Campaign loading screens

Hello!

I'm new here so I'm not sure if this is the most appropriate place for this question but anyway, here's my question.

I've been making a little campaign recently for my own amusement and I've come to the point of putting in those little finishing touches that wrap everything up nicely. I've had no trouble adding seperate loading screens for my maps and a static loading screen for my campaign as a whole but what I am nowhere near being able to figure out and what would be infinitely groovy is this:

To have a loading screen for my campaign similar to the ones blizzard has for its campaigns. i.e. A scene with models, scenery, sky, moving water etc. Unfortunately I haven't found any articles on how to do this, or even if it's possible.

I suppose it might be done by creating a short cinematic sequence which could be exported to some kind of file, then imported into the campaign editor and set as loading screen in the same way that I currently do with static 2D blp images.

Anyone know if this is possible?

Apologies if there is some mention of this, or a tutorial, already on the site. As I said I'm new and although I've been searching I haven't found one. ^_^

The campaign loading screens are simply complex models. In theory, you could probably even use a static loading screen model in its place. If you really want to roll up your sleeves and start making a backdrop, though, I'd say the best place to start is looking at one that already exists. The models are fairly large, and fairly complex, but fundamentally similar to unit models.

For FoK, what we've done is start with an already existing backdrop, alpha out much of the foreground (using a dummy texture in place of used textures), and then attach our own models to the main model.


The unit is an attached model, and the gate is as well. The rest of the model (actually, little of that is visible, but the ground and the vegetation) comes from what had already existed in the tutorial loading screen.

Of course, you can always, depending on your modeling skills, design one of these from scratch. That's a fairly major piece of work, though. Indeed, getting our makeshift loading screen was no small feat.

Ah, I thought it might take something along those lines. Thanks for explaining it, I'll be able to sleep easier now, although I think I'll be sticking with a 2D image for now.

I can't really justify that amount of effort for my little campaign as skinning and modelling aren't my greatest talents :8 , maybe if I do something grander in the future.

Cheers

Yes that's how you do it. The model file you're gonna make is a *.mdx file.