Changing Casting Animation

Is there anyway to change the casting animations of heroes? Some heroes like Archimonde have casting animations like spell slam etc. Can we customize those and use each for different spells?

If you want to change the casting animation to a different animation, that requires only a small amount of mdl editing. If you want to create a brand new animation, I'd say that's extremely difficult unless you're already an expert modeler.

Granted, even switching two animations (flipping an archmage's attack animation with their spell animation, for example) will be quite hard if you've never done mdl editing before.

For your last question, I don't think that's possible, except via triggering (and possibly the creation of animations, if that's what you're picturing).

What about the fact that some spells use the "channeling" animation and others use the normal spell casting animation? How are they doing that?

Anyone? :(

give that unit the channel ability? maybe

Can anyone explain how to change the casting animation to a different animation? I can do .mdl but have no idea how to do the animations.

I want to change the casting animation of a unit to the attack animation. So, whenever he casts the spell he attacks and instead of casting it.

If you want to switch the two, look at the top of the mdl file. The very first thing in the file is a list of animations. This is a list of a name and then two numbers, which indicate the keyframes that this animation uses. If you simply want to switch two animations around, just switch their names. Unlike the names of bones, helpers, lights and emitters the name of an animation IS important - the program looks for a "stand" animation for example when placing a unit. THere's no particular order to the list of animations, so if you rename "attack" to "stand - channel" (or whatever it's called) AND rename "stand - channel" to "attack" you will switch the two animations (keep in mind this means that they will do the channel animation when they attack). Actually duplicating or deleting animations is a little more complicated, especially in unit models, because there are dozens of references to each animation, all of which would need to be changed.

Ok, I actually had this problem. I created this custom spell...

When I used Storm Bolt as its base spell, my unit used the
Spell1 animation.

When I used Frost Nova as its base spell, my unit used the
Spell Slam animation.

Now, the question is, Suppose I still want to use the Storm Bolt based spell, but I want him to use the Spell Slam animation, how do I do it?

Is there a way to do this using only WE?

Thanks.

I believe you can using triggers so that when the unit casts whatever spell, they show the spell slam animation.

Tried that, it wont override the programmed animation. Anyways, thanks for the .mdl stuff, it doesn't sound too hard. :D