Editing an exported WoW model - Seeking advice

[Into The Earth]

Hello there, long time no see!
So, every once in a blue moon I get back into messing with the World Editor, and for the current private project I'm working on, I've decided to use several models from WoW. To my delight, I found a model of C'thun that was exported from WoW and had the eye and the body merged - perfect for what I'm trying to do (although I will edit the skin to look kind of in the same vein as the Forgotten One skin in the Heart of Storms mpq)! However, upon further examination, I ran into several issues that no searches provided the answers for, although I suspect the fixes may not be that difficult. And that is why I've decided to post here, to seek your guidance, o fellow Hivers!

First off, here is a screenshot of the model in Magos:

Now for my issues:

-I-
The purple glow around the eye is only visible from the front and back, and seems to swivel with the eye's movement. I could swear there was a way in WC3 modeling to make textures show the same way from every angle, but after hours of searching, it seems to elude me.

-II-
This one bothers me most. Ingame, C'thun is way too bright:

It also seems to me that they're not affected by the omnilight very much:

Again, I seem to remember that this was something that happened if you forgot to check a certain option in Magos, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was!

-III-
As you can see in the pictures, the model is rather tiny for an Old God. I think it was resized using a certain technique that is often employed for models exported from WoW, but, once more, I can't remember exactly how it's done. The model appears large when not animated, and shrinks as soon as any frames start playing.
This is probably the least critical one, since I can just resize using the Object Editor, but I thought it might have to do with the brightness issue.

Thank you in advance for your help, and may you never get eaten by an Eldritch Being from Beyond!

 

[Hermit]

-I-
The purple glow around the eye is only visible from the front and back, and seems to swivel with the eye's movement. I could swear there was a way in WC3 modeling to make textures show the same way from every angle, but after hours of searching, it seems to elude me.

Nodes with the billboarded flag are oriented to face the camera. Fully billboarded objects will always face the camera in the same orientation. E.g. it is used to make the sphere at the top of Priest's staff look like it is three-dimensional even though it is actually a flat surface.

This flag is also used in almost every model that has some kind of glow, like Far Seer and Witch Doctor missiles. Objects that are only billboarded on one or more axes will face the camera on those axes, but may rotate around other axes. War3 Model Editor often has problems with properly displaying billboarded surfaces.

-II-
This one bothers me most. Ingame, C'thun is way too bright:
View attachment 333022
It also seems to me that they're not affected by the omnilight very much:
View attachment 333023
Again, I seem to remember that this was something that happened if you forgot to check a certain option in Magos, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was!

The unshaded flag in material layers prevents shadows from being generated when the model appears in game.

-III-
As you can see in the pictures, the model is rather tiny for an Old God. I think it was resized using a certain technique that is often employed for models exported from WoW, but, once more, I can't remember exactly how it's done. The model appears large when not animated, and shrinks as soon as any frames start playing.
This is probably the least critical one, since I can just resize using the Object Editor, but I thought it might have to do with the brightness issue.

There's probably a node at the top of the hierarchy that applies a scaling transformation to the entire model.

 

[Into The Earth]

Wow, thank you so much for your reply!

Nodes with the billboarded flag are oriented to face the camera. Fully billboarded objects will always face the camera in the same orientation. E.g. it is used to make the sphere at the top of Priest's staff look like it is three-dimensional even though it is actually a flat surface.

This flag is also used in almost every model that has some kind of glow, like Far Seer and Witch Doctor missiles. Objects that are only billboarded on one or more axes will face the camera on those axes, but may rotate around other axes. War3 Model Editor often has problems with properly displaying billboarded surfaces.

I suspected something like this, thanks for clearing up exactly how it works. After some searching I found that I can toggle the bone that the glow is attached to as billboarded. Now to find which bone that is (is there a good way to find out?) and probably create a new bone just for the glow, since the one it seems to be attached to also moves a lot of other things on the model.

The unshaded flag in material layers prevents shadows from being generated when the model appears in game.

So that was the culprit! Well, partly... There seems to be more going on, like doubled and tripled geosets, the body and the eye using the same material so I can't toggle the eye to "unshaded" and the body to normal, and the lower eyes using what seems to be like strange UV mapping and multiple transparent layers... This model is a real mess!

There's probably a node at the top of the hierarchy that applies a scaling transformation to the entire model.

Yeah, I will look out for that. Thanks again for your help, Hermit!

For anyone who's curious or eager to help out, I've attached the model file to this post.

 

[Into The Earth]

So, I've been working on this for the last few days. I've trimmed down the geosets from 18 to 5(!), since all the rest were duplicates, attached a new billboarded bone to which the glow is now assigned (this seems to work well), resized and renamed the "Scralebone", split the body and eye into using different materials... This all helped, but the body was still far too bright and washed out. I then noticed that the small "eyereflect" texture was currently applied to the whole of the body. After deleting that material, I've gotten closer to my goal, but now I have the opposite problem:

Now the body suddenly lacks in brightness. I've played with leaving the eyereflect texture in the model, toggling it to transparent filter and adjusting it's alpha value, but that didn't seem to do anything ... At least for the body, this time. Instead, the lower eyes which don't even use that material, got less bright and more defined. I am utterly confused.
If anyone has any insights to share, I'd be grateful. I'll once again attach the model in its current state.


EDIT:
Updated from 1.30 to 1.31 and that fixed it somehow.