Looking for some advice
 

For years I've been putting off doing anything with machinima, digging through my mind over where I could find information on how to do it. I even bought machinima for dummies but never got around to reading it until 2 weeks ago. Great read but I feel book smarts only go so far; so I believe I need to be asking people with experience about this. I've been fleshing out my current idea over the past year when I have time and now I'm trying to work out the technical logistics of it all before I start dragging victims....I mean friends into the project.

Currently I'm working with the adobe premiere pro, photoshop, and a newly broken WoW Model Viewer. My questions to the community are

1) Is there anything other than WoW model viewer out there since its creator no longer updates it?

2) As for the WoW Map viewer is there anything else like that out there since it just straight up no longer works?

3) A program that generates particle effects somewhat like Particle Illusion 3.0 but a little bit cheaper. Nothing with that preset crap I need to be able to make my own.

4) Sounds, music, FX; really anyone that knows of a way to obtain area music and such from the WoW data files please let me know.

That's really all that I can think of at the current time. If I think of more I'll add to this post.

ok....I will try to give you the best advice that I, myself can personally give.

1) Is there anything other than WoW model viewer out there since its creator no longer updates it?
To my knowledge...no, unfortunately. But,there are viewers that ARE updated, just not as updated as WE would like it. You can still get pretty far with WMV. You could also try My Warcraft Studio

2) As for the WoW Map viewer is there anything else like that out there since it just straight up no longer works?
Negative, although you may be able to find an older version out there somewhere

3) A program that generates particle effects somewhat like Particle Illusion 3.0 but a little bit cheaper. Nothing with that preset crap I need to be able to make my own.
Particles are a complete art form, it is like a graphic artist. People who create particles pretty much are in high demand and really only do that kind of job.
To answer your question....not really. But, there are some really cheap app's out there like Particle Magic and Particle View,just..you get what you pay for.

4) Sounds, music, FX; really anyone that knows of a way to obtain area music and such from the WoW data files please let me know.
Again, My Warcraft Studio has all the MPQ files you need for Sound/Audio FX. You just extract the WAV file>Save to whatever destination> and import to your Premiere

Hope that helps, and who knows....might be something I am unaware of forgot and someone posts as well.