Difference between revisions of "Reskinning an item tutorial"

Revision as of 00:25, 12 January 2010

This tutorial describes how to reskin, or change the default texture, of items that already exist in-game. As an example, the default textures of the human female mage's apprentice robes will be changed.

Tools needed are the Dragon Age Toolset, and a grafic editing Applications capable of Opening, Editing and Saving DDS Texture Files.

Locating the Model Textures

At the beginning, you only know how the Model looks and what its called. A somewhat difficult task will be, finding out which files are tied to the model so that you can edit them.

First and foremost, you are looking for DDS Files. How DDS Files are referenced by an Item you see in Game is a long list of database references.

A quick rundown on references we need to be aware of

• A DDS File is referenced by the Material Properties of a Model
• A Model is then referenced by the "ItemVariation" type of files. In our example, the sub "clothing_variation.gda"
• The different Clothing Variations are then referenced by the Item Type made via the Toolset
• The Item Type is lastly referenced by the Game, when choosing which gender and race this item is worn. And then displays the final version in your game.

• • To track back to the DDS File, you need to run up this list in reverse. Starting up our example, the mages apprentice robe, as it is worn by human females. Open up the Toolset and in the Resource Palette on the upperright click on "Items". Now comes guessing where this piece is to be found there. These Items are pretty well sorted thou, it is to be found under _global / Clothing / Mage Robes / Unique. In the following list you see the ResourceName followed by ItemName "gen_im_cth_mag_app (Apprentice Robes)". Any Item can be found in the "Item" Category. Doubleclick that entry to look inside.

• • Base Item Type is Clothing, which is branching off into the Item Variation. The Robe has a Item Variation called "Robe, Apprentice". Variation in mind, onto the next step.

• • Open up the "ItemVariations.xls" File located under "(dragon age install directory)/tools/Source/2da/rules". It has many pages, locate Page "clothing variation" since we know our Item is of Clothing Item Type. In there, locate the Row called whatever Item Variation your Item had. "Robe, Apprentice" has Namestrings followed by "rob" "app" "a".

• • "rob" "app" "a" makes up Part of the Filename of the Model. Here comes a slight downer. The Model, that name references to, doesnt reveal the texture as easily. The Game follows a Naming Convention ,in that Human Female models have a hf_ prefix. Resulting Modelfilename to look for would therefore begin with "hf_rob_appa***". The Materials filename oftentimes got the same name to look for. But in this case it doesnt. The Robes Material Filename actually begins with "pf_rob_app***".

Alternatives

However you can take shortcuts, by guessing which ItemVariation it is under which category, and start by opening the "Itemvariations.xls" file directly. Or by browsing files with a Picture Viewer. Since pf_rob*** are only Robes, and its not so many.

DATools also provides a quick way of browsing thru Models, and seeing their Texturenames. You may not catch all Models, but its a possibility.

Extracting the Texture from the Package

Model textures are located in two "texturepack.erf" ERF packages, corresponding to high resolution and medium resolution textures. These packages can be found in the (dragon age install directory)\packages\core\textures\ folder. For example, the packages might be:

• C:\Program Files\Dragon Age\packages\core\textures\high\texturepack.erf
• C:\Program Files\Dragon Age\packages\core\textures\medium\texturepack.erf

Drag and drop these ERF Files onto the Toolset to browse and extract their content. If you have the Name, finding the Files will be easy. The Files will be in both "high" and "medium" and the quality setting in the game will decide which to choose. To make it compatible enough, taking them all may be neccessary.

To prepare for extracting the textures, we must create a directory mimicking the structure of the Dragon Age packages folder. To do this, create a new folder named "textures" in a convenient location (for example, on your desktop). Inside this folder, create two new folders, named "high" and "medium". The "high" folder will be where the high-resolution textures are extracted to, and the "medium" folder will be where the medium-resolution textures are extracted to.

For this tutorial, we are interested in the mage's robes. To locate the textures of the mage's robes, scroll down to "pf_rob_appa_0d.dds" in one of the two texturepack ERFs. In each texturepack.erf, select all of the image files prefixed with "pf_rob_app" (from "pf_rob_appa_0d.dds" to "pf_rob_appb_0tl3.dds"). For the high-resolution texturepack.erf, extract these images to the "textures\high\" folder just created. Extract the medium-resolution textures to the "textures\medium\" folder.

The Suffixes are describing Texture Formats, which is described under Textureformats.

To extract one of the textures, right-click on it and select "Extract Resource."

Editing the Textures

Conveniently, there are two sets of textures for the mage's robes, but only one is utilized in-game. The currently utilized textures are the "B" variation of the textures, identified by their "pf_rob_appb" suffix. This suffix can be interpreted as "female apprentice robes, variation B".

At this stage, if we wanted to edit the existing robe textures, we could do so by changing these files. See Textureformats.

Instead, we are going to simply rename the variation A robes so that Dragon Age uses these textures instead of the variation B robe textures. To do this, delete all of the "pf_rob_appb" textures, and then change the names of each of the variation A robe textures to those of their variation B counterparts. For example, "pf_rob_appa_0d.dds" becomes "pf_rob_appb_0d.dds".

Once this renaming has been done for all of the variation A robe textures (in both the "High" and "Medium" folders), we'll be ready to override the default textures in Dragon Age.

Overriding the Existing Textures

To override the existing textures, copy the "textures" folder containing the modified textures, and paste this folder into the Dragon Age override folder. The override folder is found in:

• Documents\BioWare\Dragon Age\packages\core\override\

for Windows Vista and 7, and in a similar location on Windows XP.

So, after pasting in the modified textures, the structure of the override folder should look like this:

• Documents\BioWare\Dragon Age\packages\core\override\
  • textures
    • high
      • pf_rob_appb_0d.dds
      • (...)
      • pf_rob_appb_0tl3.dds
    • medium
      • pf_rob_appb_0d.dds
      • (...)
      • pf_rob_appb_0tl3.dds

The end result: reskinned default mage robes.