(Noob Question) My recolors of BoltImpact

[Shyster]

Hi there so I've always liked different colors to distinguish skill and character differences, I grew up on FF1 man. So I made a white and a green version of BoltImpact.mdx (the chain lightning target) and re-hued the associated textures in Paint.NET.

That's great and all, but there was an unforeseen problem I encountered after editing the .mdl files in notepad and converting back to .mdx - the effect lights up all the objects on the screen in game!

I don't mean to come across like a random beggar, I know little about modeling and I honestly tried as hard as I could to fix the problem myself. While I have passionately worked on Wc3 projects for 10 years my modeling experience does not go beyond making a ghost variant, and I am now trying to recolor without these types of lighting issues.

Is this something that is easily fixed? I do not have any expensive programs such as 3DS max. Thank you for reading and your help!

 

[Veritas 117]

You may have some luck on the request thread. You could post your model on there and see if someone can fix your problem for you. I'm often amazed at the help I get sometimes. (Sometimes not of course) but you might get lucky.

Good luck!

 

[Shyster]

I thought about that, but I figured since I do not dabble in this sort of thing often that I was missing something.

All I changed in the boltimpact.mdl was the name of the textures. I renamed them to Zap1_Green for instance to match the name of the zap I had recolored. I noticed that every time I used a name not originally included in the war3 MPQ that War3Viewer would create the spammy light planes all over the model. The recoloring worked just fine and I was pretty excited about that, but the lighting issue sort of ruined everything I'd taught myself how to do.

I'm assuming that means I have to overwrite one of the existing glows as opposed to making my own? That's kind of crappy because then I may accidentally overwrite something useful and may not be able to do it twice for both the white and green versions of the model.

I could post a few images of the lighting if it would help, I just figure lots of people have already encountered how to fix this. The light radius of everything nearby increases dramatically and it encompasses the field of view until the graphic is gone.

 

[PublishedShadow]

I think you can open the original model in magos model editor and change the coloring associated with the texture's there, then save it as a new model as opposed to doing it in paint.net and editing the notepad.

I did it with the Fog model before (changing it from blue to brown for a dust cloud) - just while tinkering around with it. However I can't remember everything I did and I am by no means a modeler.

Maybe you could try that out?

 

[Veritas 117]

Certain particles can be recolored in the node manager and certain geosets can be recolored in the geoset animation manager, but this doesn't always work for all of them. For instance if the texture you want to recolor is already red it is difficult to get it to look green by just changing the color in Magos.
At least that has been my experience. I am by no means an expert in modeling.

 

[Shyster]

Thank you guys for your replies, I'll try that out soon as I can.

Edit: I downloaded Magos a long time ago and was hopelessly confused. Now that you guys mentioned it and I'm older I went in and found I still have absolutely no clue how to change the colors, which is 99% likely the reason I downloaded it in the first place. I made an image to be more helpful visually. All I have learned so far is that this is probably the way to remove/add sounds to models, which is very convenient. Some people put really annoying sounds on models that I'd otherwise want XD

 

[Veritas 117]

This tutorial might help

 

[Shyster]

Ok thank you for that. I had searched the tutorial section many times but never found an appropriate title, guess you have to dig through each one.

I believe it's this particular model that is gonna be an issue, because that tutorial is obviously very easy. BoltImpact.mdx doesn't *have* any particles, it only borrows colors from textures in game. I guess I could try removing the omnilight and see if that helps?

Edit: Removed omnilight, made them disappear completely *sigh*

I'm confused. I guess I have to find something that has particles or else this just doesn't work even though it wouldn't seem to be hard at all either way.

 

[Veritas 117]

Well the best I could do was open the model in Magos, go to the MPQ browser and find Textures/Green_Glow2.blp and right click on it and select use as texture. Now go back and open the material manager and replace the two materials that use Blue_Glow2 with the Green_Glow2. This will give you a greenish glow around the bolt. Unfortunately the lightning itself is still blue since (afaik) there is no green zap.blp.

Try this out and see if you like it. Otherwise you may have to recolor the Zap1.blp and then import it.

 

[Shyster]

Yeah I know but that was when the problem occurred - I had recolored everything just fine without the help of magos but the lighting issue happened once I had edited the notepad and saved it. I didn't screw up any parentheses or commas or whatnot, I just changed the texture references to be the path of each of my custom textures that i already imported. Is it possible that I could have saved them in the wrong format before converting to BLP?

There's a BoltImpactYellow that someone on this site made. When I opened it up, all the textures are white squares too (since he's using a custom yellow zap, etc) but his model does not screw up the lighting like mine. I don't know what I've even done wrong to cause it. As far as I can tell, I did the exact same thing the author of the yellow lightning model did.

I'm kind of surprised no one else has come to help given how many knowledgeable people there are around.

To me, this process seems stupidly simple. Let's review, how could this get messed up?

1. Find model + associated textures to recolor
2. Export the textures and recolor as desired, save as blp
3. Convert the models to mdl, rename the textures in notepad to the path you'll use in worldedit
4. Save and switch back to .mdx
5. Import and test

It worked wonderfully except for the lighting problem. I have no idea how this process would make the graphic add a light on every object within view for its duration.

 

[Veritas 117]

I'm not sure. I'm afraid my knowledge is pretty limited. I'm sure someone who knows a lot about texturing and modeling could tell you right away. Hopefully someone will stop by this thread soon. Otherwise you could ask a moderator to move it to either the modeling or the texturing forum.

Good luck mate.

 

[Shyster]

Hey no worries, I appreciate the replies and thanks for sticking with me

 

[Shyster]

Does anyone else know how to help?

 

[PublishedShadow]

What about the Mana Flare effect?

If I remember correctly it has a blue-greenish color and is essentially the same as the bolt impact. Perhaps it may work for what you are needing.
It may even use particles that you can change in magos.

As far as the bolt impact goes, what you may be able to try, is instead of editing the mdl file in notepad you could Import the BLP and then
overwrite the original texture in import manager.

So for example, import your edited recolored texture and then rename it to Textures\Zap1.blp and see if that works.

 

[Shyster]

What about the Mana Flare effect?

If I remember correctly it has a blue-greenish color and is essentially the same as the bolt impact. Perhaps it may work for what you are needing.
It may even use particles that you can change in magos.

As far as the bolt impact goes, what you may be able to try, is instead of editing the mdl file in notepad you could Import the BLP and then
overwrite the original texture in import manager.

So for example, import your edited recolored texture and then rename it to Textures\Zap1.blp and see if that works.

That's what I'm using at the moment actually, I'm just assuming I'll never figure it out at this point. :\

I was hoping I could find another way besides overwriting a texture because I thought that would screw up anything else in the game that happens to use it. Wouldn't that be an issue?

 

[PublishedShadow]

Here ya go, I played around with Magos a bit and got something to work. See if that fits your needs.

File is attached.


Also, if you use chain lightning as the base spell, it goes well with mana burn as your lightning effect.


EDIT* I just realized two of these textures can be in-game textures which will save you a couple of imports.
If you want I can change it for you.

 

[Daffa]

You might be interested in SLK file for the lightning effects, it might suit your needs.

 

[Shyster]

Here ya go, I played around with Magos a bit and got something to work. See if that fits your needs.

File is attached.


Also, if you use chain lightning as the base spell, it goes well with mana burn as your lightning effect.


EDIT* I just realized two of these textures can be in-game textures which will save you a couple of imports.
If you want I can change it for you.

It works perfectly, thank you very much for being willing to help. I really appreciate it a lot. I've gotten great results with editing lightning effects and I was held back by editing the impact models, and the one you have here is great.

What did you do differently? Your glow is much deeper and richer than the one I made too, which I also like. I'd like to try and imitate what you did for the other one I need which is just a white version.

One last thing - is it easy to merge the textures like that? While the project is a ways from being 8mb after optimization, there's so much junk in this map nowadays I can hardly find stuff.

 

[PublishedShadow]

To create the model, I used Magos model editor to open the original effect, then exported the BLP's to my desktop. I then Used Wc3Viewer to convert them to TGA, then used GIMP 2.0 to recolor them to my liking.

After I recolored in GIMP, I used WC3Viewer again to convert back to BLP. Then imported all my textures into texture manager and replaced all the materials with my imported textures. Then simply saved the model as something different.

Also, Magos editor actually can convert the BLP's to TGA. I just used Wc3Viewer because I like to have everything separated.

For your second question, yes you can get rid of at least one of the imports if you use ingame textures. Just open the Model in Magos, then browse through the MPQ for Textures\Green_Glow2 and use it instead of the one I made. I didn't realize there was an in-game texture for that when I made this.

Unfortunately any texture that a model uses that isn't an in game texture has to be imported for the model to work.

 

[Shyster]

Thanks so much for all the help, I actually figured it out

I know by the standards nowadays this is simple to do but i have a strong appreciation for colors and aesthetics. I got a little confused with the ordering of materials cause of their crazy FJ39SLFKJ4 names but I am just glad to have found a way to fix it! TY <3