Difficulty skinning the feedback tower.

07-08-2003, 01:58 AM

Greets.

I've got a problem skinning the human arcane tower from TFT.
I'll first describe my symptom, and then the steps I took to arrive at the point I'm at.

I want the tower to end up looking more or less like the original elven -fury towers (so that they would have a build animaton), so I grabbed the skins of the original elven tower and the new guard tower, and gosh, they're very similar.
The skins I grabbed from War3x.mpq were

Textures\Tower.blp
Buildings\Human\HumanTower\HumanMagicTower.blp

and from war3.mpq was

Buildings\Human\HumanTower\Tower.blp

I converted the new human tower model to .mdl using YobGuls and opened it in Notepad, and changed it from looking for its usual skin to my Textures\NewElvenTower.blp, which I had altered to resemble the skin used for the original elven towers.

However, when I imported the texture using the Import Editor and changed the path to Textures\NewElvenTower.blp, changed the Arcane Tower to use the imported model in the Object Editor, and then placed an instance of the tower on the map, instead of showing me what I expected (a slightly altered original high elf tower), it instead showed me a normal Arcane tower, except that the tops (the pokey bits) of it were solid black.

So, does that mean it's not finding my texture properly? I had converted it from .tga to .blp using the relatively new "Warcraft 3 Viewer", and I tried it both as a .blp and as a .tga (since I'd heard that it reads .tga's the same as .blp's), but both ways it gave me the same result.

Or, am I doing something else wrong that I don't realize?

07-08-2003, 04:04 AM	#2
MasterSlowPoke	It doesn't read TGAs the same as BLPs. There's something wrong with your model file, I believe.

07-08-2003, 04:40 AM	#3
Panto	Should I suspect that YobGul's is corrupted? I haven't previously had any problems with it, though since I only changed the path for the skin in the .mdl, if there's an error with the final model it would have to be in the program's conversion. I rather thought it was something wrong with how the skins worked.

07-08-2003, 05:47 AM	#4
KDEWolf	Humm I don't thnk it's a W3V or Yobgul's converting problem, since it's showed up in the map anyway. I don't know how TFT works right now, I still don't have it, but are you sure it does update all models when you add the skin file to it using the importer? Did you try running the map? Anyway I would like to see a screenshot of it, to see what are the black things.

07-08-2003, 06:39 AM

Panto

Certainly.

Here's the texture-applicable section of the .mdl, for reference:

Quote:

Textures 16 {
Bitmap {
Image "",
ReplaceableId 2,
}
Bitmap {
Image "Textures\Doodads0.blp",
}
Bitmap {
Image "Textures\Tower.blp",
}
Bitmap {
Image "",
ReplaceableId 1,
}
Bitmap {
Image "Textures\DeathSmug.blp",
}
Bitmap {
Image "Textures\CloudSingle.blp",
}
Bitmap {
Image "Textures\Clouds8x8.blp",
}
Bitmap {
Image "Textures\CartoonCloud.blp",
}
Bitmap {
Image "Textures\Dust3x.blp",
}
Bitmap {
Image "Textures\RockParticle.blp",
}
Bitmap {
Image "Textures\SpinningBoard.blp",
}
Bitmap {
Image "Textures\Dust5A.blp",
}
Bitmap {
Image "Textures\HumanBase.blp",
}
Bitmap {
Image "buildings\Human\HumanTower\HumanMagicTower.blp",
}
Bitmap {
Image "Textures\Blue_Glow2.blp",
}
Bitmap {
Image "Textures\GenericGlow2b.blp",
}
}

And the textures area of my subsequent .mdl

Quote:

Textures 16 {
Bitmap {
Image "",
ReplaceableId 2,
}
Bitmap {
Image "Textures\Doodads0.blp",
}
Bitmap {
Image "Textures\NewElvenTower.blp",
}
Bitmap {
Image "",
ReplaceableId 1,
}
Bitmap {
Image "Textures\DeathSmug.blp",
}
Bitmap {
Image "Textures\CloudSingle.blp",
}
Bitmap {
Image "Textures\Clouds8x8.blp",
}
Bitmap {
Image "Textures\CartoonCloud.blp",
}
Bitmap {
Image "Textures\Dust3x.blp",
}
Bitmap {
Image "Textures\RockParticle.blp",
}
Bitmap {
Image "Textures\SpinningBoard.blp",
}
Bitmap {
Image "Textures\Dust5A.blp",
}
Bitmap {
Image "Textures\HumanBase.blp",
}
Bitmap {
Image "Textures\NewElvenTower.blp",
}
Bitmap {
Image "Textures\Blue_Glow2.blp",
}
Bitmap {
Image "Textures\GenericGlow2b.blp",
}
}

And here's the shot in-game. You'll notice it doesn't have any of the characteristics or colors of the altered skin (shown in the last post).
Now it seems to be suffering more completely. *sigh* And the original tower is hurting too. I'm not sure where this is going wrong.

07-08-2003, 07:08 AM	#6
KDEWolf	Hummm that looks like it isn't loading the texture file... That's weird really. So it might be a conversion problem (I thought it was showing up)... can you post the tga so I can take a look?

07-08-2003, 07:18 AM	#7
Buttink	i say u just overright the current skin i mean there are tons of diffrent towers in tft now theres like 10 in humans alone

07-08-2003, 07:57 AM	#8
Panto	Certainly. Attaching .tga skin with this post. Buttink, actually, altering the original skins for this tower would affect all the human towers, a couple of which I'm using as-is for other purposes, so converting them directly willn't work.

07-08-2003, 01:18 PM	#9
MasterSlowPoke	Works fine for me - you're importing it wrong.

07-08-2003, 09:31 PM

#10

Panto

Darn, they look so nice. I assume from your picture that you replaced the Buildings\Human\HumanTower\Tower.blp, Buildings\Human\HumanTower\HumanMagicTower.blp, and Textures\Tower.blp textures directly, instead of re-writing a model to point to a different texture.

I won't be able to do that on my map, but I altered a duplicate model (as far as I know correctly) and still, inexplicably, my model isn't getting the skin right.

You can see how I altered the .mdl in my slightly earlier post. I then added the converted .mdx file and changed its path to Units\Creeps\NewElvenTower.mdx, and added the .blp with the path Textures\NewElvenTower.blp. None of that looks incorrect to me.
I restarted TFT WE to make sure it didn't need to have the skin at start-up to apply it correctly, but it didn't help.
I took my .blp and converted it back to .tga to make sure that it was intact, and it was.

So, I guess I'm still having the problem, and I still don't know what it is. Can anyone troubleshoot my process?

EDIT: I tried replacing the original skins with my own and it gave me the same result. This says to me that the skin is somehow wrong, whether it be corrupted or mis-pathed. I double- and triple-checked the custom paths in the Import Editor and found them to be correct. I did the conversion using the War 3 Viewer. Shall I attach the .blp?

07-08-2003, 10:06 PM	#11
MasterSlowPoke	Take mine, see if that helps. Just rename it to whatever you need.

07-08-2003, 10:20 PM	#12
Panto	Thank you very much, MasterSlowPoke, your .blp worked perfectly, thus confirming that mine was corrupted. What program did you use for the conversion? Apparently War 3 Viewer didn't work properly for me.

07-08-2003, 10:30 PM	#13
Ogre-Savage	I use image extractor. never failed.

07-08-2003, 10:54 PM	#14
MasterSlowPoke	War3 Viewer.

07-09-2003, 06:48 AM	#15
Panto	Strange, then, as War 3 Viewer is what I started using ever since Image Extractor II stopped working on me a few weeks ago. Did I set any options incorrectly for the file in War 3 Viewer? Are there any options?