Editing Character Textures for Lazy Louts, and the Technically Inept(like me!)

The texture files are saved as dds files. This stands for direct draw surface and it's the internal format used by direct x.

Your art program must support the dds file format or use a plug-in that supports it. For Photoshop you can download a plug-in from nVidia from here.

Paint.NET, a free art program for Windows, also natively supports dds files.

You can also use a stand alone program to convert the file format. One program I'd recommend is the Compressonator. You can get it from here.


thx but i already downloaded it, i didnt have problem to open the original file, i have problem to the saved document, i cant reopen it, and its saved in .tga
and the other thing, i cant repack it.... i think my tools wont work correctly, because the only way i can unpack file by selecting combine option by pressing right click, and if i wanna just run the program i cant, because instantly stop working...
 
Ah I think I know what you are doing now. You need to save the file as a dds file and the extension is filename.tga.dds.

What's confusing you is that you probably have windows set to hide file extensions. So any files will show up as filename.tga instead of filename,tga,dds. (Hiding file extensions was one of Microsoft's more stupid ideas. They stated that file extensions just confused people. Well they didn't until you started hiding them).
 
Hi! Looks like I screwed something, but I can't figure ot what... Tjhe project is, that I change the clothes of some girls (e.g. Kenzie,Viola, etc) on a little bit hotter. Unpacked the stuff, as it was written, modified, repacked, but... Kenzie totally disapeard (I use Gang Plus One to have Kenzie in the gang, and easily check the changes, but after mod, she's gone, only an empty field is there) There are two suspicious moment: I found 2 kenzie str2 file, and at the npc_kenzie_high the diffuse map is not 1024x1024, but 1024x512. Is it OK? The other one, with asm: do I have to (and if yes, how?!) update all of the parts, even those I didn't modified? (pants/shoes, head) Or ther's another thing? THX!
 
Thanks for the tutorial. I'm working on modifying the tank top (custmesh_-1887417275f). I am using GIMP and painting black on the Alpha layer to create holes. I tried at 100% opacity and 50% opacity (for a wet look).
After I export the file the tank top loads as solid grey in game.
I may be using the incorrect export options. I've tried direct export and using the recommended compression.
I'm not sure how to isolate the Alpha layer in Gimp. I did click that layer to highlight it but after saving, the blue layer becomes solid blue.

Any help is appreciated.
 
Thank you for the tutorial! However, trying to go through the whole process has been unsuccessful in my case. I would love to modify the default female character skin textures, which, if I'm not mistaken, are stored in Default female diffuse.str2_pc file in customize_player.vpp_pc file. I managed to unpack the files, edit the texture file (tga.dds extention), export it, repack the texture file (this particular str2_pc section has the textures stored in a .cvbm file, which had to be updated after the exporting the texture itself), but the str2 and asm repacking/updating part totally failed. I tried multiple times, with no success. The whole batch process seems a bit confusing to me, although I think I put correct paths to the files that should be updated / repacked. The filename.bat thing (which I put in the same folder as the repack / update applications are - as suggested in the tutorial) doesn't seem to do anything... Is it possible that the batch process can't handle this particular .str2_pc file?
 
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