Death animation

i want to make a spell that has the animation of the lich's death. how can i do this? i can't find the path of the lich's death animation!

I'll take mercy on you, but this is NOT for the fainthearted. If you've never played with mdl files before, I'd give some serious thought to looking for a different effect to use (look here for two different easy ways of browsing through effects)

OK, so let's assume you're comfortable going into mdl files. Actually, first let's assume you know how to create them: download Yobguls' converter (run a search of the forums for his name to find the thread) and convert the lich mdx file into an mdl (which you can then open in wordpad).

Go all the way to the bottom of this long file, and look for "emitters." There are probably 1-3 or so. From there, you can probably insert those into the model of your choice, making sure to change the object ID's the visibility settings, and making sure that the textures that the emitters use are also placed into your new model.


There's a good chance that you've either lost interest at this point, or are totally overwhelmed, so I'll leave at that for the moment. If you're still interested and got stuck at one point (or don't have a clue, and need me to back up), just reply, and I'll try to fill in some of the details.

ok, i went thourgh the effects in the link u gave me, and found one i can use, but when i try to attach it to the spell nothing happens, does it has anything to do with the fact it's a .mdx file?
if not, maybe i'm doing something wrong so i'll very thankful if u'll tell me how to do this (putting a certain effect to a spell).

When you say attaching it to a spell, describe what you're doing. Are you altering the abilityfunct.txt files? I didn't quite follow that.

i added this line to the Humanabilityfunc:

Specialart=Abilities\Spells\Items\AIso\AIsoTarget.mdx

this is the graphic i want to have on the unit the spell is being cast on.

it doesn't work, i belive it's becuase it's an mdx file, in the "help" in the spell editor is says something about only mdl files are allowded in the "Specialart=".

if it's true, how am i going to make it work? should i convert the file into mdl? and if so then how?

thanks for your help.

hmm i think this has to do with spell editing (not sure)actually if i did well understand you want a spell which looks like the lich death's animation then get redskulls editor read my tutorial if u dont know how to spell edit and in redskulls editor modify the
Effectart to whatever you want exemple:

Effectart=Doodads\Cinematic\SunWell\SunWell

i dont know if im right cuz i never tried but i think it should actually work...

Why does everyone love RS so much? Its really buggy....

Anyway, all models will work for any field. It isnt showing because the spell doesnt use SpecialArt, try EffectArt, or MissileArt.

And for the animation, find which frames the death animation are on, go down to teh particle emitters, find the one with a 1 by numbers that are the begining of the death frames, and copy that into a new model. Fill in the nessisary bs, and convert it back to mdx.

REMEMBER: The name of the model must be the same as defined in the mdl.

Although I don't have a huge amount of experience with this, my experience is that wc3 doesn't care what format the file itself is in, so long as the "given name" matches the format it wants to look for. Ok, that was confusing. An example: suppose all other spell effects are *.mdl and your file is called "effect.mdx". If you set the abilityfunc to use the file "effect.mdl" wc3 should be able to use your file, even thought the file itself is an mdx file. I know, it's unintuitive, but in my experience, that's the case. IN other words, you *don't* have to convert OR rename your file. Simply pretend that it's already an mdl file, and work from there. If you want further proof, keep in mind that wc3.mpq doesn't have *any* mdl files inside of it, yet fields in WE and in the func files ask for mdls.

If it's still not working, test it yourself - try using an effect that you *know* works with other spells (like the slow spell's mdx file) and see if that works - that way you can localize the problem to the spell, or to the model.

i belive you can use the lich model in the [whatvere]art= section of the ability strings... and i'm pretty sure that there is a way to add required animation names (stand death i believe) but i don't know how. (i'm 99% sure this is what Eul did, i don't think he would be the one to mess with mdls.

That would be neat if you can do that. In his case, though it wouldn't do any good, because I think implied in his request is that he wants the special effects of the lich dying without the lich model itself. The death animation would include everything, not just the effects, and so wouldn't be all that useful to him.

ok, i changed the speicalart to targetart and it works now.

as for the lich's death animation i'm still curious, i also saw it being used in DotA and i belive Eul didn't do all that mdl editing stuff, u sure there isn't a file or something that contains death animations of units & heroes?

anyway thanks for your help everyone.

ok, just wanted to tell u that i found the animation i was looking for, it's path is:
Object\Spawnmodels\Undead\UndeadDissipate\UndeadDissipate.mdx

thanks for ur help everyone.