wow.export Unityifier is a collection of shaders, asset postprocessors, and other tools aimed to make working with wow.export's exports fast and easy in Unity. With just a drag and drop, things like prefabs, alpha maps, and doodad generation are handled for you.
Overall, this tool will get you ~80% of the way there when it comes to using wow.export assets in Unity.
Importing assets and their metadata directly from wow.export, this plugin will automatically:
- Apply alpha maps and textures to terrain tiles
- Set basic shader settings for most objects
- Generate texture animations for objects such as flames and waterfalls
- Populate WMOs and ADTs with doodads automatically
Typically when working with wow.export, it's much easier to import the exports into blender, and then export that file into Unity, or some other software. That way, your WMO and ADT objects have all their doodads placed. This works for modeling, but with game projects, you may need to add things to those objects, like lighting to your torches, etc.
With the export for blender, you will have to replace every object with one prefab version to save you some work later, or write a script to handle it for you. This tool handles all that for you.
This package will create prefab variants for each doodad, allowing you to do things like add lights to all street lamps at once, make normally non-interactive objects carry some game logic, etc. Do it once and it will update every instance of that object in your project. Magic.
wow.export is an amazing tool, created and maintained by Kruithne. Please, do me (and yourself!) a favor and check out these links, and support Kruithne on Patreon:
You will require the following to use this package:
- Unity 2021.1 or greater
- Universal Render Pipeline (URP) 12.0 or greater
The whole idea of this plugin is to make things simple: one import process, and you can get started working on your scenes. This is the process from start to finish:
- Create an empty directory for wow.export to export to. (Optional, but recommended)
- Configure wow.export to export to that directory, and export all the assets you need.
- With your project open in Unity, drag the entire export folder into the project panel.
- Wait.
After some time (can be as much as an hour on slow machines, or if you export a lot of assets), presto! All your ADTs, WMOs, and their doodads are turned into prefabs!
As mentioned, we don't edit the models themselves, outside of manipulating the materials. Each ADT, WMO, and any doodads inside them have had a prefab variant created in the same directory, with the same name as the original object file.
To use the fully populated version of the ADT or WMO, simple drag the prefab variant into your scene.
Textures are left in their original folders. New materials are created for each texture, and those materials are placed in a folder in your project's Asset folder.
You can find those files at Assets/Materials/.
ADTs are automatically set up to use the current version of the terrain chunk shader, provided with the package. Updates to make the shader more game accurate (aka: correct) will be my next project, along with more accurate initial shaders.
Here are some quick things you can try that will resolve most problems:
- Delete the entire wow.export folder used to import the models from Unity.
- Reimport the files again, as you did before.
If there are still problems, delete the files exported from wow.export, update wow.export, reexport the files, and try again. If you continue to have problems, feel free to reach out to me on the repo, and I will try to get back to you.
In the future, I'm planning to look into:
- Foliage generation and rendering
- Render features for billboards (objects meant to face the camera at all times)
- Automatically attaching generated animations
- Apply armiture to exported models
- GLFT imports (when wow.export supports those exports)