I doubt anyone is going to have the answer to this… but there are effects throughout the game with attached PKB files storing information for textures, colors, etc… of the effect.
These files can be opened in notepad, although you see mostly garbled code… at the bottom you can still get to the labels and variables. Changing texture paths here works fine, but where the color information is stored is a mystery.
Ideally a developer responds to something like this to tell us exactly how these are compiled from PopcornFX, or how to manipulate/update color information of spell and model effects.
In a perfect world, we are simply duplicating these PKB files, adding some RGB values to those files, and poof you now have a red spell instead of a blue one.
I know the world editor has an option to “tint” models, which is great, but that’s limited to just a few models, where spells and effects are basically off limits.
An even more ideal scenario would be a simple option in world editor to tint buffs and effects. This would eliminate a lot of headache and unnecessary textures reuploaded to custom maps that already exist in the game…
Yeah… changing the color of spell effects, you think would be a simple thing, does NOT seem to be the case. Very annoying…
Yeah I reached out to PopcornFX and they basically said the same thing, to reach out to the developers for more info, which I feel getting a response on something like this is highly unlikely.
I’ve successfully made changes to texture paths in these files, then pushed them back up via the asset manager, and it works, ie removing them or routing to new textures. That is “A” option… but then you’re forcing players to download textures that already exist in the game.
The color information is in these files somewhere, at least I feel like there’s a way to override the values. I’m going to keep looking for a solution… I’d rather upload a 10kb PKB file with some new color values than go through the headache of modifying and uploading 1.2mb textures in DDS format.
They also linked this to me, although I’m not familiar enough with this to understand some of what’s going on here. It’s an example of how all this looks in PopcornFX before it’s compiled.
Yeah so most of them I think are in \SharedFX\ and \Abilities\
A temporary solution I found is to remove effects from models by clearing out the texture path in it’s related PKB file. That will straight up hide/remove those effects in game. Then you can setup a trigger to add a new effect to the model in the place of the old one.
Even that’s limited though. Like you can’t necessarily target all models. Most units and missiles can be targeted to mess with, but models playing out animations, that don’t really have “points” you can target, I’m still struggling with. Infernal Birth animation is an example of that.
I’m working on the exact same problem. So you are not alone to search, at least.
In a PERFECT world, Blizzard just give us a tool to convert to and from any modeling/texturing/anim/rigging tech they are using to widely supported format, allowing us to modify as we want. Actually color is not really what i search.
Absorbmana missile as a waving effect, i want to remove this and re-scale it. While re-scaling is probably possible right now, removing an animation wrote in a binary is far more complex…
Unfortunately, i have only questions, no answers. But i let my message to tell that you are not alone, and that Yeah, we want this new tool Devs talked about.
Absorbmana missile as a waving effect, i want to remove this and re-scale it. While re-scaling is probably possible right now, removing an animation wrote in a binary is far more complex…
Well you can remove the whole effect easy enough by messing with these PKB files, unless you mean actually changing the animation of an effect, then yeah seems like the only option would be learning PopcornFX and creating new ones from scratch…
I’ve found that completely removing effects from models is the compromise at least for now… that way at least you sort of have a fresh canvas to work with. Not ideal at all… but it’s something.
