How to change muzzle flashes and where are they?

Hi, for a long time now i had an idea of better muzzle flashes in arma generally, no one made any addons that change them properly, and i was looking for ways to do it, after researching a lot, i cant seem to find their location or even less their format and how arma handles this?

I have some awesome .dds muzzle flashes and smoke puffs , which i am able to open in texview 2( never used it before) so i am also wondering how to convert .dds, to whatever format arma 3 is using for muzzle flash stuff. I am guessing a simple open/convert/copy/paste wont work here? I know this even worked in arma 1 with ACE mod but i just dont know how. I dont write configs and texture stuff, all i ever did in arma modding was sound stuff and open/unpacking pbos so i have no idea where to start. I hope they dont rely on actual game particles because that would make things a lot more complicated AND it means the game can never have proper muzzle flashes. I hope i'm wrong :P Hope you guys can help.

.paa are the textures. it's basically a dds similar format. Use png or tga to save them as paa in texview2. You could also try the dds directly.

You can't open A3 muzzleflashes, they are binarized models. Not even sure if you can change their textures, i doubt it. You could only make new ones.

The models are in "Data_f.pbo\proxies\muzzle_flash\" and they are just textureplanes.

You could use A2 flashes as base for the new ones (A2 models are available to use in A3)

Hey man thanks a lot for answer, it took me a looong of time to research all this as i've never done it before. Thanks to you i found the folder , converted dds to paa after a lot of trouble and conversions to pngs, changed a couple of muzzle flashes, made data_f.pbo a pbo again, overwritten the original pbo (i made backup) and it doesn't work, in fact, game refuses to load any visual effect, including explosions and smoke AND the flashes.

So this is what i'm thinking, either I cant mod it because BIS made it so it doesn't work if you edit their files, OR i was supposed to do something extra with those rvmat / p3d files that were there. All i changed were tha PAA files which i replaced with mine and renamed them with original files. I would like to view the p3d files but i can't open them anywhere, i tried Blender , plugins for blender, photoshop cs6 with plugin that supposedly opens it but it really doesnt, some other 3rd party softwares. I tried opening them in Oxygen 2 but error pops up crashing the program. This is all very confusing to say the least. I need to see those p3d files to know what they are and what to change about them.

I PROBABLY have to make a new mod folder just for this, i know how to pack and unpack pbos , but i dont know how to write configs, and if such thing is necessary, how to tell the game to use it instead of the vanilla arma files.

Been with arma games since 2001 and i never bothered with modding till now, hope you guys have some advice it would be greatly appreciated. :D

i'm not sure if you can just replace the vanilla textures. Maybe you just didn't place them correctly? idk.

You definitely can't change rvmats, they are "baked" into the p3d modelfile when its binarized. The ones you find in the addons are basically just references for us modders - or leftovers from filebinarization (if you put it simply). So you can't change texturepaths within the rvmat/ it wont have any effect.

p3d files that are binarized can't simply be opened, and it's illegal to do so. You can check the content of them with eliteness from mikero (you wont see any model, just the informations in textform). This should already help however.

Ah it doesn't work, i tried everything that came to mind ... So i guess this is it, it's not gonna happen. I guess i will leave this in hands of other moders...