Close ups not very close up

I have recently been dabbling in model making and I have noticed that in game the close-up to the faces of the models sometimes doesn't show, for example for my ranger model it is a couple feet above his head and only shows when he does his "look around" animation. Does anybody know how ot fix this?

In wc3 terms, what you are refering to is called a portrait. Portraits can be provided in two slightly different ways, depending on the model. In some cases, the protrait is derived directly from the unit model. The model has a camera that is used during "portrait animations" which the game knows to use soley for animating the portrait (as opposed to the unit's in-game face). Other aspects of the unit may also only be used during these animations. Two examples I can think of off the top of my head are the teamcolor areas behind buildings and the "glowing" eyes of the priest, both of which are part of the model, but which only appear in the portrait.

The other way wc3 uses to display portraits is to have a separate model file, which simply displays the head of a given unit. I believe dragons and chimeras, with their animated "clouds" in the background, both feature these.

From your point of view, if you're adding a new model to wc3 (and especially if you're reskinning an already existing model) you have to know which of the two methods is used. If a given model comes with a camera/portrait, then reskinning the unit is sufficient, and you'll have no more problems. If you have created a model from scratch, though, you'll need to either provide a portrait animation or an additional file (more on that in a sec). If neither is provided, wc3 uses a default camera which almost certainly will look weird.

If the model you're adding is based on a model which comes with a separate portrait file, you'll need to also add the corresponding file, or wc3 won't be able to find a proper portrait. The convention is that for model "model.mdx" the game looks for "model_portrait.mdx" to use as the protrait. So if you've added a completely new unit, one option is to also create a portrait model, and rename it to [model]_portrait.mdx, at which point the game will be able to find it.

alright thanks, only 2 of the ones I have right now have the portrait (and that was the ones I downloaded) so guess most are within the model, in which case ill just fiddle around with it until I get it.