How do I make Explosion in Milkshape!

HI!:D

I want to make it so when my hero, she does her jump up down slam, that she creates a rotating golden wave of explosion!

Now I figure, what I do is this: I create a dome, and I hollow it out, and I give it a big hole in the center right? Now I know how to make it rotate. But when I animate it, how do I make it grow very large before it vanishes?!

Is it impossible to do this inside the model? Will I have to make a new f/x model that just "grows" and is triggered by the ability animation?!

edit: uh oh did I post this in wrong area?

Scaling.

Has to be added manually by MDL or Magos'.

Scaling 2 {
Linear,
0: { 1, 1, 1 },
1000: { 2, 2, 2 },
}

Etc etc etc.

oh hrm.

Well I made a sphere, cut it out and added joints to each of the vertex lines and moce them all out that way. I needed to make them rotating explosive types and I don't know how to do that manual stuff. I hope it doesn't make my file too big.

edit: my model has 724 vertices: 632 triangles, 41 joints, does this make it too big of a file?

The complexity of your geometry has little effect on the size of your file; unless you're moving into the tens of thousands of triangles. But do snap to grid, that will increase the compression the game can apply.

What eats filesize is your animations; the more keyframes and bones you have, the bigger the filesize.

But you're using Milkshape and most of your animations will be linear (one line per key instead of three), so you don't need to worry. In-game compression will also take a fair chunk out; my average Milkshape model is halved when placed into an MPQ.

For your explosion, what you need to do is attach your sphere/etc to a single bone, then apply scaling the scaling. Bear in mind that { 1, 1, 1 } is "normal" (ie every vertex's position multiplied by 1), and that the keyframes are in 1000fps in the MDL/X ((milkshape frame / 24) * 1000 ). It might seem a little difficult at first, but it's easy once you get into it.