Can anyone convert all the HC/IGC Units to usable format?
All the villagers walking in HC/IGC integrated into game will be such a wonderful idea.
I would especially want to see the HC Female villager wearing Saree to be in game. And the Japanese villagers made different from Chinese. And Incas from Aztecs.
It will be a dream come true to finally get to use these beautiful models.
Would be greatly thankful to anybody who can help fixing the bone of those models.
I think Phoenix is most of the way there already.
Are you referring to @Phoenixbursche0 ?
Yes, he is.
The question is how you want to use the HC units.
Wow, this is something, even I asked for 5 years ago:
Would be great if you can share the workflow for one unit as a simple guide. So that everyone can do it on their own.
Currently there are 2 options.
Either use their current animations - with the definition in the Protomods file as settler.
Then they can walk and such things, but the don’t have a gather animation. But all animations the have in the HC should work on them.
Or you have to redo the whole rigging for them to use the basic infantry unit skeleton.
Thank you for for your response! 
Primarily I want to see them as villager variants.
How do we do the rigging?
I’ts a bit complicated.
You need the “ressource manager” to extract all the model files you need (.gr2)
Then convert them to FBX.
Import the FBX to Blender, delete the armature.
Import an armature of any Infatry unit (no pikemen) from the legacy AOE3 then replace every space with an _ in the bone names and make sure that the vertex grooups of your model also use _ instead of a space.
Then scale your mesh to match the armature and parent them with Automatic weights, usually works, if not you have to make the weight painting yourself.
And keep the name of the material MatA, MatB, etc… (Blenders auto renaming MatA.001 wil not work.)
Then export as FBX & convert back to GR2. then it can be used within your mod as you want.
You can DM me on Discord then I can share my Blend file for Infantry units.
Discord @Phoenixbursche
Yeah it’s a bit complicated.
Would this be MP compatible?
Not sure, but I guess not unleass everyone has the same MODs enabled.
Some sound mods are MP compatible, for example.
You should know that Mexican HC villagers are already usable. My mod Mexican Unique Villagers (I think it is its name) use them as foundation
Oo I didn’t know that. So is this also for Incan Villagers? I mean they were also introduced post DE.
But what if we made a mod with only Art replacement and no change to proto.xml? Will it still affect multiplayer functionality?
I’m pretty sure if you override the villager.xml with a different villager.xml then it would not be multiplayer compatible. Could be wrong though.
There is a way to make a multiplayer compatible visual mod by using visualmods.xml. It was a tool introduced for the official winged hussar mod. The mod’s visualmods.xml file contents is here if you don’t have access to it. How do I make a muliplayer-compatible reskin mod? - #4 by Stark22e The visualmods.xml goes in the data folder.
Assertive Wall made some reskin mods using this method that are multiplayer compatible like his Age of America mod. You could check out one of his mods to see how he structured the files.
There are limitations to this method. As far as I know when you switch one model for another it applies to every civilization. So if for example you switch out the dragoon model, it will switch it for every civilization that uses it so it’s mainly good for unique units. Also I don’t think you can have more villager variants then what the game has already with this method. Most civs only have one male and female variant.
All the villagers you mentioned should be unique except the Mexican villager which uses the Mediterranean Villager model.
I was trying to use visualmods to make the rekruts standard musketeers however, rekruts have their hats as part of their model while musketeers have their hats as a separate model. I was only able to turn rekruts into musketeers without hats.
I wish there was more documentation on what could be achieved with visualmods.xml other than switching models and adding particles.
Here you can see an screenshot of the progress of making Mexican VIllagers. They are fully compatible:
I think Incan VIllagers from HC are in reality Aztec Villagers from their HC, barely reskinned.
Right now I’m slighty sick, but I was working in a Villagers mod. However, you should know that everything @SnowLynx2 said is true, as far as I know. MP compatible just includes modifying ddt texture files or png, not xml files, didn’t even replacing gr2 files.
Incredible. So Mexicans and Aztecs are sorted.
I wish for Indians and Japanese too.
