SC2Mapster

Hey guys, im trying to develop my first "bigger" (means more then 3h spawning tons of units, fighting against till a lonly marine survive) project, its an remake of the good old "Takeshis Castle" map of WC3...well first 6 games are created, but they look really crappy, so i want to learn some visual effects...i was happy about an heal beam and a sound, as someone used a healthpack, but a big problem is creating a nice model for a Thor(Takeshi), which is set on fire and burns... i would be happy, if someone can tell my, how to adjust a flame or something on the head of the thor, so a blind one would possibly think,"ahhh, it really looks like i have set him on fire!" I hope you know what i mean, the data editor is killing me! Last but not least: I have used Squibs for all my visual effects, but it seems not to be the normal way, maybe you guys know a good tutorial about visualization and stuff like that. Thank you in advance!

You used... Squibs? What? :)

About your first question:
The flame is purely visual so what you want to look at are actor attachments.

Go to the data editor.
1. Create new actor of type "ModelAddition".
2. Art: Model -> Fire Medium.
3. Hosting: Host -> Subject -> Actor -> Thor.
4. Event: Events -> make new Event of type UnitBirth.Thor with action "Create".
5. Now the last thing you have to adjust are the Site Operations. Site Operations basically define where and how actors appear, so you can use them to change the positioning on the Thor. Go to Hosting: Host Site Operations and add a new one of type SOpAttachOverhead or SOpAttachHead or something. With this you will have a flame over/on the head of your Thor, if you want to adjust it further create new Site Operations of type Local Offset and add them to the list (I don't think rotations will work on the fire model because the fire is just particles and you can't edit particles at all in the editor apart from the position). Local Offset just lets you adjust the actor in a xyz-axis kind of way with 3 vectors where z is the height.

Now just create as many fires and flames as you like, you can of course change the scale of each actor and stuff like that as you like. If you want other cool looking models I can't help you much, maybe the "Smoke Medium" will also look cool if you play around with tinting it or something, I don't know. There are probably a lot of cool things you can try out, maybe even some Firebat attack animations bursting out somewhere periodically or stuff like that.

Quote from DrSuperEvil: Go

There is a better model called implosion impact.

Ah nice, I'll check it out :)

Does it loop animations automatically like the Fire Medium does? Else you probably have to tweak the animation actor events too or not use ModelAddition as a base. But I haven't tried that model yet, so I don't know exactly what you have to change @fischy.