[General] Fallling Ash Weather Effect

[ShenLong Kazama]

How can i make a weather effect which looks like falling ash?

 

[defskull]

Download the test map below.
Change that fire dummy, to your "falling ash" model.

 

[WaterKnight]

Use an mpq viewer and extract TerrainArt\Weather.slk, preferably the one from War3x.mpq. Edit this file with War3Slk Edit for example. You can create new entries or modify an existing weather effect. There is a number of fields for them, specifying the properties of the particle emitter, experiment with these. The basic image's path is determined by texDir/texFile, search for an appropriate graphic in the mpqs or import a custom one into your map. This modified slk-file you also import then and set its path to TerrainArt\Weather.slk to overshadow the default one.

Of course, you can take some other approach like defskull's proposal to create the illusion but the independent particle emitters should be much cheaper than periodically moving tons of units. Also you would not spread these units over the whole map but only where you currently looking at (and maybe recycle them).

 

[ShenLong Kazama]

Download the test map below.
Change that fire dummy, to your "falling ash" model.

I have no ash model, i thought it could work if i edit the snow weather effect.

 

[13oot-Me]

@defskull, I thought "entire map" leaks, does it not?

 

[defskull]

Never heard of those rumors, I don't know (my knowledge).

Perhaps you can replace it with (Playable map area).

 

[WaterKnight]

Yes, it does create a new rect.

 

[ShenLong Kazama]

So how can i get this to work properly?

 

[WaterKnight]

Get an ash model and use defskull's method or execute mine?

 

[ShenLong Kazama]

And where can i get an ash model? I tried to recolor the snow flake textures but the snow is unchanged in the editor.

 

[WaterKnight]

Search for one or create it yourself. Recoloring the snowflakes surely is possible. The editor loads data different than the game does. If it at all recognizes your imported texture in editor, you would at least have to reload the map.

 

[ShenLong Kazama]

It still doesn't work. The snowflakes stay white. And where can i get an ash model? I can't find any.

 

[WaterKnight]

When searching fails, create one yourself. But here you have recolored flakes. Bon appétit.

 

[ShenLong Kazama]

Nice, but how did you recolored the snow? I tried myself but somehow the snow looks like white squares.

 

[WaterKnight]

Extracted ReplaceableTextures\Weather\snow.blp, recolored the file and imported it into the map under the same path to replace the old one.

 

[ShenLong Kazama]

I did the same thing but it didn't work somehow. Or do i have to convert it properly?

 

[WaterKnight]

What do you mean "convert it properly", it has to be a blp again in the end. How should things work if you did them improperly like corrupting the file format or choosing a wrong path?

 

[ShenLong Kazama]

I have the option to convert the jpg file to blp1 or blp2. Anyway, when i open the snow texture, it doesn't show up properly. It looks like this:

 

[WaterKnight]

I do not own that program, so cannot say if it works properly. Does this one also do the conversions? Blp is a format of Blizzard, so only some specially created tools know it. And apparently, the snow.blp texture is a pure-white graphic.

I used Wc3ImageExtractor2 for conversions and modified the file as tga in Photoshop.