deleting weapons?

how do you delete weapons? do you just make it transparent or something? and if you do.. how do you edit the alpha channels(sorry for asking.. even tho it is all through the channels...) but even if im able to edit it, what does what? all ive seen the other threads say is HOW TO get it up.. not exactly what does what.. i know that it controls unit colors.. but what do i do to get rid of the unit colors? do i just color the alpha channel white? (b/c in photoshop, the alpha channel is just a layer of total blackness)or delete the area? anyone help?

Model editting
alphaing weapons out rarely works in some cases

Actually it always seems to work quite well for me. If you're using Photoshop, then just click on the channels tab and switch the channel to alpha, now it depends on the skin, but by some you have to cover over the area you want transparent with grey, and with others you have to color it with black. White will remove ALL team color, it won't make anything transparent, but if you color over something black with white, it'll just make the team color go away. I thought it was rather complicated at first, but it's extremely easy, especially once you get the hang of it. Here's an example:

Open up the footman.blp, next press on the channels tab, and then click on the alpha channel. Now, go to you're swatches tab and pick any shade of grey, click the little eyes next to the other channels, so now you can see the alpha channel over the skin (they look like shades of red). Now, just paint the sword over with grey and you'll see it come out light red (and if you have just the alpha channel going it will come out grey). And that's pretty much it, rather easy, and poof, transparent weapon, and attach the one you want via special effects. I'd be glad to remove any weapons you or anyone else wants from skins, just PM me.

err.. i dont know what im doing wrong rein... im doing exactly what you say. clicking channels icon and then clicking 'create new channels' which makes an alpha channel. then i click the eye on the RGB channel.(it automatically selects all of them). then i go to the alpha channel again, and use grey and color in the thing i want alphaed out.. but when i do paintbrush it grey.. it doesnt come out red.. it just erases the red... whats wrong!?

Ok, here goes:

First of all, DON'T create any channels, just click on the channels tab and there will be the RGB channels AND an alpha channel already. Press on the alpha channel, in most cases, anything colored with grey is transparent, anything with black is team color, and anything with white is blank. So assuming we are using the footman, grey is transparent by him. Click on the channels tab, and DO NOT create a new channel, click on alpha channel, and change you're brush to grey. Now click the eyes on all the other channels but make sure that you're STILL on the alpha channel. Now, just paint over the sword and it should come out as a light red.

Sorry, that's the best I can do if you're using photoshop, if not then I'm not too skilled PSP, but as I mentioned before I could get out some weapons for ya if you want.

wow.. you responded in record time d^_^b... but i think there is something wrong w/ photoshop then.. cuz when i open a picture and go to channels, there isnt an alpha channel.... there is only RGB, red, green, and blue... or is the rgb the alpha channel??? (confused... lol)... and thx for the offer to do it for me, but id prefer to do it myself. you know that saying about teaching a fishman to fish crap...(same thing applies here) i just dont want to always depend on someone... no offense..lol.

it might be your version of photoshop, what v is urs?

i use photoshop 7.0.. does everyone else's channel include an alpha channel already? cuz mine doesnt. aarrggghhh

No, no, you're not insane... I just got a copy of Photoshop 7.0 to try out and it does the same thing. :( Found this post while trying to see if anyone else has the same issue. Rather annoying given that the whole reason I'm considering switching from PSP is that PSP 8 has the most God-awful alpha handling I've ever seen, but so far the new Photoshop's looking just as bad... Actually, it looks like the same thing. All the newer releases of editors seem to be trying to "make transparency more intuitive" by pretending it's not a channel but just "an aspect of the image" with the side effect of making it difficult-bordering-on-impossible to do advanced work, at least the way we're used to. Photoshop 7's own help is also no help as the pages on alphaing form a loop with each one insisting one of the others has the instructions. :bgrun: Which is not a slam on Photoshop 7 since PSP 8 happens to have a nearly identical system, the one that drove me to try Photoshop in the first place. (And a suddenly PSP has a very Photoshop-like interface.... and hmmm, they both have the same bug about saving alpha data to TGAs... If I didn't know it was ridiculous, I'd say the two were trying to merge or something.)

Maybe I should just revert to PSP 7.

EDIT:
Ah, wait, here we go- Useful information! My research has pulled up Draco's thread about Alpha editing in PSP 7, and it has included a bit of a side discussion about Photoshop 7 and PSP 8.... basically, don't use them. But wait, all is not lost! Adobe has updated Photoshop to 7.01 in response to outcry from the community and supposedly this makes everything OK again according to the people on that thread. :D Of course, given that I'm just using the Tryout, I can't patch it, but if you have full Photoshop 7.0 you can get the patch from Adobe. (And if you were cheap and downloaded a pirated copy, the patch won't work, but that thread also includes a link to a plugin to fix TGAs and alpha for people who can't patch.) This will, however, only fix how TGAs are loaded and saved, so you'll need to load from the original TGA file again. (If, say, you saved a Photoshop file with your work that wasn't working, this won't fix that.)

As for me, I guess it really is back to PSP 7...

Hmm, well, the only time you can "alpha" something out, is usually if it's *not* on a team color area. You can of course, but not without modeling. As for weapons, yes you can delete weapons with the alpha channel, so long as they aren't in a color zone. Otherwise, you get a big blocky, one-color blob, that looks horrible.

Actually, it's quite fun to make the swords looks serrated and such, using the same technique, by slashing in and out of the weapon's area...

oh.. thx man.. i just d/led 7.0.1 and now there is an alpha channel!!!!! thx.

okay.. one question.. why can i not edit out jaina's staff? i edited out the footmans sword w/ no problem.. but when i do the same thing to jaina..her staff is just light red....

whats am i doing wrong?

when you edit hero weapons, it just alphas the weapons, not the glow, by default hero's weapons glow there player's color, i think it takes model editing to take out the glow

i didnt say anything about the glow.. just that the hero weapon doesnt go transparent.. it just goes to a light red.. like the color it turns when i alpha it...

OK... there area lot of things that might cause this, so here goes nothing. Please note that as I am not at my normal computer, I can't just go see what happens if I edit Jaina's staff.

1) As UltimateJim has pointed out, the hero glow is not affected by alpha-ing the textures. Removing hero glow requires model editing, though it's a fairly simply and straightforward process. There are other posts about this on the board already if you just use Search to find them. But you said it's not the glow, so...

2) Some things just do not use the alpha channel, like the wings on the Warden. I can't explaing it, I've never heard it totally explained, it has something to do with the material properties in the model. So again, fixing this would require model editing, though I'm sure if you could find someone/somewhere to explain it, it should be a fairly simple edit to one line of the model file. (in MDL format, of course)

3) There is teamcolor on Jaina's staff. This is what HarlequinKnight was trying to point out to you. This seems the most likely option. (Incidentally, it has nothing to do with the red you see in Photoshop. That red is a property of the Alpha channel that you can change by double-clicking on it. When alpha alone is shown, it shows the B&W image of the channel, but when it is show with the image, the image is made transparent and the color of the alpha channel is the color of the background behind it, hence the color. The practical upshot of this is that you can see what your unit will look like WITH teamcolor by setting the alpha channel to the desired teamcolor and turning it on along with the image.)

OK, I'm totally off topic, I just thought that was an interesting factoid. Point is, I bet if you change Jaina to the blue team, it'll be a blue staff because it's the teamcolor showing. It's kind of complicated to explain, but WC3 puts teamcolor anywhere ther's transparency on a part of the model that's supposed to have teamcolor. That's how teamcolor's done: You make the teamcolor areas transparent in the skin and then set up the model to put the teamcolor sort of "just under" the skin. Now I don't know exactly how the Jaina model does it, so I don't know if removing teamcolor from the staff would result in removing teamcolor from the whole model. (Which would happen if they were in the same group, or "geoset" in technical terms.) But if you want to try, removing teamcolor is a very simple edit. I just removed all the teamcolor from Arthas for a rather demented (mostly-transparent) skin I just created for him. But as with all of these, this will require some simple model editing by converting the MDX into an MDL, making a few changes in a text editor, and converting it back.

Both the conversion process and how to make any of these edits can be found elsewhere on the board. Just use Search. (It's at the bottom, if you've never seen it. It's not exactly obvious to the naked eye.) Offhand, since it turns RED, I'm guessing it's #3, but I can't tell you if the staff has a separete geoset (group) from the rest of the model, thus allowing you to take the teamcolor off of it alone or whether it doesn't, thus making you remove the color from everything.

I hope that didn't confuse you too much. :bgrun: I know it's got to be one of those... regrettably, removing weapons is simultaneously one of the most popular things to do for some reason and one of the most aggravating because most of the time it doesn't work, at lesat not with just skinning, as Kiether said way back at the start of all this.