Lately, I've been modifying and Skoping some fx for FF1. (And later I might convert some to FFvT3R). And among these are a series of grenades.
I manged to do several without a hitch, but one type of grenade FX I wanted to create was a "freeze" type. I thought about using either the start.nif or end.nif from the Active Defense ice_shell (library\fx\nuclear_winter\ice_shell), but I decided I wanted to use the core.nif from the Area attack "ice_explosion" (library\fx\fx_levels\cold_explosion) instead.
Problem is, for a grenade I did not want this freeze-type fx to cover such a huge area - I felt it needed to be reduced in size by half. Scaling the fx is not the problem. I can change "Scale" to 0.5000 and it does shrink it. However, by doing this, nearly all the components (such as the ring (ring_blue_03.tga), snowflakes (snow_flake_01.tga), and smoke_grey_02.tga are misplaced far away from the actual target - usually appearing near the hero who threw it. The only component not thrown off is the glow (area_snowstorm_01.tga ?) from the impact.
I did notice that most of the NiNodes for above had some Translation. Both X and Y coordinates were always 0, but Z is usually 18.2430 or something close. This reminded me of when I rescaled the Meshes in a different FX that I could see within NifSkope that they were no longer centered. But in that case I managed to fix it by manually scaling the Translation as well. (When I changed the scale in start.nif from rad_bolts by 0.6, I multiplied the Y Translation of -31.3716 by 0.6 to get -18.8230. This correction re-centered the mesh.)
I've tried this technique on cold_explosion\core.nif, but that doesn't seem to change anything. However, only the Z coordinate in cold_explosion has a non-zero value and, in-game, the mislocated fx seems to be off-center via either the Y or X coordinate, not Z. I've tried a few random numbers for X and Y to get it to center, but nothing seems even close to working...