Explain Probably Simple Things

1. How exactly do the skins of buffs and abilities work? I don't see that you could skin them in the usual sense, i.e. make silence into a smiley face or something. I can do it for units fine but is it part of the model for abilities?

2. If i made a really weird animation for a unit and left it as something that's not usually used, let's say stand victory would it work in relation to what i want? Let's say i have an ability where my caster runs up to the target and does a little dance ^^ Since all the other animations dont really involve movement would there be any way of making it run TOWARDS the target regardless of where the target was in relation to the caster (who just loves to dance i guess)?? Note - the running would have to be part of the animation, not just the dance though i dont actually intend to use that particular example :p

1. special effects are usually made of ribbon and particle emmitors and sometimes objects with skins with lots of alpha channels for invisibility.

1 - without looking, I can guess that silence in particular actually almost certainly does use a standard skin n bones approach, rather than the particles and ribbons that most effects use. As EdwardSwolenToe said, though, most complex effects are done with emitters, ribbons, and geosets.

2 - I'd say it's impossible to make an animation "know" which direction it's supposed to go in. On the other hand, if it were, say, an attack animation, the unit using it would automatically be facing a target, and so the animation would go towards the target. Similarly, you could use a trigger to rotate the unit to face a target before playing an animation.