’m using. Keep in mind this is a work in progress:

https://imgur.com/a/fOSHWQW