The_mechanic's FULL TUTORIAL
CREATE SMOKE AND MOVE TO POSITION
In magos you do not need a bone to create a particle emmiter. OPEN MODEL then Merely go to windows-node manager and right click and select "create particle emmiter 2". e.g. for smoke, open the mpq browser ( also in windows) and go to file-open-war3.mpq. you will see a tree view of all ingame items. Select "Textures" and find the texture "cloud8x8fade" right click it and select "use as texture" then go back to the node manager and right click the particle emmiter you created and select "edit" (not edit node...yet) you will see a lot of boxes in one big box.
set texture ID as textures/cloud8x8fade and filter mode as blend. there will be check boxes under this, select "unshaded" "unfogged" and "head", from your bottom middle to left set "time", "life span" and "tail length" as somewhere around 0.5 to 1
(NOTE: the texture you are using has 64 clouds on it and as such youmust input 8 into "rows" and "columns to your bottom left" this tells the computer how to divide and show the texture)
For this example and most particles ignore "head life span" "head decay" and "tail life span" "tail decay" boxes and above that you will see three boxes, you may input colors into these boxes (like shades of grey, suggested - lighter to darker left to right)
the alpha boxes initially under those color choosers are how transparent you set each stage of the particle to, 255 being completely solid and 0 being invisible. Scaling reffers to how large the particle will be when generated, and you may set these to different sizes for each of the three parts. if you put in a small than medium than large number from left to right the particle emmiter; when created ingame; will grow larger (sugested- double digits e.g.15-25-50)
Above the color chooser you will see gravity, length and width, gravity refers to how far a particle will fall when created (like if there were gravity) and length and width refer to how much room a particle has to sporadically move around if you input a variable into "variation" (top right)
"Speed" above this refers to how fast the particles will move when either given a "variation" or "gravity" emission rate is very important since it tells the computer how often to make a particle. (larger numbers means more particles) and visibilty tells the computer when to show the particles. type in "1" for it to show up all the time in the model or "0" for it to be invisible all of the time. You can also click on the visibility button to manually tell the computer in which sequences the particle should show up.
For you, open the sequence manager in "windows" and double click on the sequence you want your particle to show up in. copy the number across from the word "From" (this is the start time of that animation) and paste it into the sub menu you brought up by clicking the visibility button. keep the number "0:0" in the menu and paste your number and type ": (1 for visible and 0 for invisible)
you can manually type in the start time for every sequence and put 1 or 0 for each one but also keep in mind that you must always have either 0:0 or 0:1 in the menu. 0:0 will default the particle to be invisible unless you type it otherwise, or o:1 for it to be defaulted as visible.
Also please remember that whenever manually inputing variable like this that they must always be in order or else the computer will skip the instructions that are smaller than the one above it so small to large in decending order
i hope this tutorial helped
