Reskinning an item tutorial

This tutorial describes how to reskin, or change the default texture, of items that already exist in-game.

For this tutorial, the default textures of the female mage's robes will be changed.

Locating the Model Textures

Default model textures are located in two "texturepack.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

The files contained in these ERFs are in DDS format, and plugins exist to allow these files to be edited in Photoshop, GIMP, or other image editing programs. To extract the mage robe textures, open the two texturepack ERFs in the toolset. The ERFs will contain a number of DDS images.

Texture Prefix Guide

The prefixes of these files describe what kind of model the texture is associated with. Here are some of the more common ones:

Common Texture Prefices

Prefix	Interpretation
c_	Creature model
fx_	Effect
pf_	Female-specific gear model
pm_	Male-specific gear model
pm_	Genderless gear model
vfx_	Visual effects
w_	Weapon

Extracting the Model Textures

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

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_robe_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.

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" prefix. This prefix 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. (For example, pf_rob_appb_0d.dds is the diffuse texture for the mage's robes, and pf_rob_appb_0dl2.dds and pf_rob_appb_0dl3.dds correspond to lower-resolution diffuse textures).

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.