entropychicken wrote...
How do reskins work exactly? Are they used via haks? I've never even touched anything like a reskin before.
As Henesua stated above A reskin is a texture replacement. So you'd create copies of each texture in the tileset, and edit those copies. Copies should be in DDS format.
To clarify that just a bit though, it is a direct replacement with a new/modified texture of the same name as the original. This removes the necessity of having to actually edit the tileset itself, or the corresponding .mdl files of that tileset.
Sounds easy right?
It is, but it is VERY DANGEROUS. Why? Mainly because textures used in Bioware tilesets in particular, but other tilesets as well, are typically also used for placeables, and possibly creatures or npc's OR other tilesets. This would mean that if you changed say a cloth texture used for a flag in a tileset, that cloth texture might be used by an NPC and would also change everywhere in your mod or you might be changing that flag in other areas of your mod that uses a different tileset.
That is why CTP warns so heavily against doing simple reskins. They can totally ruin other tilesets out there if you go and replace a Bioware texture with a file of the same name.
A replacing texture for ANY Bioware texture will override ALL instances of that texture anywhere in your mod, regardless of .hak order. Simply because .hak files override normal game resource files and also override anything placed directly into your override folder. .hak takes priority.
Now to get really long winded (as if I wasn't already long-winded enough I know).
Using the tileset duplicator that was mentioned, makes duplicating an entire tileset much easier. Once you have all the files in a sub folder that you can work with, you could then do a mass search/replace of specific textures throughout the entire .set without much issue.
The only issues you might run into would be with really detailed/complex textures... say the texture file used for crates. If your replacement texture doesn't exactly line up in the same fashion, if the edges of the box are different etc, then all the crates could look really bad. This would apply to any complication like textures used for fences, some textures used for walls, textures used for windows and doorways, possibly textures used for road surfaces etc... the list would get really long really fast.
Examples of two different texture files used for crates:
Both of those would be interchangeable.
But if the texture was more complicated like this one:
The uvw mapping would NOT work, and you would have to go manually edit every object that used the replacement texture.
Texture mapping is a skill, and the more complicated the item/object/creature/tile etc, the more complicated your skill set needs to be. UVW editing can be required to get a texture to map correctly, which is where you are basically moving bits of the object's map to correctly grab the right section of the texture that you wish to apply. The UVW map is like an invisible copy of the object that can be stretched, shrunken, moved, cutout etc, then apply the texture to that invisible object. The UVW Edit button in Max allows you to see that hidden object so you can adjust it as necessary.
So, as you can see, a complicated texture, like the third one above, is actually used for more than one thing, in this case, it has some flower pits, for flower beds, two pieces for a birds nest, some stuff for a log either cut lengthwise or not, an image map to use for a sheep, and some other bits and pieces in there. Bioware did that a LOT, they combined many small images into a single larger image, thus saving disk space, if not saving inline memory space.
Modifié par Bannor Bloodfist, 25 octobre 2012 - 05:52 .
