I made this guide when a friend asked me to help him with area changes, Its not great but i figured id atleast post it instead of letting it go to waste.
[Guide]How to: complete area edit.
-TILESETS-
first things first, Open up mywarcraftstudios and choose a zone you would like to edit.
I will be picking Tanaris since its spread out and there are not many doodads and such to edit.
1. Open Mywarcraftstudios
2. File->Open->common.mpq
Ok now that we have common.mpq open we can see to the left all the different folders to choose from.
First we will be editing tilesets which are the ground image blps.
1. Open TILESETS-->TANARIS
2. Now you will see all the different tilesets for tanaris, sand, rock, etc.
3. Make a folder on your desktop called TANARIS.
4. now decide what you want to make tanaris look like, im going to change it to something simple and make it look like elwynn forest.
5. Find the elwynn folder in TILESETS, once you find the folder right click it and click 'Extract Folder...'.
6. Extract the Elwynn folder to your desktop, name the folder Elwynn.
now that we have the Elwynn folder full of all the elwynn tilesets on our desktop its time to edit them!
1. Open the Elwynn folder on your desktop.
2. You will see all the different tilesets
3. Swap the elwynn Blps with the tanaris blps, it is very simple.
If you do not know how to swap blps I will attempt to explain.
1. find the name of the blp you want to change, for sake of demonstration I will swap TANARISSANDBASE02.blp
2. ok this is really easy, lets say you want to change TANARISSANDBASE02.blp into grass from elwynn, you open your Elwynn folder
that is saved on your desktop and find a blp for grass, I will be using ElwynnGrassBase.blp.
This is the part where we swap the two files all you have to do is rename ElwynnGrassBase.blp to TANARISSANDBASE02.blp.
now the you have renamed ElwynnGrassBase.blp to TANARISSANDBASE02.blp wherever TANARISSANDBASE.blp usually is ingame it will be replaced with grass.
that is all there really is to know about tileset switching, just keep going down the list of all the tanaris tileset files and replace them with the elwynn
ones.
-DOODADS-
Alright so you've finished editing the land and it looks all nice and green now, but you want to edit the buildings and doodads so they fit in with the new envirement?
no problem, its just as simple as the blp swapping. Here is where we start editing m2 files, but you switch them the same you switch blps, just change the name.
1. click on World-->Kalimdor-->Tanaris-->PassiveDoodads
2. find a doodad you want to edit, it could be the buildings, the trees, whatever. I will be using the WaterTower.m2
3. find something you would want instead of the water tower, you want something that fits with the theme of the new zone so im going to pick something trollish. I will be using
TrollWatchTower.m2.
4. Go to World-->Azeroth-->STRANGLETHORN-->Buildings-->TrollWatchTower and extract the TrollWatchTower folder you your desktop.
Now you are going to want to change WaterTower.m2 into the TrollWatchTower, so remember how we did the blp switch with the tilesets? We are going to do the
exact same thing here.
1. Open the TrollWatchTower folder that is saved on your desktop.
2. Rename TrollWatchTower.m2 to WaterTower.m2
Ok now you have change the watertower model to the trollwatchtower model, but there is still more to do!
Now that you have changed the model to Trollwatchtower it needs to have the same skin has Trollwatchtower otherwise it will look like the trollwatchtower
but will have the same color as the old watertower.
1. Rename TrollStrawRoof.blp to gp_watertowerroof.blp
2. Rename TrollWood01.blp to WaterTank.blp
You have now changed the WaterTower into the Trollwatchtower which will fit the zone much better now thats its forest like. you do the same thing show above
for editing trees, creatures, buildings, etc.
-SKYBOXES-
Ok so you have changed the whole zone to look the way you like tanaris is now no longer sandy but covered in grass and troll buildings.
but lets just say you dont like the skybox and you would like to change it to the elwynn forest skybox, also no problem!
okay we are going to be doing this the easy way using Glitchy's skybox editing tool
1. Open Glitchy's Model editing suite and click on Skybox editor.
2. Find the skybox ID of the place you want to edit, since we are editing tanaris the ID is 199.
3. find the ID that you want to replace it with, since we are using Elwynn the ID is 78.
4. Replace the ID 199 with the ID 78 and hit Save changes.
5. Where it says Save: C:\Program Files\Glitchy's Model Editing Suite\ replace that with your desktop location or wherever you wish to save your file.
6. Save files and now you have your MPQ.
-ADDING YOUR FILES TO CREATE A MPQ-
1. Open up Mywarcraftstudios again, Click pack->Create MPQ archive. Name your mpq whatever you want, Ill be naming mine Tanarwynn
2. Alright now we are going to be adding the new files that we made for this example. first lets add the tilesets.
3. Pack->Add files to archive...
4. This will pop up
Click the '...'
5. It will ask you to choose a file you wish to add, ill add one of the tilesets first.
6. it should now look like this:
DO NOT HIT OK YET!
7. you need to enter the treepath in front of the file name. the treepath is the location of the file. so for the tanaris tileset the treepath would be TILESET\TANARIS\*******
8. Hit ok. you now have your first file in the MPQ, keep adding all the files in until they are all there. once they are all in go to 'Pack' and click on 'Save and
Close archive.
You now have your MPQ!
*Keep in mind I did not edit everything, this was just an example of how to edit the different things in an area. I only showed one example per thing, there is usually
a lot more things that need to be edited. but its very simple and usually just requires switching names.
A special thanks to glitchy for his awesome program that allows for a super easy edit for skyboxes.
If any new model editors have any questions they can post here, plz no PMs. I will answer them here if i have time.
[Guide]Basic area change guide.
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