Guide on adding a new model, animation, and creature to HoMMV

I finished writing a small guide on some basic functions when working with models in 3Ds Max. I sent it to you on VK, Zakhar. I think you can adapt it for your guide. I hope it will be useful to at least someone.

Well, I like running Heroes on my old laptop, and in theory, I would like to run it on my Android phone as well. Plus, we don't know how the game will react if we overload it. Therefore, I think it's better to keep the models around a decent 10k polygons (considering that in the original game they range from about 2 to 7k). 10k is, by the way, a standard for modern mobile games. In principle, the models from Heroes 7 are already in that polygon range, so they don't require additional retopology. (although for the global map, it makes sense to use LODs, in Heroes 7 they are available for most models and can be generated with just two clicks).
But here's the question, if a two-sided modifier multiplies the polygons, then instead of a harmless 10-12k, we get 20-25k, which, I agree, is not very good considering that the game engine was originally designed for models with 3k.
But even here, the problem is easily solved. You can simply separate the elements of the model that should be two-sided into a separate mesh and apply a material with a two-sided modifier only to this mesh in the game.

Well, I don't know, nowadays it's quite rare to find hardware that would struggle to run "Heroes 5" or not run it at all. I played it on such hardware in 2006, which is funny to remember. Here are the system requirements for Heroes 5, by the way. Operating system: Windows 2000/NT/XP Processor: Pentium IV 1.5 GHz or AMD Athlon Memory: 512 MB Video: 64 MB (NVIDIA GeForce series 3/4/FX/6, ATI RADEON series 8500/9000/X Matrox Parhelia) Free disk space: 2 GB DirectX 9.0c or higher There's no point in comparing it to today's configurations of the most basic PCs. Optimization is very good and useful, but in such cases, it is unnecessary, in my opinion. P.S. I'm not insisting on my opinion, I just think that each modder should decide this issue for himself. In my projects, I have long abandoned the position of "it should run on any computer" in favor of a more beautiful picture. Therefore, I first removed all LOD models, because for me, watching creature models with three and a half polygons is painful, my eyes just bleed.

You can simply separate the elements of the model that should be two-sided into a separate mesh and apply a material with a two-sided modifier only to this mesh in the game.

Why not. By the way, in some cases, applying two-sided materials where they shouldn't be, sometimes distorts part of the model, as if mixing the top and bottom layers of the material. Although, perhaps this defect does not appear in all models. However, in my opinion, it is still not worth abusing it :D