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War3 Model Editor

This bundle is marked as director's cut. It exceeds all expectations and excels in every regard.
//MOD EDIT// - PLEASE CHECK "UPDATE 2" below before posting if you have ISSUES USING MAGOS

This Model Editor is not made by me, but is made by Magos.

War3 Model Editor is as the name suggests a Model Viewer and a Model Editor dedicated to Warcraft 3. It supports both loading and saving of .mdl and .mdx model formats which are used in Warcraft 3. It also supports .bmp, .tga, .png, .jpg, .jpeg, .pcx and .blp texture formats.

There is a built-in MPQ Browser that allows you to browse any MPQ archive, which also includes Warcraft 3 map files (.w3m and .w3x). The MPQ Browser has been optimized for speed and is very fast to load and use. The Browser is customizable so you can add/remove your own icons and filters.

Features

* Model Viewer
* Model Editor
* Geoset Importing/Exporting
* Can save/load the model formats *.mdl and *.mdx
* Can save/load the texture formats .bmp, .tga, .png, .jpg, .jpeg, .pcx and .blp
* Can import other model formats (importers stored in DLLs)
* Ability to convert between the model formats
* Ability to convert between the texture formats
* MPQ Browser (very fast loading)
* Support for custom listfiles
* Support for custom MPQ filters & icons

Extras

* Loading Screen Creator
* A tool to create colored text for Warcraft 3

Supported Importers

* md2 (Quake 2)
* ms3d (Milkshape)


UPDATE 1 //by Rui​

Hey people, it's Rui. I have updated the tool to v1.07 and added some keywords for searching. Enjoy!


UPDATE 2 //by Khyrberos​

In recent years, both with modern OSes & with Reforged, W3ME might require a few adjustments to work properly.

(Made redundant by update 3)
One common issue over the years was missing DLLs; as described in this post by Hero_Lief and this message by Pyf, the DirectX Installer can be downloaded here. (Alternatively, as Hermit describes here, you can Google & download the specific file 'd3dx_9.dll' needed by W3ME.)

(Doesn't apply to beta v1.08)
A new issue with 1.30+ is its use of the CASC data system, replacing the old MPQ system. As described by Hermit in this post, you will need to have/find a copy of the old MPQs & put them where War3 Model Editor can find them in order for it to work properly. It appears 1.28 files work the best in v1.07

UPDATE 3 //by BogdanW3​

The v1.07 zip has been repacked to include the dll needed to make it run without having to install the DirectX runtime, thank you to @Dr Super Good for noting that that's the proper way to do things now with deprecation of Direct3D9 taking place.

You can now also download a new version, v1.08 beta, which was updated by me (@BogdanW3) and has some nice new, albeit still to be thoroughly tested, features:

* Edit texture paths directly from the textures window (no need for MDL for this)
* Support for v1000 (1.32) and v1100 (1.33, only loading for now) SD MDX models
* DDS texture support
* Hierarchical loading of textures (a texture referenced as tga in a model will no longer fail to load if the file is for example blp)
* Loading assets from CASC (no CASC browser at this time due to library limitations)
* 24 team colours
* Replaceable IDs 36 and 37, as well as a few more event objects are added from entries in the game data (thank you @Hermit)
* And more!

Feel free to contact me if there's any bugs or regressions you wish to report. MagosX has given me permission to post it, so I would like to thank him for that as well as making a great model editor with a very readable codebase!
This version currently works best with 1.29 MPQs or 1.31+ CASC.
Requires the 64-bit Visual C++ 2015 runtime.

PS, applies to all versions of W3ME:​

To set up the War3 Model Editor to load data (be it MPQs, or CASC in v1.08) from a specific folder, you will want to set up the string Registry value InstallPath in the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Blizzard Entertainment\Warcraft III\ to point to the Warcraft 3 data folder you wish to use.
For a more step-by-step explanation, check this comment by StormKnight.

Keywords:
warcraft, 3, III, magos, w3me, editor, model, war3, wc3, mdx
Contents

War3 Model Editor v1.07 (Binary)

War3 Model Editor v1.08 (64-bit, beta) (Binary)

Reviews
PurplePoot: Approved for extreme usefulness, whether as a mapper or a modeler.
Level 2
Joined
Jan 1, 2023
Messages
3
I have been using this tool a lot recently to make particle effects. This tool is great, but there are a few imperfections. If it can be fixed, I will be moved to tears! 1, ribbon effect cannot be displayed, 2, tail effect cannot be displayed, and 3, fixed particles in model space cannot be displayed correctly. 4, XY phase time limit, particles and game effect is different, lack of random direction, 5, particles jet state is invalid
 
Level 40
Joined
Feb 27, 2015
Messages
522
why does magos hate particle emitters 1, the green icon ones,"SuperSpray" bones/gutz? if you want it in your model you have to save in .mdl, otherwise they get deleted; but as far as i can tell it doesn't happen when you edit a blizzard model that had them by default
i copied it from a blizzard model, converted both to .mdl and looking at them side-by-side and the only difference i see is that default blizzard model's superspray has all numbers with six digits after a dot, even for visibility where it's usually just 1 or 0; but even that didn't help and it still wiped it clean off after saving as .mdx
is there just nothing to do? if i want it in my model i have to add it as the last thing ever?
 
Level 21
Joined
May 29, 2013
Messages
1,567
why does magos hate particle emitters 1, the green icon ones,"SuperSpray" bones/gutz? if you want it in your model you have to save in .mdl, otherwise they get deleted
I experience the same thing on my old Windows 7 PC, but not on my Windows 10 PC. I hope someone who knows more about computers will figure out why this happens.
 
Level 40
Joined
Feb 27, 2015
Messages
522
I experience the same thing on my old Windows 7 PC, but not on my Windows 10 PC. I hope someone who knows more about computers will figure out why this happens.
hmm, for me it happens on windows 10 laptop
i'll check out if that happens on my older windows 8.1 laptop and report back day after tomorrow

edit: yeah, mdl-only on win 8.1 laptop too
 
Last edited:

Kyrbi0

Arena Moderator
Level 44
Joined
Jul 29, 2008
Messages
9,487
Hey so I finally got this working on my PC & it's pretty great, but I ran into a little issue which is hard to describe...

Basically there are two different kinds of dialog windows that can pop up when I go to Open File; one is the "older" one (Windows XP-style skin (gray)), and the other is the "newer" one (Windows +7-style skin (dark mode)). Most importantly, the latter features an 'address bar' file-system thing, where I can copy-paste an entire address to find exactly which model I want to open (as opposed to the former, which only has a drop-down box & the "Up-Folder" button).

In your ( @BogdanW3 's) latest version, I only get the former ("older") one, and cannot seem to access the latter ("newer") one, which I really want.

Any thoughts?
 
Level 17
Joined
Feb 25, 2013
Messages
303
Hey so I finally got this working on my PC & it's pretty great, but I ran into a little issue which is hard to describe...

Basically there are two different kinds of dialog windows that can pop up when I go to Open File; one is the "older" one (Windows XP-style skin (gray)), and the other is the "newer" one (Windows +7-style skin (dark mode)). Most importantly, the latter features an 'address bar' file-system thing, where I can copy-paste an entire address to find exactly which model I want to open (as opposed to the former, which only has a drop-down box & the "Up-Folder" button).

In your ( @BogdanW3 's) latest version, I only get the former ("older") one, and cannot seem to access the latter ("newer") one, which I really want.

Any thoughts?
I don't remember seeing the old one when I last used my version, but I will give it a look tonight and see if it's something obvious and easy to change - having the new style dialog is probably better in general :D
 
Any thoughts?
It may be worth remembering that the user Magos who created the War3ModelEditor stopped publishing the source code of his program for some time before he disappeared, so the version of the code that I gave Bogdan that was used to build a more recent version is an "out of date" version of the code from the standpoint of Magos from back in the day. So there might be some cases where Bogdan or whoever is doing the updates today has to reinvent or re-introduce features that were added by Magos to his binary back then, but not added to his public code that was on his website before it went down.
(As I recall, the code that we have claims to be version 1.05 but the binary version that everybody used for over a dozen years or whatever calls itself 1.07)
 
Level 17
Joined
Feb 25, 2013
Messages
303
@Kyrbi0 ok, it indeed seems the code uses the very old dialog system, and making it use the newer one might cause some regressions. For now, what I can suggest is pasting folder or file paths into the "file name" box at the bottom, as trying to open a folder will instead position the dialog into that folder and trying to open a file via a full path will work regardless of the current folder
 
Level 40
Joined
Feb 27, 2015
Messages
522
View attachment 442066
When trying to create an animation with a light intensity. Model can't be re-opened and can't be loaded in the editor... Any solution?
a lot of beta models show similar errors and some (but not all) of them get fixed if you convert to .mdl and back
you can also try opening .mdl in notepad, searching for that "KLAI" and deleting that string or renaming it
 
I;ll to report 3 bugs of the program:

  • associating a material with texture animation does not save it, as it remains unused. Only way is by editing the MDL file with nodepad.
  • if a geoset animation has static alpha , sometimes that gets saved as 0 or near 0, which makes the geoset associated with that GA to be invisible. Use dynamic alpha instructions.
  • What;s the point of having the option of creating a new geoset if when no data is entered, it crashes the app? and actually entering any data manually inside of that geoset is not enabled.
  • when opening a model, if any layer has filter mode "modulate", is changed to "none". (saving with modulate works however)
 
Level 17
Joined
Feb 25, 2013
Messages
303
Is there a way to open reforged models with this new versions of W3ME? I extracted the reforged Paladin Model with textures DDS for testing, but the program couldn't open.
If you mean HD models, they're rendered very differently so it'd be very hard to code that in sadly, and they're much more complex to parse too
 

Dr Super Good

Spell Reviewer
Level 63
Joined
Jan 18, 2005
Messages
27,178
Retera's Model Studio is nice, but is too complex for my big-brain
If you have usability suggestions you might want to feed them back to the developers. Effective UI design is very difficult and usually involves a lot of feedback and use by a broad spectrum of users.
 
Level 20
Joined
Jan 14, 2014
Messages
559
If you have usability suggestions you might want to feed them back to the developers. Effective UI design is very difficult and usually involves a lot of feedback and use by a broad spectrum of users.
I love the RMS because it contains almost all tools we used in order to make high quality models. However, I'm used to MDLVis because it seems simple. Perhaps I will use RMS again. I just have to properly know how to, right?
 

deepstrasz

Map Reviewer
Level 68
Joined
Jun 4, 2009
Messages
18,706
I love the RMS because it contains almost all tools we used in order to make high quality models. However, I'm used to MDLVis because it seems simple. Perhaps I will use RMS again. I just have to properly know how to, right?
You could use both for various purposes. There's things you can't do with one and do with the other.
 
I was asked on Discord about a new bug in Magos War3ModelEditor 1.07 that now causes it to crash when opening some models but not others. I did not feel very useful; I have been trying to only run linux libre lately, and wine is not working on here.

Does anyone else have issues cropping up with recent updates to Windows causing War3ModelEditor to fail on some models but not others? How would I help someone reporting that problem?
 
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