Modding

Good afternoon. I decided to try modding, and I found a lot of different information, but in the end, either it didn't help me, or I didn't understand how to do it correctly. My goal is not to insert models from other games or combine old guides, which there are many of, but to extract the basic models from Heroes 5, update them, and make them more detailed. This step is omitted everywhere, as if everyone already knows what and where to do. I encountered problems, so I will describe what I did step by step. 1) In the tutorials about extracting models, they show an example of how to extract models by UID, but they extract LOD models, which are much worse (which is understandable, these are LODs). The manual had a link to a video about extracting high-quality game models, but it is no longer valid. As a result, I figured out on my own how to get the UID for the main model's geometry in the editor. (I described this process because I deviated from the tutorial, and I may have missed something). 2) Now that I finally got a normal model and textures, I sent everything to ArkhangelTools and converted it to SMD, preserving all the bones. Later, I edited this file (model) in a 3D editor, and when I finished, I saved it again as SMD and sent it back to ArkhangelTools. In the port for displaying the image, the test sample of the Death Knight with a modified helmet is displayed correctly, including the preservation of bones. I followed the manual by Esto100nec, where many things are simply omitted, as if everyone already knows what and where to do. At the end of the manual, it said that when you are finished, you should "simply" export it back to the HOMM5 game format and "all that remains is to return them to the game." Excuse me, how? Is this a manual or the author's notes for himself? I still don't understand. As a result, I get a file with a constantly new generated name .new. What do I do with it next? 3) I started trying things out by trial and error, and here's what I did... I assumed that I need to recreate the structure up to the geometry file (there was a manual about this somewhere). Then, I copied the name of the original and the desired geometry and renamed my resulting .new file to the name of the original file. In this way, I hoped to replace the old file with my new one. As a result, in the game, I guessed correctly, and the file was replaced, but the model itself is not displayed in battle (only the shadow). 4) There is another question: my SMD file, which I exported from the 3D editor, was 1500 KB in size. When I loaded it into ArkhangelTools, it became almost twice as small after conversion to .new and became 896 KB. The question is, is this normal, and another question is, is it normal for the game to handle models with a large number of polygons? 5) I attached a link to an image on Google Drive - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VeWLu5_ ... =sharing (I didn't understand how to attach images on this forum)