Help on custom models and animations

Hey everyone, brand new to the forums and made an account just to see if anyone can help out.
Me and a friend are working on a very ambitious mod for AOE3:DE that brings it into the Warcraft setting. We are jumping into this with no previous experience and just hopes and dreams. We figured out how to access the files and are still learning how the coding works, but now we run into an issue about creating custom models and animations. Since this is going to be set in Warcraft, everything needs to be new. I looked around for answers online before coming here, but I can’t find anything conclusive.

The only reason why we know creating custom animations and models is possible because we saw the Age of Pirates mod, which is also what inspired us to try our hand.

In short, any one know how to make models and animations from scratch?

Make them in Blender Maya or whatever you use and export them as fbx. Then there’s an online converter to go from fbx to GR2.