Tips for a beginner?

[Claret]

Hey there!

I've always been a big fan of WoW, and after completing my first year of college and getting some experience in Maya and 3d modeling/texturing, this just seems like a logical thing to fiddle around with. I've had a repacked private server running once, and am familiar with MySQL, but apart from that I'm almost completely in the dark.

I'm not looking for guides, since there's a section for those and posting here would just make me look incompetent... heheh... heh... I'm after tips and suggestions to getting started with modeling editing. It's actually a lot easier for me to learn something when I understand it, so if you want to go off on what goes where and why, I'm all for it!

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[EvilDancingWalrus]

(Not sure if you're still keeping tabs on this thread, but)
Custom model work is possible, but I have never messed with it. A lot of it is converting back and forth between .m2 files (Which the client reads) and whatever else. Going from m2 files is easy enough and even the WoW model viewer will do it. But going back, I haven't ever found a program I liked.

Re skinning things is much simpler. Its mainly just making a MPQ file(What the data of the game is stored as) with the correct path format.
Say, you wanted to make custom armor. Since in WoW, most pieces of armor are just reskins of the character with certain flags enabled for dress/glove looks/boot looks, you could extract ItemDisplayInfo.dbc - WoWDev (Which would be in your WoW\Data\Cache folder and in one of the MPQs (try to pick one thats closest to the current, but not all patches contain updates to that file) and take a look at the path locations.

Maybe then take a look at the armor files themselves. Notice that they're very segmented. Draw doodles on them, add them in, toy around with them.
I haven't done it in ages (since the days before transmog), but the path should be item\texturecomponents\ and then the armor location folder

I use MPQ Archives - Downloads for MPQ extraction, but whatever works.