3DSM 5 How to model an aura

AURA TUTORIAL by xXm0RpH3usXx
or how to model an aura which rotates and consists out of multiple planes

Programs used:

- Warcraft3 TFT
- WC3 Viewer
- 3DSMax (but should be useful for all 3D programs)

Teaches how to:

- arrange multiple planes
- put on an alpha material
- assign them to a bone
- animate these bones

An aura consist out of many planes, nicely arranged and animated.
I chose two textures:



Export those and convert them to .tga, afterwards start up your moddeling program.



Here u start off with a plane, nicely centered so it will rotate properly.


Take care that you do not use too many polies, make sure that there is only one segment in length and one in width.

Now import the textures we just exported from Warcraft 3 and take care that the “Full Alpha” is ticked…


Now copy and paste it once more and arrange some new planes to make your aura look special and interesting:


In the preview my aura looks like this now


Now add some bones, one for every layer, we want to animate the levels separately.
For this just add some new cubicles and rename them, to make them to real bones click on the “Hammer” and on “More”, now activate the “User Property Editor” and while having one of the cubicles activated tick “Bone”.


Repeat this until everything you want to have as a bone is one, but be careful, don’t do that with your planes, bones will get invisible in-game.


Now click onto the moving tire and while having activated one of the bones you can assign the right controllers. These have to be lineal position and TCB rotation!



Since we renamed our bones earlier on now rename your planes, the first number should resemble the layer it is:


Now you are ready to assign the planes to the bones, which will make the planes turn like the bones do. Simply click on the red framed button:


Once again click on the red bordered button and drag and drop from the plane to the bone, which will assign the plane:


Everything with a “1” will be attached to bone “1”, everything with “2” in the front with “2”, and so on and so on…
In the end you should have something like this:


Now close this window and activate all bones at once. Press the “Auto Key” button, which will make the engine calculate how the bones will behave between two keys.
Now move the bar to the time 0 and click on the big key (marked with a red frame), repeat that with time 100.


Now move your bar to time 50 and rotate all bones 180 degrees, one to the left, one to the right, and so on and so on…


Now open the “dope sheet”:


A new window will pop up:


Click on “Objects”, you may have to scroll up to find it, and make it underplayed with yellow. Afterwards click on “Tracks”, “Hinttrack”, and “Add”.(Since I am German I don’t know what these tracks are called in English…)

Now click on the new track, you will see that it is now highlighted.
Afterwards click on the red bordered icon:


Add a key at 0 and one at 100 and name both “stand”, right click the new keys to do so and simply close the window after you typed in the name…


The moddeling part is over here, all you must do now is to export the mesh, convert it to .mdl and edit the paths since we used ingame textures.

Very helpful, approved.