Before the beginning of today I didn't know how to do this - now with a bit of trial and error and much help and patience from WNG I have successfully added effects to a custom sword for my mod! Yes, perhaps childsplay to many veteran modders here, but I'm pretty happy atm with this achievement
For the sake of keeping records for those who follow and may wish to do this in the future ill explain what I did:
Firstly, in addition to the ARC Encryptor and Mesh View Tool that WNG mentioned, you also need to have the ARC Explorer tool as well.
~Includes Trial and Error explanation as I experienced it~1- Using the ARC Explorer I opened the Items.arc file and then scrolled down to my desired item mesh; in this case it was 'spathalongbronze01'.
2- I then extracted selected file to a folder I had previously named "MY CUSTOM MESHES". I have a mod folder named
Project Hamunaptra which has all my mod related stuff so for tidy safekeeping I created my custom mesh folder there.
3- Now I have my sword mesh I then opened up Mesh View and following WNG's instructions loaded in the sword mesh by navigating to the aforementioned custom meshes folder. In the Mesh View program under the 'Textdata' category, I added a new "CreateEntity" and "Anchor 3" line of code and added my chosen effect. I knew the path to this from the TQ Editor database which in this case was
'effects\weaponenchantments\rclub07b_ambientfx'.
This I all manually typed in... which is partly where I went wrong I believe.
4- Saving and closing Mesh View I opened ARC Encryptor, and then the AM and followed WNG's guide for these last steps (especially taking care with the sliding of my Mesh.arc file to the desktop before building in Art Manager to avoid losing anything!) Works a treat
5- Loading up the TQ Editor I excitedly located my sword, clicked on it and the Editor froze and crashed! lol Obviously something wasn't right.
~The Fix!~A) - Damn, Alright. Went back into Mesh View but this time loaded in Pagos - A sword mesh I know already has effects attached to it. Looking at the Textdata code for this sword I saw it had this:
CreateEntity
{
attach = "SpeacialHit03"
entity = "Records\Effects\WeaponEnchantments\SwordIce_AmbientFX.dbr"
}
So here were two things I noticed; One the entity text was typed out in full starting from 'Records' and using capital lettering etc. And two, it wasn't using and 'Anchor' attach point. However, instead of using "SpeacialHit03" for my sword, I saw there were other attach lines with one called
"Upper Body".
Figured that this meant an attach point roughly in the middle of the blade (which is what I wanted) so used that instead. So to clarify; all I did was added the 'CreateEntity' code lines as above but changed the 'attach' and 'entity' lines to "Upper Body" and my chosen effect
Once again followed WNG's final steps, hit build in the AM and opened the Editor .....to find my glorious flaming sword!
Once again, thank you and credit to WNG for the help and insight into achieving this
P.s - there will be a twin sword accompanying this one which will be lightning themed