[General] To everyone that created effects/FX

[old]

(If here is not the right place to this thread, please feel free to change to the right location where i'll hit the people im asking)
In every game, there is something called Visual Effects, these effects are used to make some very cool spells. You can take example of Warcraft, the fire, the lightning, the Holy etc... My question is: in these effects, what is the thing that makes water effect looks like water, and the fire effect, fire... And holy effects holy... etc.?

How do you make them? How do you make the fire, how do you make the water, the holy, etc?

 

[Light]

Could you explain a little bit better, please?

 

[old]

Could you explain a little bit better, please?

How do you create special effects, like fire balls, ice balls, lightnings, storms, auras, smokes, beams etc.
These special effects are used to make spells of any game, like warcraft, heroes of the storm, lot of games. Warcraft 3 for example, you can see them in world editor, editing abilities properties (Cooldown, mana, etc.) there are fields called "Effect" (effect in caster, target, AoE, missile effect, a lot of them). How is it created?
If you go in Maps&Resources --> Models ---> SFX in this site, you'll see a lot of effects, thats what im talking.

 

[Wark]

Well, those are created using 3D modeling programs. You can find some details about 3D modeling in the tutorial section, if that's your thing.

Or, you could import those existing models into your map for use.
Just download them, then press "F12" for your map, and import the model into there.
Take note: follow the instructions for importing models exactly, or it won't work. You'll see details of that on the webpage for the model, like file paths and such.

 

[Chaosium]

Most of them consist of particle emitters, which are basically textures that are emitted at a certain speed, latitude, variation, etc.

I'd suggest you use Magos Model Editor to check special effects created by Blizzard, try to tinker a bit with them and check tutorials about how to create them.

 

[old]

Most of them consist of particle emitters, which are basically textures that are emitted at a certain speed, latitude, variation, etc.

I'd suggest you use Magos Model Editor to check special effects created by Blizzard, try to tinker a bit with them and check tutorials about how to create them.

Particle emitters, yes! Thats the word i was looking for. The particles, particles systems etc. i know how it "works", i saw some creators, like Unreal Cascade. The question i was trying to make is about the textures, particles emitters are just a lot of pixels emitted with different speed, time, and other things. But how do you make them looks like fire, or ice, or water etc.?

 

[Light]

Should be a combination of textures, their color and how they are emitted. Like, water splashes are basically an outward bluish nova, fire is a bunch of orange particles moving up, etc. To get into the specifics, I'd do what the others have said and download existing particle models and look into how they emit particles.

 

[Kyrbi0]

One of the best ways to learn (particle-creation specifically, 3D-art more generally, Warcraft 3 Modding more generally, and In Real Life even more generally ) is by doing; by diving in & messing around with stuff.

For this, I'd say I've learned an awful lot by simply cracking open the existing SFX assets in the game & studying how they are made, as well as tinkering with the values to see what changes. For this, the simplest & easiest tool is probably Magos Model Editor (provided here on the Hive); the only thing it can't seem to handle are Ribbon emitters but in lieu of that, you can mess around with & see nearly everything.

Open that, make sure it can find your War3 MPQs (if you've updated recently you'll need a copy of the old ones, since the MPQs are replaced now), and open the built-in MPQ Editor & traverse the file paths to find some SFX. Then open it up, open the Node Manager, and check out some of the particles. See what textures they use, and with what colors & parameters.

Then change stuff (everything!) & see what you can create.

Good luck!