Texturing: Class #1

[InsanitySorrow]

Texturing: Class #1

Welcome to the First texturing class, here we will introduce you to the basics of texturing, what you need and how to use it. In this class we will be learning how to extract our textures, how to make a simple retexture (Colour Change) and then how to save our texture. At which point we will then place our newly textured object in-game. Lots to do, so lets get started

Step 1: Our Tools

For texturing we need a few basics tools, one to extract our textures for us to retexture, our graphics program, a program to view the model and change texture path and finally the Construction Set so we can put it into the game.

The programs you choose to use will be entirely down to you, it's all personal preference, but I will cover some of the well know applications:

Extraction Tools:

BSA Commander:

BSA Commander is the extraction tool of choice for most people, it's easy enough to use and has no problems with extracting or creating BSA archives.

Download: TES Nexus

TES4 Archive:

TES4 Archive is my extraction tool of choice, I love it, it has a simple interface and organises everything in folders ect, so it's really easy to find what you want to extract. This is what I will be using throughout the classes, but you can use whatever tool you feel most comfortable with.

Download: http://sites.google.com/site/ronsworkspace/GameUtilities/oblivion

OBMM's BSA Tools:

Oblivion Mod Manager has it's own set of in-built BSA tools for creating or extracting BSA Archives. The downside to these tools is that you need to download the full OBMM install.

Download: Download

Graphics Packages:

This is the most important tool we will be using, this is where you will be working with textures, so we need to pick something we are comfortable with and supports the DDS format used for Oblivion. Fortunately the following packages all support DDS format and for the most part are easy to use.

Photoshop:

Photoshop is a very powerful graphics editor, quite confusing to learn at first, but it's worth it. The only downside to Photoshop is that it costs...quite a lot and for most modders is not really a viable option for modding.

Photoshop supports DDS format with an additional plugin provided by Nvidia.

Download Plugin: Download

GIMP:

GIMP is a free graphics editing program and a popular choice for modders. Aside from it being free, it's easy to get to grips with and is pretty powerful, it's also well supported.

GIMP Download: GIMP Website

GIMP DDS Plugin: Dowload

GIMP Normal Map Plugin: Download

Paint.Net:

Paint.Net is another free graphics editing program, it's not as powerful as GIMP or Photoshop, the upside to this is that it's quicker than the other programs and has built in support for DDS files.

Paint.Net Download: Download

Other Tools:

The last couple of tools we need are Nifskope and the Construction Set.

Nifskope will allow us to open up our meshes and redirect the texture paths to our newly created texture. Don't worry if that sounds confusing, we'll be covering that.

Download: Link

The Construction Set is required to get our work in-game, afterall there is no point creating something if it cannot be used or worn.

Download: Lhammonds has uploaded all versions of the Construction Set to TES Nexus, be sure to grab the latest version.

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Step 2: Working with BSAs

No point in learning or trying to learn how all our tools work at once, so what we'll do is work with them when needed, will simplify things for us. So first we'll start with our BSA tool of choice. The BSA tools will allow us to easily unpack the meshes and textures we want to work with/on. So let's start with that.

As mentioned earlier I'll be using TES4 Archive. but all BSA programs work in the same way, the buttons might be in a different place is all . So go ahead and run your BSA program, you should be greeted with a nice new interface.

Okay with our application open, click it's Open button. Navigate to our Oblivion Data folder and select the Oblivion - Textures - Compressed.bsa and open it.

Now with our textures BSA loaded we need to find the textures we want to work on, the textures we'll be working on are middle class clothing pants04m.dds and shirt04m.dds.

Now that we have located our textures, we need to select them and the click our Exttaction button. A new screen will pop up asking where you want to place them, for ease of use I will place mine on my desktop.

Smarty Says: Make sure you also extract the matching files with the _N suffix, these are the normal maps and are something we'll need to.

Step 3: Working with our texture

Now before we can do this we need to make sure we have installed our graphics program of choice and the required DDS & Normal map plugins. All these are linked at the start. Now with that done let's load up our graphics program. So with our plugins installed we can open up our textures like any other file, so let's open the shirt04m.dds file, if the program asks about loading MipMaps be sure to click yes.

So now we have our texture open , It's time for us to edit it. For this class we're going to be making a simple colour change, it's quick and easy, just what we need for our first go at things.

So what we need to do is open up our Hue/Saturation tool, for this go to Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation and a new box will open up.

Smarty Says: Do not worry if you are a GIMP or Paint.Net user, we simply need to navigate a little differently to find our tools. So for GIMP go Colours>Hue/Sauturation and for Paint.Net go Adjustments>Hue/Saturation.

Now I'm not sure about you, but I don't like the burgandy colour, so let's make it a light brown colour. On our little Hue/Saturation screen, fillw our saturation box with a value of 30, you'll notice we have a nicer brown coloured shirt now.

We can click ok now, our change is done.

So next up we need to save our texture for later use. so go File>Save As, make sure the DDS format is selected as the file type and name our file BrownShirt. When we click save a new dialogue box will open up, these are our DDS settings, not really much we need to do here, just make sure MipMaps is checked and select DXT1 (No Alpha) as our compression.

Click save. Now with that done we have completed our first texture edit , Simple eh? . What we want to do next is repeat those last couple of steps but this time with our pants04m.dds, we need a matching pair of pants to go with our new shirt

Use the same settings as the last texture and give it the name BrownPants.

Step 4: Normal Maps

Since we're using vanilla textures and have only re-coloured them, we can get away with using the vanilla normal maps, which saves us some time. Remember the two normal maps we extracted?, they were shirt04m_n and pants04m_n.

So what we're gonna do is rename them so they match our two new textures. So rename shirt04m_n to BrownShirt_n and then we'll rename pants04m_n to BrownPants_n.

We now have four textures, our two main clothing textures and our two normal maps. So how about we get them ready to use in-game?

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Step 5: Extracting our meshes

Okay so what we need to do is re-open our BSA Tool of choice then open our Oblivion - Meshes.bsa file. With that open we need to find the Middle class clothing folder, inside it is a folder named 04, our meshes are in here. Inside there is another two folders F (female) and M (male), we need to extract the two shirt models and the two pants models from out of the Male folder.

Our extracted files are:

Pants

Pants_gnd

Shirt

Shirt_gnd

To make sure we don't overwrite any vanilla content, we will need to rename our meshes. Simple rename them to BrownPants and BrownShirt. Make sure you rename the _GND files too.

We have our textures and meshes setup now, but there is one thing left to do, we must adjust the texture paths on the models to point to our new textures.

Step 6: Adjusting File Paths

This last section requires Niskope, so be sure to download it and install it. Information is in the first section of the class.

Double click our BrownPants.nif, it'll open up in Nifskope and you will be greeted with a screen like this, though I turned the pants slighly in my picture so you can see them better.

Now click the little white arrow nex to the NiNode in the left pane. You'll notice it'll expand the details, click the next two small arrows to expand the information again. You should now be seeing what I have here:

The reason we are expanding the information in the pane is because we are looking for the NiTextureSource, you'll be able to easily see this becuase it is noted with a purple flower icon. This is where the texture(s) are linked to the model, so we need to change this to our texture.

Click the little Purple Flower icon, this will bring up a new dialogue window, navigate to your new pants texture and select it. You'll notice our model now has the new texture applied.

Now you may also notice the texture path is something like: c:\users\Username\desktop\textures\clothes\middleclass\brownpants.dds, now while that is good enough for us, it's best to avoid leaving our texture paths like this becuase if our folder is moved or if we release the files it'll cause missing textures in-game. Anyway our textures will be placed in our Data folder, so we should not leaving a desktop link in there.

Double click on the text, you'll notice it becomes highlighted and you're able to edit it. Change it to: textures\clothes\middleclass\brownpants.dds, basically just removing anything before textures. This will make our file path safe to use and avoid problems later one. Now go File>Save As and overwrite our pants model, that's it, all linked up now

Repeat those last few steps on our 3 other models to get the texture paths all setup.

Step 7: In-Game Test

Now the final step you can take is to test these in-game, we won;t be covering that here since it's basic modding knowledge, so if you don't know, go and do DarkRider's CS Basics classes

To use these you'll need to place the models and textures into your data folder and then in the Construction set create two new clothing items, linking to our new Shirt and Pants models.

Here is how our final work looks in-game:

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Homework:

Homework, how fun , Okay so for the home work I want you to do the following:

1. Extract the female version of our textures
   
2. Extract the female version of our meshes
   
3. Recolour the female textures to match our male ones
   
4. Make sure they're correctly named so they don't overwrite vanilla work
   
5. Rename the meshes so they don't overwrite vanilla work
   
6. Repath the female meshes so they link to the new textures
   
7. Test them in-game.
   

Screenshot Requirements:

You are required to post screenshots of your recolouring, the file names, the new texture paths and an in-game screenshot showing they work.

[InsanitySorrow]

The class is not currently open for participation, but it is open for you to look at