I was looking to change the color of the energy emitted by the Terrazine Shrine as seen in Wings of Liberty Campaign (screenshot attached), and I assume I will have to edit the associated texture in order to do that, right?
I downloaded the MPQ Viewer and was trying to locate it into the assets, but I cannot manage to find the file; how can I know which texture file is associated with this model?
EDIT
Ok, I seem to have found in the Materials section of that model, that it references LightBeam_Emissive.dds and Smoke_Wispy9.dds under the Beam and Terrazine Gas section; I assume it is one of those two. I checked those .dds, and, as for Smoke Wispy, it is really just gray; while LightBeam is blue. This makes me believe that the color of the material is changed somehow in the data editor?
1. You don't need an MPQ editor to export the textures. You can just go into the textures in data and while your looking at the list of textures you can right click and hit export.
2. If that's all you found you did it wrong. I found a hell of a lot more than 2 textures. You need to look at every folder in the materials section not just the first one there. Honestly you probably will just need to edit a few of the textures not all of them.
3. None of the coloring is done through data.
Hey Jack, thanks for the reply. I didn't meant to say that I only found 2 textures; I meant I only found two textures which I believe may be relevant to what I wanted to achieve (changing the color of the emission). Is there a way to debug which textures are used where, then? Like selectively deactivating materials so that I can see the model decoloring, or something on those lines?
Nope it's kinda guess and check. I usually look at all the textures and if they have what I'm looking for terrific. If not I end up editing all of them.
You can selectively swap single textures in data to see, which texture is used in which location by utilizing Texture Select By ID. Also, for models which support team color, you could use team color to selectively tint specific areas (), but that requires editing of the textures beforehand anyway, and for doodad models like the shrine, that would most likely require model editing as well.
Interesting. Where is Texture Select by ID located? It would be a nice solution to add team colored areas to the texture, it would definitely make it easier to tint colors on the fly and experiment a bit. The video looks amazing, I wish there was a standard tinting tool like that; instead, texture swapping is such a time consuming task!
This would work if the effect is not using particles with colot, then texture wouldn't help. Idk how particles in SC2 are made but in war3 you could have a Smoke texture which was grey and some particle was using that texture and the color that rendered the Smoke to be some different color could be changed in the settings that make up the particle.
No, SC2 uses textures for colors. No color parameters in the model itself.
But with a custom model its possible to enable/diable tint for each material, so for the model in op it would be possible to limit tinting to the particle emitter. It is also possible to change how strong tint is for each material.
Actually, material layers can be set to texture or color mode. Some textures used only as alpha mask, and color is defined by diffuse or emissive layers of the material. As far as I remember, m3 exporter supports colors instead of textures.
In ArtTools we can set color as material layer, and can change it within animation. We also have color parameters in the particle emitter, to change particle color depending on its lifetime.
For example, this is a kind of volcano fire, made of 3 particle emitters (sparkles, lava drops and smoke), with materials that only use colors, no texture used.
Smoke is changing its color, size, angle and alpha by lifetime. Yellow sparkles mode is "pinned", so they get stretched between the emitter and particle coordinates. Red lava drops change size and use gravity and collision with terrain. So, particle emitters are a great instrument to create almost any posssible effect. All their parameters are intuitive, well named, and documented, so it's easy to get into.
How do you limit the tinting for a specific material? Are you speaking of something doable in the Data Editor, or just with an external 3d editor such as 3dsmax or Blender?
@sunyatasattva: Go I'm talking about material properties in Blender, probably doable in 3dsmax as well. In Blender there are tinting strength fields for each material and a flag that enables/disables tinting. It's been some time since I checked those but they aren't hard to find.
@Zolden: Go That is awesome, thanks for the info. Good to see they are intuitive to use and well documented, it seems we can expect all kinds of particle effects in the future.
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I was looking to change the color of the energy emitted by the Terrazine Shrine as seen in Wings of Liberty Campaign (screenshot attached), and I assume I will have to edit the associated texture in order to do that, right?
I downloaded the MPQ Viewer and was trying to locate it into the assets, but I cannot manage to find the file; how can I know which texture file is associated with this model?
EDIT
Ok, I seem to have found in the Materials section of that model, that it references LightBeam_Emissive.dds and Smoke_Wispy9.dds under the Beam and Terrazine Gas section; I assume it is one of those two. I checked those .dds, and, as for Smoke Wispy, it is really just gray; while LightBeam is blue. This makes me believe that the color of the material is changed somehow in the data editor?
@sunyatasattva: Go
1. You don't need an MPQ editor to export the textures. You can just go into the textures in data and while your looking at the list of textures you can right click and hit export.
2. If that's all you found you did it wrong. I found a hell of a lot more than 2 textures. You need to look at every folder in the materials section not just the first one there. Honestly you probably will just need to edit a few of the textures not all of them.
3. None of the coloring is done through data.
@JacktheArcher: Go
Hey Jack, thanks for the reply. I didn't meant to say that I only found 2 textures; I meant I only found two textures which I believe may be relevant to what I wanted to achieve (changing the color of the emission). Is there a way to debug which textures are used where, then? Like selectively deactivating materials so that I can see the model decoloring, or something on those lines?
Nope it's kinda guess and check. I usually look at all the textures and if they have what I'm looking for terrific. If not I end up editing all of them.
@JacktheArcher: Go
Thanks. And I guess there is no way to selectively tint colors, right? The only way to do what I am trying is by manually coloring the textures?
@sunyatasattva: Go
Yea. you could tint the whole object but... doesn't look as good.
You can selectively swap single textures in data to see, which texture is used in which location by utilizing Texture Select By ID. Also, for models which support team color, you could use team color to selectively tint specific areas (), but that requires editing of the textures beforehand anyway, and for doodad models like the shrine, that would most likely require model editing as well.
@Kueken531: Go
Interesting. Where is Texture Select by ID located? It would be a nice solution to add team colored areas to the texture, it would definitely make it easier to tint colors on the fly and experiment a bit. The video looks amazing, I wish there was a standard tinting tool like that; instead, texture swapping is such a time consuming task!
@sunyatasattva: Go
Texture select by ID will probably actually take a bit longer to setup than it would to just look at the listed textures.
However a tutorial on Texture by ID is located HERE
This would work if the effect is not using particles with colot, then texture wouldn't help. Idk how particles in SC2 are made but in war3 you could have a Smoke texture which was grey and some particle was using that texture and the color that rendered the Smoke to be some different color could be changed in the settings that make up the particle.
@Eimtr: Go
That would be quite interesting. Will do some research on SC2 particle systems.
@Eimtr: Go
Nahh this particle is gonna have color in it. Generally the particles in SC are colored, aside from smoke because smoke is black/gray.
@JacktheArcher: Go
Yes they were colored in war3 too, basically a Particle was simply a set of options
You set how to tint the texture and there, you get some colored particle, not sure if sc2 is like that
Anyone knows if something similar exists in SC2?
No, SC2 uses textures for colors. No color parameters in the model itself.
But with a custom model its possible to enable/diable tint for each material, so for the model in op it would be possible to limit tinting to the particle emitter. It is also possible to change how strong tint is for each material.
Actually, material layers can be set to texture or color mode. Some textures used only as alpha mask, and color is defined by diffuse or emissive layers of the material. As far as I remember, m3 exporter supports colors instead of textures.
@Zolden: Go One of the many things the Blender addon differs from 3dsmax. How is it in StarTools?
@SoulFilcher: Go
In ArtTools we can set color as material layer, and can change it within animation. We also have color parameters in the particle emitter, to change particle color depending on its lifetime.
For example, this is a kind of volcano fire, made of 3 particle emitters (sparkles, lava drops and smoke), with materials that only use colors, no texture used.
Smoke is changing its color, size, angle and alpha by lifetime. Yellow sparkles mode is "pinned", so they get stretched between the emitter and particle coordinates. Red lava drops change size and use gravity and collision with terrain. So, particle emitters are a great instrument to create almost any posssible effect. All their parameters are intuitive, well named, and documented, so it's easy to get into.
@SoulFilcher: Go
How do you limit the tinting for a specific material? Are you speaking of something doable in the Data Editor, or just with an external 3d editor such as 3dsmax or Blender?
@sunyatasattva: Go I'm talking about material properties in Blender, probably doable in 3dsmax as well. In Blender there are tinting strength fields for each material and a flag that enables/disables tinting. It's been some time since I checked those but they aren't hard to find.
@Zolden: Go That is awesome, thanks for the info. Good to see they are intuitive to use and well documented, it seems we can expect all kinds of particle effects in the future.