Are models made for reforged versions not available in older versions?
Hi yelimeng, and welcome to the Hive! Warcraft III: Reforged is a graphical remaster of the Warcraft III game that replaces the Warcraft III render pipeline with new code copied from modern game engines. When the computer goes to draw each pixel of a Warcraft III: Reforged model surface, the computer pulls in a mosaic of data from three to six texture files and performs mathematical operations on the colors of the textures as individual numeric values. These values compute physics-based lighting and shading on the surface of the model that allows it to approximate an appearance as though the model were much more complicated than it actually is, by approximating the 3D world as being constructed from a lattuce of infinite tiny mirrors. These mirrors each reflect the light using the radiance equation calculus computations and that produces the color of the surface of the Reforged model. You can read about the radiance equation and the calculus involved here:
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These assets that the Reforged engine can load and process using this radiance equation and the related PBR technologies that require complex calculus in order to draw to the screen are technologically unlike what was present on the 2002 Warcraft III CD. The format would be alien to the 2002 Warcraft III game, and it would not be able to draw them because the necessary calculus and equations to perform this kind of render probably only existed in a theoretical sense in 2002, if it even existed at all. Wikipedia says the term "PBR" was not widely popularized until 2014.
So the model that I have uploaded here requires ingame textures from the Warcraft III: Reforged game. If you were to try to load this model on a copy of Warcraft III from the year 2002 from your CD, then that would not work. In addition, if you tried to port the model back to your 2002 Warcraft III game installation, then that would not work either even if you also included the texture files. Even a port of the new the texture files imported on your old version of the game would not have the necessary radiance equation calculus happening inside the computer to display them, so the model file would come out looking like play-dough garbage, if at all.
If you are interested in converting models to look like play-dough garbage to use on your old CD-based installation of Warcraft III from the year 2002, there is a computer software that I developed here on the Hive for editing Warcraft III models called Retera Model Studio. In my software, as a joke late one evening I added a button to convert the Reforged assets back into their counterpart 2002 Warcraft III game format directly. My main goal was to prove to people who were asking me to help them that doing so was a dumb idea.
What I have found is that because I accidentally left that button in my program long-term, a number of people came to take it more seriously and use it, believing that they were "converting the Reforged models to classic" although really they were just using a joke piece of software that I created to produce play-dough garbage.
More recently, other users besides myself have found ways to precache the results of the radiance calculus equations and use that to create models that are valid inputs for custom maps on the 2002 Warcraft III CD game -- but the models look
a bit more like their Reforged counterparts than anything that I have ever created. However, because those people probably had to work incredibly hard to pull something like that off, I have not seen anyone share how it is being done. You would essentially have to bake and produce an entirely new texture asset, as well as dealing with other problems. It would be a technologically involved process, although in theory you might be able to automate most of it.
When you were done, you would have a fabulous way of achieving the grotesque potential to essentially pirate Reforged one individual model at a time. Every time you pirate a Reforged model, an angel loses its wings.
Does that answer your question?
Edit:
Here's a video that answers your question basically -- the answer is that NO you do not want to even try to do that. You think you do, but you do not.
haha look, I even fixed the geometric spears sticking out of his chest and put back the team color:
today an angel truly lost its wings...