Was there any need for this?—No, not really.
Why did I do it then?—For my amusement, for my curiosity, and for my man-crush on the Butcher—all of this spurred me on.
So this contains the Butcher animation from Heroes of the Storm, some of his sound files and a general installer to put them into the game. There is no playable content in this mod, it is just a modding resource. (A mod using the animation is in the works though..)
*edit* I should note that this works only for the EE versions. I do not plan to release a version for the classic game using Infinity Animations since I no longer play/mod with it. If anyone feels like doing that though, they are more than welcome to.
Support for the classic engine (with InfinityAnimations) has been provided by Gwendolyne.
Some notes on the animation:
- Current version uses a copy of the “stand idle” animation for its “combat ready” animation.
The reaon for this is that oddly enough the attack animations line up a lot better with the “stand idle” animation. (The combat ready animation is fully functional though so if there is any need/interest I can upload that as well.)
- He does not attack with his cleaver.
His attack animations are huge anyway, with his cleaver animations more than doubling the animation's size. In addition to that, the 3d nature of the animation, shape of the cleaver and view angle made the cleaver “change size” dramatically whenever it was moved into the “camera” (south facing attacks). At times the cleaver appeared bigger than the Butcher himself. So for now he just hacks and slashes with his hook.
- There were no death/dead animations for him so I had to improvise a bit.
His death animation is him dissolving into smoke instead of falling down and he has no corpse.
- He has also an unusual sleep animation as a result of the missing dead animation. I used his "stunned" animation which means instead of falling down he just drops his head/arms and shambles a bit form one side to the other. Usually the game just loops the last frame of the sleep animation for as long as it needs to. With the continuous "stunned" animation I got around that by simply prolonging the sequences. Bottom line: If a sleep effect doesn't run for longer than one minute everything is fine. Anything longer than that and his animation will "freeze" until he wakes up.
That's it. I mostly just wanted to see how easy/hard it is to port an animation from a 3d model and also, I just really like the Butcher.
Credits:
Original Art - Blizzard Entertainment
Porting to Source Filmmaker/HLMV - Yaron (https://sfmlab.com/profile/3762/)
Porting to BGEE/SOD/2EE - Ulb
Porting to classic BG engine - Gwendolyne
Argent77 for the automated animation slot code I stole from him. 
Programs used:
Audacity
Gimp
HLMV (Source Filmmaker version)
NearInfinity
SimpleScreenshot
V1.1 Changes:
Modified the north facing sequence of attack animation 1. The cleaver appears slightly smaller now.
Changed his death sound to reflect him dissolving into smoke.
V1.2 Changes:
Modified the animation's contrast and saturation. Looks a lot more crisp/detailed now.
V1.3 Changes:
Added support for classic BG by Gwendolyne
Changed GetHit animation sequence to look less "choppy".
Edited by Ulb, 12 August 2017 - 04:03 AM.
