Flying Balls Model : Portrait Upgrade First not working...

[Macadamia]

Hello fellow modelers !!!

Well I shall not yet consider myself as such as I am still slowly learning the basics.

Here is my problem :

For my map, I had a couple of "Ball" models. Balls are the attacking creeps in my special TD.
I have a "Rolling Ball" model for ground attackers, that actually rolls with the walk animation.
Then I made a special version of the model without the rolling for air attackers.

All I had to do is attach wings to the model and voila everything worked.
Well except the wings were not showing as a portrait, and as a perfectionist, I could not stay satisfied.
Moreover, I have 3 Types of Balls, with different wings textures.

So I first made 3 versions of a "Flying Ball" model, each version with different wings attached.
It worked great.

Next, In order to optimize all this and avoid model redundancy, I decided to make a single model with the 3-in-1 wings.
For this, I replicated the wings geoset itself, to have 3 wings geosets with each its own texture.
Then I adjusted the animations just like the Human tower that can upgrade to Guard and Cannon towers with the Upgrade First and Second animations.

So I replicated my Birth, Stand, Walk, Portrait and Death animations twice, renamed them accordingly with the "Upgrade First" and "Upgrade Second" suffixes, added a couple of corresponding GeosetAnimations all taking the time intervals into consideration.

Note that the flappings of the wings are managed by global sequences, and I even made 3 separate but identical Global Sequences for security.

Also note that I did all this editing in MDL format with Notepad++ as I believe it is the easiest method for this kind of editing.

Now I tested the resulting model, and it works perfectly under both Retera Model Studio Hack and Magos Warcraft3 Model Editor.

Then I assigned the model to my 3 different kind of flying Balls, and properly filling the fields "Required Animation Names", with nothing for the ones with the first type of wings, "upgrade,first" for the ones with the second type of wings, and "upgrade, second" for the ones with the third type of wings .

Unfortunately, once ingame, everything works EXCEPT for the animation "Portrait Upgrade First" that displays the wings of the default "Portrait" animation. Fun enough the "Portrait Upgrade Second" work fine and displays the proper wings.

If there is any experienced modeler around who could have a glimpse at my model and tell me what went wrong, I would be immensely grateful as I have been unable to trace the source of the problem.


I have attached both MDX and MDL versions of the model with the 4 required textures (3 wings + Ball).
The last texture used belongs to the game storage.
Note all my textures have the path "Custom Textures\" as a prefix.

Thank you.

EDIT: Here are ingame captures to show you the problem :

Portrait (BallWings)

Portrait Upgrade First (BallWings2):

Portrait Upgrade Second (BallWings3):

EDIT : I did not realize it, but I captured the 3 screenshot at nearly the same position for all wings, but they indeed flap properly ingame, even for the portrait.

 

[Hermit]

I don't think there's a problem with your model; the same thing happens when I make a custom unit in the Object Editor and try to change its model to the standard Guard/Cannon/Arcane Tower; it always shows the portrait of the Scout Tower. It seems like the "Art - Required Animation Names" field no longer works properly with portraits.

 

[Macadamia]

Yes that is indeed strange. I sometimes also have the issue with the scour tower once upgraded (but not always).
In fact the stranger part is the fact that the Portrait Upgrade Second works great.

Maybe I should add a fourth set of animations and see if the new one works.

If anyone has better ideas, they are welcome !

 

[Macadamia]

UPDATE !!!

I am posting an update for anyone who would face the same issue with their own models.
It seems that the game tends to mess up some portrait animations when you model has tags with more than one word.

My problem was fixed when I changed "Upgrade First" to "Alternate" and "Upgrade Second" to "Upgrade".

I hope this will help someone.