Take the Reaper for example, aside from editing the unit texture and pausing the animation, is there an easy/efficient way to make the unit appear like it is a stone statue?
Ideally even pause it in a given pose/frame?

It's fine if I need to duplicate Actors for this, this will not be an effect applied through Abilities, I need it to be permanent.
Basically want to turn the unit into a doodad.

There is definitely a way to make a unit skip to a certain part of an animation, I know this because some guys make animations play in reverse by skipping backwards through the animation, just take a careful look at all the Animation triggers available.

I'll look into those triggers and check out the actor messages upon unit creation.

Most likely I'll end up making a custom stone like texture too.

Use "Texture Select By ID" for the texture change. Tutorial that I really should update

I've read about three different SetTextureByID tutorials.
Was able to successfully change the textures of a reaper this way.
I am going to try to do the same with a portrait actor.


Also, I am confused by the "Slot" fields and how exactly they are handled by the engine.
I've seen this list for available slot values:
Decal
Main
Reflection
Video
Campaign
Terran
Zerg
Protoss
Merc
Body
Head
Hair
Generic 01
Generic 02
Generic 03
Generic 04
Generic 05


But when looking at a model's materials in the cutscene editor, there is usually never any reference to these labels.
It seems the texture swapping procedure is a bit inefficient since it's using String matching to find/replace the texture assignments for that model.
Things would have been a lot easier if you could select a material by its Index and then assign the diffuse/normal/specular/emissive textures via dedicated fields.
I donno... feels like the whole texture swapping implementation was quite ad-hoc on Blizzard's end. But I'm glad it works.

Blizzard tends to release community tools that aren't fully completed or lacking in features, e.g. the editor itself. That's part of the reason that SC2 mapping (there is no modding since you can get banned for doing such a thing, there is only Blizzard's loosey-goosey definition of a 'mod' that involves data stored in a map-like file) is so difficult to get into.

You should be able to access the strings manually if the automated procedure isn't working out for you. They do still have the string editor, right?

Text module can't edit these strings. The paths to the textures are defined by the model file itself.


These slot strings are only used for matching a texture declaration and a texture entry in the texture tab together.

I agree that the texture replacement stuff could have been designed better. The community found a way that works, but we don't actually understand what the implementation is actually capable of or if it is just a horrible implementation. The problem is as usual the documentation.

Usually I put the whole texture file name into the Trigger on Substring. Then I think I'm putting that into the prefix, too, in case an empty prefix isn't working. The slot just needs to have a valid slot name.

The texture entry requires the path to the texture and the slot name. If you only want to replace the diffuse texture, you need to write "slotname.diffuse" in the texture's slot field.

So, well, the good aspect of this is that we can change an actors texture per instance on the fly.

One known limitation is that one texture can only be used on one unit type at the same time, I believe. So, worst case scenario is that you import the same texture image file multiple times...