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| Introduction |
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This document is intended as a guide to the NWN mdl format. It's purpose is to
aid in the creation for editors and converters for the program as well as to
help people understand the options available in creating their own custom
content for NWN. Finally I hope that creating this guide will fuel discussion
about the areas of the format that are still unclear. The mdl files at a basic level define a scene graph, which is a common data structure for constructing 3d models or scenes. This seems to be a very simple scene graph that takes the form of a tree. (more complex formats, such as maya's DAG, allow arbitrary acyclic graphs.) In a tree each node can have at most one parent, although it may have many children. The children inherit properties from the parent node or can overwrite them with their own values, also the children transformations (position and orientation in this case) are defined relitive to the parent node's transformation. This means that moving or rotating the parent node will also affect child nodes, which is very useful in animation. The basic object in the mdl format seems to be the model. Each mdl file we have from bioware represents a single model, and each model has it's own scene graph associated with it (as well as animations and other properties). Models also support inheritance from other models. Other things to note: Any line beginning with # is a comment. The models begin with a filedependancy statement (for example: filedependancy Deer.max). This is before the model definition begins. I don't know what this statement does yet. It seems to refer to the max file from which the mdl was made. It could be related to the internal build process, or it could have some other purpose I'm not aware of yet. If anyone has any ideas let me know.
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Worlds of NeverWinter: http://www.wnwn.net/
This document is not supported by Bioware and should not be taken as an official specification for the NWN model format. It is based on my own experiments with the model viewer and speculations by others in the NWN community. There may be errors or omissions in this document, if you find any please let me know at: sorcerer@wnwn.net. The format may also change before the game is released. Finally I would like to thank the great community on the bioware forum for their contributions to this project.