Adding custom heraldry to a shield tutorial

This is a brief summary of how to add custom heraldry to a shield.

You will need Photoshop with the Nvidia DDS plug-in (or similar). See DDS for general advice on tools.

[Texture]

Unless you have a tool which can manipulate the alpha channel of a DDS file, it's best to start from an existing example.

Open the following file in the toolset:

C:\Program Files\Dragon Age\packages\core\data\textures.erf

Export some of the heraldry textures (prefixed h_) so that you can examine them using a tool which allows you to see the alpha channel.

Note that the alpha channel is a mask which determines which part of the original shield texture is over-written by heraldry.

Choose one that is roughly the right shape - for example, h_primalora_0.dds is a good shape for a kite shield.

Open it in Photoshop.

Over-write the image with your custom heraldry, using Paste Into (not Paste, which destroys the alpha channel mask!).

It doesn't matter if your custom image is slightly bigger than the original, but bear in mind that only the masked portion will be visible in DAO.

Save the file with a new name (e.g. h_new.dds) in dds format with the following options : DXT5, mipmap 1/10, generate mip maps.

Check that your new dds file is the same size as the original, with the correct alpha mask,

[M2DA]

[Item]