The Universe according to Spellborn

Last Sunday 27 april 2013 we (Acid and a friend, Ciara and I ) visited the comic convention at the Antwerpen expo.

 

It was a fun meeting and we had a good time presenting a printout of the unreal editor with the Spellborn arena as picture to both

Romano Molenaar and Chris Evenhuis.

 

For Romano it was a nice surprise that even after some years still some Spellborn fans turned up during the event.

 

Here a picture where he signed one of our original Spellborn art books.

 



 

Romano was quite busy during the event, making ordered drawings and off course sign copy's of his work like the Storm books.

 

Chris was working nearby, but at a different booth.

Here he is working on a requested zombie for Ciara, A 'best request ever' as we later read on his FB.

 



 

We were a little surprised that also former Spellborn artist Sjan Weijers showed up,

she did mostly work on the weapons and armours for the characters.

 



 

Sjan signed her howler work in our booklet

 

And I guess some of you know this design, it was supposed to be a dress design for Sharon of Within Temptation.

 

Here Chris is proudly showing it.

 



 

You can see the coloured version at this link:

http://forums.conceptart.org/showthread....&p=2416660

 

 

During the day we saw a lot of people who dressed up for so called cosplay,

some of them were pretty good looking compared to the original. 

 



 

Also something that came back from the future:



 

It was close to the end of the event when we drove home to the Netherlands.

 

Unfortunately Vampire and Cow didn't show up, could have been a good moment to meet each other.

 

Greetings Jan-Willem & Ingeborg

Fuark... I really shouldn't have had plans; I'm so regretting not being able to join you guys at the time. Looks like you had a blast though! 

I only have one thing to say...1.21 gigawatts!

Mhmm,

 

we might give it a try to get in contact with that car owner and blast us a few weeks back.

That way we should be able to redo the event

 

Greetings Jan-Willem.

What about going a few years back instead and getting your hands on all Spellborn data you'd need to run a private server? 

That would be nice, but it wouldn't be easily done, I fear

I also fear it's not as easy as it may sound.

 

First an update about my current work in progress.

 

I'm rebuilding my OS software from Vista on the older system to Windows 7 now.

The older system had a breakdown due to a lightning strike nearby.

 

The harddisks were still ok, it was just the sata and network connection that broke down on the old system's motherboard.

 

Since the OS wouldn't boot anymore on the new motherboard I had to do a new install.

I made a trial install for windows 8, but it was pretty quick decided that it was not my cup of tea as main OS for my system.

 

I was working on extracting the character meshes and the animation data of the skeletal meshes that belong to the character meshes

and it seems that it should be possible to get that done in a program.

 

Part of the program should be to build up the structure off the skeletal order of the bones since this is the link that has to be compared with

the animation data which is in a different file.

Next part is the shape of a character which is defined in the skeletal mesh part.

This shape has connections to the skeletal bones and the bones in order are animated according to the animation data.

 

Acid and I did find some definitions for the way the data should be placed in the Unreal packages, but you might have guessed that

the devs of Spellborn added extra things that I now have to find again between the rest of the data in the packages.

 

Current goal for me is to be able to extract the characters / monsters out of the Spellborn packages into the PSA and PSK files.

The PSA file contains the animation data en the PSK file the shape for a char/ monster. Both contain the skelet so they can be linked together

in 3D software such as 3DS max.

 

I did however read on the Epic forums that the actor-X software (which uses the PSA/PSK file format) is no longer supported with the newer version of 3DS Max,

it's only available for the older versions of 3DS max.

 

After I've finished the first goal Maybe next step should be to implement the newer way the data is exported / imported between the newer version of 3DS max and the current release of the UDK (Unreal Development Kit).

 

Let's see how far I can get in reaching my first goal.

 

CU,

 

Jan-Willem.

<div>
I also fear it's not as easy as it may sound.

 

First an update about my current work in progress.

 

I'm rebuilding my OS software from Vista on the older system to Windows 7 now.

The older system had a breakdown due to a lightning strike nearby.

 

The harddisks were still ok, it was just the sata and network connection that broke down on the old system's motherboard.

 

Since the OS wouldn't boot anymore on the new motherboard I had to do a new install.

I made a trial install for windows 8, but it was pretty quick decided that it was not my cup of tea as main OS for my system.

 

I was working on extracting the character meshes and the animation data of the skeletal meshes that belong to the character meshes

and it seems that it should be possible to get that done in a program.

 

Part of the program should be to build up the structure off the skeletal order of the bones since this is the link that has to be compared with

the animation data which is in a different file.

Next part is the shape of a character which is defined in the skeletal mesh part.

This shape has connections to the skeletal bones and the bones in order are animated according to the animation data.

 

Acid and I did find some definitions for the way the data should be placed in the Unreal packages, but you might have guessed that

the devs of Spellborn added extra things that I now have to find again between the rest of the data in the packages.

 

Current goal for me is to be able to extract the characters / monsters out of the Spellborn packages into the PSA and PSK files.

The PSA file contains the animation data en the PSK file the shape for a char/ monster. Both contain the skelet so they can be linked together

in 3D software such as 3DS max.

 

I did however read on the Epic forums that the actor-X software (which uses the PSA/PSK file format) is no longer supported with the newer version of 3DS Max,

it's only available for the older versions of 3DS max.

 

After I've finished the first goal Maybe next step should be to implement the newer way the data is exported / imported between the newer version of 3DS max and the current release of the UDK (Unreal Development Kit).

 

Let's see how far I can get in reaching my first goal.

 

CU,

 

Jan-Willem.


</div>

JW if there's anything I can do let me know please! Would love to help out or lend some computing power. 

Hello everyone,

 

After our visit to the Antwerp Comic convention (see some posts earlier) Ciara planned to spent some time in creating the Spellborn logo in crosstich.

 

We wanted it to be pretty good looking, meaning the number of colors and size of the design would be bigger then normal.

 

And now it's finally done after a few months work.

 

Ciara allready said, this is gonna be a unique item since she won't make a second one.

 

Those of you who have her on facebook might allready have seen it, but here is the picture.

 

For size comparison: The Original Spellborn artbook is also visible in the above convention pictures (held by Romano and Ciara)

 

Greetings Jan-Willem.

 

 



 

I could have posted these two in the other thread about the Spellborn character packages, but somehow it seems to be better placed here close to the pictures above from Chris and Sjan. Sjan is the artist who drew the howlers if I understood right during the Antwerp convention in 2013.

(Date for 2014 is Sunday 27 April) See Antwerpconvention.be

 

Just to make clear, these pictures are taken from the Unreal 2004 editor screen after importing a psk file which I created from the data of the original Spellborn game packages.

Next step will be getting together the sounds and animations which belong to the characters.  When I get something together it might be a good idea to make a youtube video

 

Greetings Jan-Willem