So anyone know a program to make creatures for Baldur's gate engine?

Kaliesto

Since assuming Modding is gonna be a big thing in BG crowd, I was wondering if there was a way to make paper-doll monsters and characters.

I know NWN community has done this for their own thing.

Miloch

If you're talking about making animations for the game from scratch, it is a huge amount of work. It actually is possible to port things like NWN animations, which is only slightly less work, but has been done for a few. See the Infinity Animations forum for more information.

http://www.shsforums.net/forum/594-infinity-animations/

Rexfaroensis

Is there a modding community on this forum? I was thinking of trying my hands on modding, actually..

Ulfgar_Torunn

@Kaliesto

If you're very artistic and want to be able to fully customize the appearance of your new monsters I'd recommend Blender 3D. Blender 3D is a 3D modelling and texturing suite that allows you to create 3D models exactly as you imagine them. Model, prerender, convert to bif files and voila, you have new creature animations.

In terms of changing monster stats and adding new abilities you simply need to manipulate text files governing their creature data.

I hope this helps.

Miloch

@Ulfgar_Torunn - you'd have to convert the animations to fully-compatible BG2 .bam files (animations) which is the hard part. Not that making the animations is easy, but BAMs are not 3d models, but a sequence of 2d images which form 3d representations. Also, creature (.cre) files are not text - you need a editor capable of reading and translating the hex fields (such as DLTCEP or NI). That is fairly easy to do. Biff files (.bif) are basically just huge archives of other files (something vaguely like .zip or .rar).

@Kaliesto - the main modding communities are not here but on shsforums.net, gibberlings3.net, etc. You'll be better off asking such questions about modding there, as this forum is mainly for the enhanced game.