It’s been a while since I ever looked at FeralHeart or it’s community. Ever since the security patch and the ‘updates’, I lost all interest. The community went from the former 1K+ to barely 30 people on in a day. It’s really depressing. But somehow, I was drawn back. I’d randomly had the urge to see if I could get the original 1.13 maps to work, which they didn’t. So in a sort of last ditch desperate attempt, I contacted the mod author and asked them a couple questions. I wanted to know how they had gotten to maps to work in the first place. After a bit of chatting, I discovered something insane. And unfortunately, this is information that I can’t give out. But let’s just say that I got all of the FeralHeart+ Maps back. And by back, I mean that I can now go ingame and visit the maps exactly as they were. I re-exported them and plan to make a map pack out of them so that others can revisit the maps. Endless Plains was and always will be home to me. And yes, all credit for these maps and the expansion that was FeralHeart+ goes to it’s creator. I do not intend to infringe on any copyrights. TLK4EVR created the expansion and KovuLKD created FeralHeart itself. I’m just bringing back what the older crowd had officially lost with the new update, since the 1.13 map pack that was created no longer worked with the update. So for those of you who loved FeralHeart+, I’ll be compiling a download for you all sometime soon, life, work, anything in life permitting, LMAO, because we all know how that works!
Anyways! When I realized that I could get back Endless Plains in it’s full original form, I also realized that a comic I had given up on a long time ago, could return. It was the comic of the 4th book in my series I’ve been writing since 2008, called Passage of Time. This book basically took place in a ‘universe’ very like that of FeralHeart, the main location being in the middle of nowhere, an endless Savannah. I literally could not continue the comic without the Endless Plains. I tried to recreate the area dozens of times, but it just never had the same feel. So the comic stopped. Now I have full unlimited access to Endless, the comic can return. And even better, the comic was going to rely heavily on custom posed models, which I also couldn’t really do with the original FeralHeart+, as I couldn’t put my own objects into an already created map. Now, however, I can. So what was my first step? I had to start posing the models. And how did one do that? Blender. How did one get the models into Blender to start posing them? A really drawn out process that required a very old version of Blender, several plugins and a hopefully functional method that brought in the mesh, but the armature was all sorts of fubbernucked (thank you Markiplier). The bones would be everywhere. You could manipulate the mesh, but it was a d*** nightmare. And if you aren’t familiar with the original 2.49b Blender, the layout was painful. If you were just coming into Blender as someone who looked at FeralHeart .material files with a skittish glance, anything Blender related would scare you away immediately. I quite several times. It’s been years since I touched Blender, and the most recent version, 2.8, makes things supposedly far easier for people to work with, and I agree! I used 2.7 and below for a while, and it was…uh…basically a clusterf*** of features that left you staggering. At least for me. 2.8 was a learning curve, just because the controls were far different, but it’s a good different!
When I started playing around, getting into Modelling again, I immediately knew I had to make this whole process easier or I was going to lose my mind. I couldn’t even begin to understand 2.49b, let alone work with it. So after a week of hunting through topics online that I had been through countless times before, I saw that someone had done the world a massive favor. There was a mesh importer for 2.6 and an exporter for 2.8. Not believing that this was going to work, I tried it out. It worked. However, the armature was still a wild mess. So I scoured the internet again and found the models that Sly had fixed up. I didn’t need the entire model at the time. I just needed an armature that worked and wasn’t in a million pieces.
By the way, I WILL BE MAKING A TUTORIAL ON THESE FINDINGS! Don’t worry! I’ve got ya’ll covered! Eventually. But I will! The FeralHeart Community has suffered for too long!
I managed to Append the armature and start messing around. After watching a few tutorials, I put materials (Textures) on the model, posed it (Took me 30+ minutes) and then had my first go at exporting. I did one major thing beforehand however. I joined the parts of the model, so instead of it exporting as 10 different pieces, it exported as 1! Like I said, I will be covering all of this in a tutorial! Hang tight! Lets just say I was successful at getting the model ingame and placing it. I thought about it real hard for a moment however. Posing one model took over half an hour. That wasn’t going to work. I have very little time these days, accept the weekends to actually work on what I need/want to work on, so this was going to swallow up a ton of time. I needed to find an easier way of posing the model. I looked critically at it. The armature was…in my opinion poorly made. For the version of Blender it was made in however, there was probably no other choice. So after watching a few more videos and messing things up several times, I achieved my goal. (See Below)
Below are the major differences between the original Armature and the new one that I created.
- Notice a single Shoulder and Pelvis bone that control both legs at once.
- Only two spine bones, since one goes from the pelvis and leads to the rib-cage, and the other covers from the rib-cage to the shoulders.
- Added extra tail bones to help remove the ‘blocky’ look when posing.
- Leg, Ankle and Tail IK Control bones to make posing the legs and tail as a whole, much easier.
- Only 4 bones for the toes, as I only need to move the toes.
- The head armature and the body armature are two separate objects. Still figuring out this part. Blender Stack Exchange still hasn’t answered me.
I’ve made it a good long ways from where I was, but I’m still not exactly where I need to be. I still know there is a lot to learn and I am by no means an expert at Blender. I still sit there sometimes asking myself what I’m missing. If any of you have questions or comments, please leave one here, or send me a note on my DeviantART page here
FeralHeart & Blender 