This is an advanced skin creation and in depth community and wiki for Titanfall 2 Skins.

Join the Titanfall 2 Skin Community discord at: https://discord.gg/v9WCVdzh

just videos you guys might find useful

List of hex offsets by MrSteyk(via Wayback Machine):

https://web.archive.org/web/20210725135838/https://gist.githubusercontent.com/mrsteyk/f9f853d93139cd395c1a49ab24b17b3d/raw/fdae77196a8f861c03373b243573096bd88406c0/common.rpak.log

This chapter talks about everything you need to know that doesnt yet have to do with actually texturing your models.

Introduction

In this article, we will be editing the path in a weapon's .mdl file to modify the weapon skin to use a custom skin, and applying a custom skin using .vtf and .vmt files.

No tool is currently made for VTF skins.

Preparation

Locate your game folder and find this folder if you are on Origin:

Origin Games\Titanfall2\vpk\

Or this folder if you are on Steam:

Steam\steamapps\common\Titanfall2\vpk\

Copy these files and paste them in a backup folder somewhere else preferably a backup folder:

• englishclient_mp_common.bsp.pak000_dir.vpk

• client_mp_common.bsp.pak000_000.vpk

And client_mp_common.bsp.pak000_228 if you have used RSPNVPK for mods before.

Unpacking

Now that these files have been backed up and everything installed. Navigate to your game folder and extract this file:

\Titanfall2\vpk\englishclient_mp_common.bsp.pak000_dir.vpk

​Using: How to extract VPK's properly ?

Retrieving files to edit

From your extracted vpk, navigate to the \models\weapons\ folder, and then to the folder of the gun you want to edit.

Start by creating a folder/file path on your desktop that has the same names as the common vpk (without the .vpk extension), and replicating the file path that leads to the .mdl files. That is:\englishclient_mp_common.bsp.pak000_dir\models\weapons\<gun name>

In this example, I will use the CAR smg, so I will copy the 2 .mdl files to\englishclient_mp_common.bsp.pak000_dir\models\weapons\car101

Editing .mdl's with a Hex Editor

Time to use the Hex Editor. I will be using HxD in this example.

We will be using a hex editor to adjust the weapons texture path to something we can work with/input our own textures.

To start, open your .mdl file in the hex editor. Using this, we can edit the file path for the factory skin, or for each non-paid weapon skins.

Once you've opened your file press CTRL+F and search for skin31 . If nothing shows up, then search for skin_31. This is part of one of the paths that you can edit to change the skins. The 2 paths for the 2 skins are .models\WeaponsR2\<gun name>\<gun name> and .models\WeaponsR2\<gun name>\<gun name>_skin31 / .models\WeaponsR2\<gun name>\<gun name>_skin_31

You can have 2 custom skins per gun in the game. Editing \<gun name> replaces the path used for the factory (default) skin, and \<gun name>_skin31 will replace the path for all of the non-paid skins.

Hex Editors work differently from normal text editing. It replaces instead of deleting then placing new characters. So click before the letter you want to change and press the key of the letter you now want.

We will make a simple change of changing the path from .models\Weapons_R2\car_smg\CAR_smg to .models\weapons_r2\car_lmg\car_lmg. The new path can be whatever you want though.

After you save your edits, the file will be saved and you will have a .mdl.bak extension file. You can go ahead and delete the .mdl.bak file, as it's just the previous version .mdl.

Now that we have edited our paths, we can start the process of applying custom skins!

VTF's and VMT's

VTF

With our new paths for custom skins, we need to create the folders following said paths. In the same folder on your desktop, create the file path englishclient_mp_common.bsp.pak000_dir\materials\models\weapons_r2\<edited gun name>.

For this example, the path would be englishclient_mp_common.bsp.pak000_dir\materials\models\weapons_r2\car_lmg.

Time to get your custom skin out! Now, put your .vtf file(s) of your choice in the weapon folder (\car_lmg).

A Valve Texture Format (VTF) is a texture that the Source engine uses. That texture is used in our custom skin.

The .vtf we will be using for an example is the Not Your Savior skin:

VMT File (managing file)

Now that we have our VTF(s) in our file system, We can create a Valve Material Type (VMT) file, which manages the .vtf and applies it to the models. In the folder with your VTF, create a blank text document and name it the last string in the path that you edited with the .vmt extension:

Next, we are going to create a small bit of code so the skin (.vtf) is applied to the model. Open the .vmt file in a text editor and copy the code below, replacing the values inside of <>, and not using the .vtf extension:

"VertexlitGeneric"
{
	$basetexture "models\weapons_r2\<gun name>\<vtf name>"
}

In our example, the code would be:

"VertexlitGeneric"
{
	$basetexture "models\weapons_r2\car_lmg\90notyoursavior"
}

After you are done, save and that's it for the VMT.

After you are done with editing the .mdl files and the .vmt and .vtf files, your folder on your desktop should look like this:

Setting up and using RSPNVPK

Now we are ready to compile our VPK. We will be using RSPNVPK. Copy the folder on your desktop from earlier and englishclient_mp_common.bsp.pak000_dir.vpk from your game directory into the RSPNVPK directory:

Now drag and drop englishclient_mp_common.bsp.pak000_dir.vpk onto the RSPNVPK.exe . It should bring up a command prompt. Press ENTER to start, and ENTER when RSPNVPK tells you it is finished.

After the tool is finished, copy englishclient_mp_common.bsp.pak000_dir.vpk and client_mp_common.bsp.pak000_228.vpk into your Titanfall2/vpk game directory and you should be done!

Final Product?

Say thanks to YawdinXiro for creating a this Showcase! Thanks YawdinXiro! (Note; due to different mods, the showcase video lighting is different. The skin wont look exactly like this for you.)

Contributing

In case you feel like something is out of place, not accurate, outdated, or if you just want to contribute. Go to this link: Once you are done with your changes, submit what you have done for review, then join our with the link of your change request and post it in #git-suggestions-links .

Contacting us

Permanent & Public link for our Discord server:

You can also reach us in the skin channels of the Northstar discord: .

Formats:

VTF format

VTF is the first found custom gun skin method. VTF custom skins take editing a path in a .mdl file to use the skin and script in the client_mp_common.bsp.pak000_000.vpk vpk or creating a vpk patch; client_mp_common.bsp.pak000_228.vpk.

• Unshaded textures

• Up to 4k skins

• Animated skins (VMT options)

• Viewed from afar

• Works on low graphics

• Can use transparency

DDS format

DDS is the 'best' custom skin method. DDS custom skins takes injecting skins into the games pc_stream.starpak file.

• Properly shaded skins

• Distance based visibility; viewing from up close.

• Community made tools

• high quantity high-quality skins

• Most commonly used

Format's possibilities

Static, Single frame

Static skins are skins that don't move in any way. Compatible with VTF and DDS format. Simple and at times, most elegant. DDS formats only skin style.

Moving texture, Single frame

Only available with VTF format. Moving skins are skins that have a code group in their .vmt that moves your vtf texture to your desired parameters. The code block to move your textures is below; note this goes into your models .vmt file:

"Proxies"
    {
        "TextureScroll"
        {
            "texturescrollvar" "$baseTextureTransform"
            "texturescrollrate" "-0.03"
            "texturescrollangle" "180"
        }
    }

Change "texturescrollrate" "-0.03" to change speed of movement. Change "texturescrollangle" "180" to change direction of movement.

Animated texture, Multiple frames

Only available with VTF format. Animated skins are skins that create a moving affect or active scene by using multiple frames. You wont need multiple vtf's as VTFEdit creates one file with every frame inside. Mind that this increases size; which can have affects in recompiling. Note you can use Add-ons on your image editors to help with making animated skins. You need this code group in your models .vmt to activate animation; found below.

"Proxies"
    {
        "AnimatedTexture"
        {
            "animatedTextureVar"	"$basetexture"
			"animatedTextureFrameNumVar"	"$frame"
			"animatedtextureFrameRate"	"2"
        }
    }

Change "animatedtextureFrameRate" "2" to change framerate in game.

'Prerequisites'

Now we will be setting you up to load you with information on how to make skins in the next chapter.

Info

Before we start, understand that this tutorial is making use of Blender as the main software. In this tutorial we will be using the .smd model format. You may still follow if you are using other software. (keep in mind as well, the process for some things wont be the EXACT same on other software) [Substance tutorial will be released soonTM]

Getting our model

Firstly, we need to obtain the model for whatever it is you will be working on. To do this, simply head over to the main page of the github, pick a format of your preference and find the model you need.

Once you have obtained the model you want, we can now obtain the textures for it. Head to the main page of the github and just simply navigate through the "textures" folder.

Now, you have the models and textures downloaded. What do I do with these you may ask. Now, we need to download the appropriate software to edit and make custom skins. For this, there is a plethora of tools you can use. Blender, Substance Painter, Maya, Krita, Gimp, Photoshop, etc.

Software

For this tutorial we will be using Blender, if you want to use Substance Painter then please navigate to the substance tutorial. (substance tutorial may not be finished at this time)

If you are asking, are all of these software's free? Sadly only some are..BUT the ones that are free are: Blender, Krita, and Gimp.

There is a way to obtain Substance which is free and not illegal or pirating in any way. This method uses a service Adobe themselves offer. For more info on this follow this video: https://youtu.be/0uKH4S7QD44

Plugin install

Assuming you now have Blender installed and have ran it at least once, firstly delete the cube and camera that spawn upon loading Blender up the first time, then go to "file" in the top left then "defaults" and click "save startup file" This will get rid of useless junk every time you startup Blender

Next, we need to install a plugin to be able to import the model/s we installed. (This plugin allows you to import .smd .vta .dmx and .qc files)

Go to this link to install the plugin :https://steamreview.org/BlenderSourceTools/ (Download the latest version)

Now that we have that installed, re-open Blender and go to "Preferences" found under the "edit" tab. Click the "add-ons" tab and go to "install"

Now locate your add-on and install as shown

Importing the model

To import our model, we simply just need to go the to top left of our screen "file" then "import" and now click "source engine". Once it opens up the file explorer tab, now just look for the model you downloaded and double left click it.

Sometimes models can take a second to load so dont click anything while ur waiting for it to load in. You are now done importing the model (yay)

Moving and rotating our model

THIS IS JUST FOR A CLEANER WORKSPACE, FEEL FREE TO SKIP THIS PORTION IF YOU DONT CARE

Following the above image, we need to make sure that magnet is now blue and same with the "rotate" text below it. Before we continue, you may notice some weird things spawned in with the model like shown in the below image.

We can delete all of the spheres, the kill tracker, and any sights that arent default. Now you may be saying "my model is split up into parts" to solve this, simply hold left shift and select the other parts of the gun, when everything is selected, right click then "join" . Now we can move on to rotating and moving our model.

Select the model in question, and in the top right you should see the x, y, and z axis. Click the X axis and it should look like this after.

Now select the rotate tool. Its the one that has a stop sign in the middle with arrows rotating around it. Now, on the red line, hold left click and rotate the model left to a perfect 90 degree rotate. Now select the move tool and line up the model with the blue line going down our screen.

Texturing our model

There is multiple ways to go about this in Blender, today im just going to show you a very simple way. We need to change our workstation to "texture paint" now.

Once in the texture paint tab, follow the below image.

Once our texture mode is set to "single image" we can now import whatever texture map we want. To acquire the texture for the model you are editing, simply head to https://github.com/BigSpice/TitanFall-2-Skin-Modding/tree/main/Textures

Now, you should have downloaded the correct textures. Simply go to the "open" button on the right side as demonstrated below to open a file explore tab.

Now locate the texture you want to edit and just open it. Congrats, you have now successfully imported a model and textured it. (A more advanced tutorial may come soon)

Beginnig with the basics

It should be common knowledge that the guns we use in game are models and these are made up of a lot of points called vertices and these are connected through edges which then come together to for individual faces.

This is a cube I made in Maya, note that for our usecase it is irrelevant wether u use Blender, Maya, 3dsmax or any other modeling tool.

The Yellow Square is a selected Vertex.

The orange lines are the Edges connecting to it.

And this is one of the Faces.

As u can see this cube is completely grey, in game we want more detail and colour to it obviously so how does that work. Well, you probably know what Textures are. 2d images describing an objects colour in certain places and other properties that I will explain later.

To define how the pixels information of the 2D image gets to the 3D object the individual faces are laid out onto a flat surface. This is called its UV layout.

This funny penis u see is the cubes standart uv layout, but it doeosnt have to be, u could also change it up and have multiple of the sides take up the same space to apply the same texture to those areas. Bits outside of the 1:1 space get the same texture applied to them so it’s the same but out of the way. Note that we cannot edit UVs in titanfall without editing modelfiles so go annoy libberty about that.

So with these out of the way we can talk a bit about the workflow now.

Basics of substance explained:

Firstly go to file and make a new Project.

In this windows we need to first select the Template, there is many ways of creating the same effects and in the case of Titanfall or Source (im not sure honestly) the one used it Specular Glossiness. Next select you fbx file, set the document resolution to what is used in game, that is 2k for most guns however some like the wingman actually use 1k resolution on their textures, however if u want to you can still make 2k resolution textures for guns like the wingman elite. The problem here would then be that it takes a greater amount of performance even though the base games resolution would have looked fine. Here you can now just click on ok to import your model.

You should save your project now to actually not just have an unnamed project and frequently later on. There is autosave but u shouldn’t rely on it. Depending on your hardwares power substance might crash at seemingly random points so you might loose a good bit of progress.

The next important step is baking your mesh maps. On the right you can see your layers and next to it are your texture set settings.

If you don’t see the textures set settings window you need to open them further on the right.

Scrolling down a bit you can see your channels. Click the plus to add ones called emission and ambient occlusion. You should not remove anything if you have used the right Template.

Scroll down a bit and click on bake mesh maps.

Uncheck ID, set the output size to 2k and that’s all you rly need to do here for Titanfall skins.

Click either bake your guns name or bake selected. Wait for it to compute all your texture maps.

UI:

On the left there is your 3D View, on the left your 2D UV layout, by pressing f2 or f3 you can isolate either one and go back to both with f1. On the right you can see your layers with all respective options and right bellow the properties of your selected item. At the bottom you can see your assets, these are presents of Smartmaterials, materials, textures, masks, brushes, generators and alphas. Importing your own is possible for all of these. And on the left you can see your tools like brushes stamps and so on. In your 3d or 2d view at the top right you can see a dropdown in which you can isolate individual channels of your materials, like colour, normal, glossiness, the ones substance has generated like world position and also things like your current mask.

Quick Substance introduction:

You usually start of by thinking of a design and then creating a fill layer, changing its attributes to resemble some basic aspect like, for metal you could create something grey in spec and have a bright value in its gloss spot to make it very shiny, these values are set in the properties under your layers. Then you should create a folder that you place that fill layer in, add a mask, masks are more see trough on brighter values and more opaque on darker values. In that mask you add a paint effect under your effects dropdown.

In this paint you can now easily edit the mask and define on what parts of the gun you want your folder to be visible, you can edit the mask directly but this is hard to manipulate or change later so id advise against that. The easiest way to restrict your materials to certain parts is to go all the way to the left of substance, and then the 4th tool from top called polygon fill will be useful here. You can select between polygon and triangle fill, as all models extracted from engines are already triangulated these are effectively the same, the UV chunk fill which selects your individual continuous UV shells that you clicked on, visible in the UV view, or your object fill mode you are currently working on an whole Model but it is still made up of individual surfaces which are not connected, and these are what you are selecting here.

In that created folder u can now place a different fill layer on top and add a mask again. Now this is where the real fun begins as I will now explain all the different ways you can add effects on top of each other to create more realistic looking materials.

You could add a fill effect and then go into your assets browser/shelf, to the grunges section, take one that fits and drag it into the grayscale slot, now u can change settings in that grunge to change how it affects the mask and lower the effects opacity in general, if you are familiar with layer modes in photoshop these can be changed in your mask where your fill effect was applied as well.

You could also add a generator to get your mask to only affect places where your AO is stronger or your do the same with curvature of thickness or to get a 3d gradient.

In your shelf you can also see a section for smart masks, these are a collection to of premade masks to help you speed up your workflow for creating certain effects like dust or edgewear.

You could also add a Filter on top of your already existing stack in that effects stack to add for example a blur, or slope blur which is good to chip up textures or stylize them, or adding a sharpen.

You can add levels to have some great control over the luminance of your mask.

And you can add all of these things and many more together to create great textures, or fuck up everything and want to die.

Stim setup:

Getting the Model from the Github I imported it into Maya, once again the software you use doesnt matter.

So, time to explain what’s going on here. Those spheres described by 3 circles are the joints of the models bones, I’m not animating these so ill delete them, instead of clicking every joint individually your program has some sort of hierarchy in which you can select the entire rig.

And here you can already see the next issue, ever LOD of the model is included. LOD stands for level of detail and they are lower resolution versions of the model that are switched to depending on the observers distance to the object. This saves performance. You can also force your game to only display the lowest resolution version of these to save performance, you would do this with a custom video config, there’s guides for this online.

The bottom one of the list is the pilots body and the name ends in lod0, this and the fact that it has the highest polycount means that it’s the correct model to work with. Don’t use any other version for texturing, that will cause things to not align correctly anymore and there is just not reason to do so in general.

I also delete the head as I’m only focusing on arm right now.

Now I do not know if this next thing will be the same in other software or if it is Maya specific. Although since I just imported an fbx it seems likely that it would be universal.

Now I go into face selection mode and delete everything that is not the arms. Useful tip is that the specific parts of the model all have different colours already assigned to them based on their Udim.

The arms are a separate on which makes it really easy to know which parts belong and which parts don’t.

Here you can see what I am talking about. Delete everything that doesn’t have the arms teal colour, even if it seems to be a part of the arm, if you don’t do so the UVs will overlap.

With this done what I would do is scale the arms down to a more reasonable size as they are, to put it lightly, FUCKING HUGE.

This doesn’t work as you can see here by the move tools axis being greyed out. So I am unable to affect the objects transforms.

How I work around this is by duplicating all the guns geometry which makes them separate and unaffected by this. Yes I do not know an actual fix and neither did my Teacher for Maya so yikes ig.

This has caused every part of the gun that isn’t physically connected to become a separate model, but all the way at the bottom of my outliner I can see that there is one that is all of them combined together again.

You might have to make you objects one again by hand but that is also as simple as selecting all of them and then combining them with what ever that function is called in your program.

Now I scaled it down to a size I liked more and placed it in the middle of my scene.

That was everything I needed to do here so I export this now and go into substance painter. You should compare your UVs to see if you have missed anything just in case.

These are all parts that should be included in your UV layout, if something is missing go back and don’t delete it this time and if something is too much delete it.

And getting rid of the bones is not necessary, just once again tis best to work as cleanly as possible to avoid additional problems being caused.

Substance part:

These arms don’t have an emission channel in game so adding them in substance is pointless.

After baking one arms AO is quite fucked which is due to the arms asymmetry. This is something you can thank Respawn for.

The easiest way to fix this is by just using the base games AO map which I would recommend anyways so your skin will fix with the games general aesthetics. Yes the AO substance exports isn’t at all the same as the basegames.

Scroll down in the Texture settings to find all your mesh maps and here you can just click the x next to Ambient occlusion.

That’s all you need to keep in mind in this case.

Preping for texturing:

Fixing the model:

Once you have all your files that you want to use from the game extracted, those being the ptpov_weaponname for the model and all the guns textures, you should open the modelling software of your choice and fix a few things to make working with it later on easier.

So with the charge rifle imported (ptpov_defender_v_defender in files) it is already obvious that its rotation is wrong. This is due to certain programs having a different order in its axis and as you can see it is already rotated by -90° so in my case I just need to set this to 0.

Your gun will most likely disappear when u rotate it like that as it does not rotate around its centre of mass which will be fixed in a bit although this is optional. You can also see that its Scale is at 100, the reason for that is similar to the one for the rotation. While this does not matter for Substance Painter it is still best practice to work as cleanly as possible.

Depending on what you did in Legion your files might come with a rig/bones or have all detached faces and so on, I wont cover all those cases but with some understanding of the software you use it should be easy, if tedious, to fix these. Makee sure to not actually edit your model itself as these changed will case issues if you don’t want to bring that model into the game as well.

Fixing UVs:

The next relevant step is a little bit more hidden but looking at the UVs it becomes more obvious. (I had to switch to my Hemloks file as this issue did not occur with the charge rifle.)

Here I have selected a face UV shell that is taking up all of the 1:1 UV space, this comes with the models as another issue trough conversion.

Focusing on it in 3D view shows that it’s a one unity big quad inside of the gun. Simply delete it as this taking up the entire UV space will cause issues.

Here it would also be optional to move the Magazine of the gun, if it has one, outside of its holder, depending on weather you care to access the bullets and the part of the magazine inside of the case. On some guns the Magazine might clip into the part of the tun that holds it in. Simply move it a bit to fit. If it’s actually larger than the opening, you can thank respawn.

Now Export it and open Substance Painter. Make sure to Export as an .fbx as its pretty lossless compared to .obj. You can think of this like .jpg and .png just more complicated.

Exporting:

Under File you need to click export textures.

Here you can set your output directory to wherever youd like.

Set the output template to what you have used in your project, thus being spec glos. You could also add AO to it but i usually dont care enough.

The file type should be a png and leave it at 16 bits.

Set the texture size to whatever your gun usually uses. So based on texturesetsize works. Note that you can make Bigger textures than thebasegames but you would just add a bigger workload on your and anyone elses compute for not much of a benefit as the game looks fine with the textures the way they are.

Here you can now click on export and use the Maker version of the skintool to add the skin to the game.

If you are planning on using maps from the base game (which you should atleast for the Normal map, Ambient Occlusion (AO), and most of the emission (ilm but its only called that in source) and some others if u want to keep parts of the guns normal look) it’s good to put each one on a separate fill layer and then playing these into a folder so you are able to manipulate individual parts.

Now ill cover what which texture map does.

Diffuse or Base Colour:

It simply defines the RGB value of a given part of the gun and nothing else.

Glossines(sometimes roughness is used instead however the two are not the same):

Defines how shiny or matt parts of the guns are, make sure to not have perfectly flat values for your material as nothing is ever perfectly even, even if u want to make a really smooth surface make sure to have extremely subtle imperfections, this is just how realism works and since none of you will make their own models a realistic style just fits best. Brighter = shinyer.

Emission or Illumination (this time they are interchangeable):

Makes parts of the gun glow, the brighter the value the brighter the glow, it doesn’t replace any colour underneath, be careful as Titanfall has bloom and it can get out of hand fast. Without bloom emission looks a bit worse.

Ambient occlusion:

Just places that are supposed to be darker cuz less light could bounce back to the camera, so basically baked shadows. This is one of the first but not last examples where you can see that substances generators, its baked mesh maps and for example the textures from Titanfall differ by a lot at times.

The normal map:

This is a complicated one. The one you get out of the game is green, we cant use it in this state, you gotta go into photoshop or something similar to flip its blue channel. Its currently only red and green channel to reduce filesize, the blue channel can thus be calculated at runtime as it is dependant on the red and green channels so once you are done with your texturing you should make the blue channel all black again. In blender there is a shader that correctly calculates the blue channel and there’s probably tools online, the imperfections by just making it all white in photoshop aren’t too noticeable though so I did not bother finding out.

The normal maps purpose is to make light reflect differently of a surface then it would with the actual angle to the Lightsource of that surface. So to save performance and aovid capturing every little detail with geometry you can instead have a flat face and create the illusion of a screw trough the normal map.

Speceular:

It basically defines how metallic a part of the model looks, if u don’t want something to look metallic at all leave it at its base value, want a purple metal, change the diffuse for all parts where it should have that property to black and then set your spec to that purple. Specular is actually RGB even if it might not look like it in this example.

Cavity:

This map has basically the same effect as AO but its constricted to the tightest of crevasses, I have yet to see anything other then Titanfall use this. Substance doesn’t even include it in its channels so the only use u might get from it is to import it and use it as some mask for a certain effect or something like that. Just use the base games in the skin tool.

Height:

This is not a map you get from the game however it is essential to correctly add normal information. Its also black and white and if you want a part of the gun to protrude more outwards it should be brighter then 0.5 luminance or if u want something to dent in it should be darker then 0.5 luminance. 0.5 is the base value and luminance is a pixels brightness.

THE BELOW IS FOR PEOPLE WHO JUST WANT TO REVERT BACK TO DEFAULT SKINS. IF YOU DO NOT WISH FOR THIS JUST SKIP PAST

If you do not have the default textures, you are in luck :https://github.com/BigSpice/TitanFall-2-Skin-Modding/tree/main/Textures/Compiled%20textures Download whatever gun you want to revert back to normal, and now just install it like any other skin.

In this tutorial I will show you how to pack a skin using zxcPandora's skin tool. In this tutorial I am assuming you have already made the skin or are just replacing a current skin with default | WARNING PLEASE DOWNLOAD THE SKIN MAKER TOOL, NOT USER https://github.com/zxcPandora/Titanfall2-SkinTool/releases Now that you have downloaded the skin tool maker, please run the tool and set the correct game path.

Common Game locations: %ProgramFiles(x86)%\Steam\steamapps\common\Titanfall2 | %ProgramFiles(x86)%\Origin Games\Titanfall2\

What is shown in the screenshot is what should pop up, if so then we can continue.

Now, set a name for the skin you have made, then set the asset type, this NEEDS to match whatever model the skin is for. Next, set the save path.

Once you have done that, just drag the textures into the right locations, if you are unaware of what layer is what then reference this image :

Once You have dragged the layers to the right locations, just click generate and we are almost done! Once the skin is done generating, just exit the skin maker tab and then click the three little dots to open a file explorer, select the skin zip and click "open". Once you click "import skin", you are done! You now have just successfully packed a skin and installed it!

If you need help understanding this tutorial or got stuck on a step, feel free to ask for help in our discord.

Ok so depending on what you do and how much effort you want to put in to your materials in substance you might need to work in metalic roughness and specular glossiness.

Introduction

So this material was created in substances metalic roughness template. What is taht though?

Well it achives the same as spec gloss, just in a different way. In spec gloss a dilectric material, so something that isnt metalic, gets its color from the diffuse and its shinyness from the glossiness. And a metalic material gets its color and metalic look from the specular map while the diffuse needs to be all black, and its shinynes is also taken care of by gloss.

And in metalic roughness a materials color is driven by diffuse, metal or not does not matter. So the metalness mal is just a slider between one and 0, white and black, that determins how metalic that part of the diffuse is. There are no matterials that that are something between metal and not though so if you care about realism even in the slightest you should keep it at either white or black.

And a roughness map is simply a glossiness map inverted, so black is shiny and white is rough while for a gloss white is shiny and black is rough. You might ask why they are even different maps when they are so similar, and the answer ist that there is no reason. At least to my knowledge, this has just historically grown to be the way it is i guess.

Personally i like metal roughness more because thats whats used in 90% of games and other uses and its also easyer as you just have a diffuse for all color and then a boolean for metal or not.

How to convert it

So as I have already said converting gloss to rough is trivially easy. You do not have to do anything more then loading the file into photoshop, pressing ctrl + i, and then saving the result.

To get your specular however the process is a little more involved. Because you cannot simply put your diffuse into your spec channel unless no part of your gun is supposed to have diffuse color.

So if you have a metal map and a diffuse you can basically use the metal map as a mask in photoshop to make all your diffuses parts that are specular completely black, and then you can copie paste those parts into your spec map.

If you want to covert spec to metalness you need to make the specs parts that are metallic completely white and the rest black. The easiest way to get that would be to colorselect all black parts of your diffuse, and then using that as a mask to copie paste your spec ontop and then making all those parts white and the rest black for your metalness map.

You dont have to use photoshop, just something that can do the described actions.

More indepth information

Community Tools:

- DDS Skin tool

Edited by Strykus, Titanfall2 SkinTool is a Titanfall 2 and R5R tool with a UI to easily apply DDS skins that are formatted accordingly. This tool can apply weapon, pilot, titan, and weapon attachment skins.

- DDS Skin tool

Made by zxcPandora, Titanfall2 SkinTool is a Titanfall 2 and R5R tool with a UI to easily apply DDS skins that are formatted accordingly. This tool can apply weapon and pilot skins.

Tools:

- "Blender's mission is to bring the best 3D technology as tools in the hands of artists, for all platforms, everywhere in the world, free and open source forever." (free, app)

"Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation pipeline."

- "The world is your canvas, so grab inspiration from all around you and have fun experimenting." (paid, app)

"Adobe photoshop is a image editing and photo retouching application."

- "Substance becomes Adobe Substance" (paid, app)

"Substance painter is a specialized texturing tool which utilizes a procedural Physically Based Rendering (PBR) workflow."

- "GNU Image Manipulation Program" (free, app)

"PureRef is a stand-alone program for Windows, Mac and Linux that keeps track of your images.

"AutoHotkey is a free, open-source scripting language for Windows that allows users to easily create small to complex scripts for all kinds of tasks such as: form fillers, auto-clicking, macros, etc."

• Numpad1: Saves (CTRL+S)

• Numpad2: Undo (CTRL+Z)

• Numpad3: Reloads images in Blender with NodeWrangler (ALT+R)

Websites:

Coolors is a color palette generator with many options to find what you need.

You can pick specific pixels and its the easiest when uploading my own images to rip colors from.

Create realistic material guides creating other styles you might want.

Preview:

Actually making a material that looks good:

Here I will go over how you would use the functionalities I have only briefly covered in the basics docs as it was only focused on getting u started with understanding how things work. I will mostly focus on my marble cars marble material as it’s a good example for making complex materials from the ground up. However I will also get other materials for examples on things I couldn’t cover otherwise. I also wont talk about substances UI or anything if u want to get started with that revere to the basics guide.

The final result:

Marble:

So with everything setup and your idea in mind you either start with an fill layer or one of the materials substance comes with, they can be selected in the shelf. Its also always good to get some reference of the material you are trying to create.

In my case I just chose a dark green for the base and a glossiness around 0.9 to make it really shiny:

I created a new Fill layer with a brighter green and slightly less glossiness and added a mask to this fill layer.

Black or white doesn’t matter as its initial colour will be replaced though if u want to restrict certain materials to certain parts of the gun you should think about using a white or black mask as it makes a big difference on how much you will work on your mask. White is completely transparent for the layer below to shine through and black is completely opaque.

In this mask I added a fill effect.

In the greyscale slot of this fill I placed a marble_fine which can be found in the grunges section of your shelf. I added a Levels effect on top to invert this masks white values, you can invert it in the grunges settings itself however with levels you have more control.

As you can see I also clamped the values down to make it much sharper.This is what that looks like now.

It should also be noted that it is generally better to set all textures so also this grunge to Tri-planar projection.

Explaining exactly what it does to UV projection would take to long now so if u actually care https://substance3d.adobe.com/documentation/spdoc/tri-planar-projection-180191954.html

The thing you really need to know is that it keeps your texture evenly sized and it can get rid of seams, though you shouldn’t rely on it. The Car has differently sized UVs on its main side.

These 2 are one piece in the model yet they are separated in the UV, one part is closer to the camera, so it being bigger lets respawn have a bigger resolution to the part where you notice it more. Clever but a bitch for us to work with as the marble pattern is now differently sized on the actual model. Tri-Planar Projection could fix this however in this case and some other Titanfall models it is fucked and doesn’t work correctly. So what did I do as a work around, I made a new folder with everything identical besides that scale of the pattern, I adjusted it to fit the size difference. One big tip here to save time is using anchor points. A quick explanation of them is that they are also able to be added in the effects dropdown and they can be used to reference properties trough your layer stack. If you add an Anchor Point to a layer can only reference it in layers that are above it not below it. To use them in a new layer you have to click on the layers property you want to effect and then switch over to the anchor points tab and select the one you want to reference.

It’s pretty messy but it works and that’s what’s important with bugs like this.

With anchor points you can also reference your normal maps information to add edgewears not only the parts of the model that are actual geometry but also edges that are only in the normal map. This would then be done under the micro details section where you would have to add the anchor and set the layer to normal.

Back to the actual material.

On the inverted marble mask that I have so far I added a warp to break the shape up some more.

The warps effect can be pretty sensitive but you can get more control by adjusting the intensity divider.

Then I added a blur in the same way as the warp and also adjusted it.

(yes the warp has become obsolete with this but I wanted to use a better example than the one coming soon)

Here I further reduced it with another levels node.

And I blurred it out again to get a smoother transition from the dark green to the bright green.

Another warp creates a nice stepping effect in the transition which fits to rock, but it’s a worse example for what warp actually does.

And onto this I now added a blur slope which is an effect like a normal blur. It’s a great effect for all sorts of things like creating break up or stylizing a texture. In this case it makes the whole thing more fitting for the rock effect I want to go for.

Now I added another fill with a grunge_scratches and I set it to multiply so it only effects on top of the pervious areas.

I was pretty happy with this result all I did now was add a paint effect to get the really thick green layers to have a bit more variation. I used the brush dirt 2 its probably one of my favourites. And in the end I decided to lower this masks overall opacity to 56%.

The final layer stack.

Under this layer I added another fill that is almost as dark as the bottom most layer, more blue tinted, and glossier. I used a simple grunge_marble_shapes in the mask and left it at its base values.

Its important that you pay as much attention to your glossiness as you do to your colours as its also a really important aspect of realistic materials.

Now all the way at the top of these layers I added a fill layer that is nearly black and added another grunge_marble_shapes with a different scale and a slightly lower balance.

Then I added a layer with a bit of a brighter green again and a lower glossiness value with a grunge marble shapes in the mask and 0.3 in balance at a scale of around 5.

I was now pretty much happy with the actual stoney texture so I moved on to adding some cracks, firstly I made some that didn’t lift of to much with the grunge marble_wide at a high scale again with more or less the same green again but a way lower glossiness of .6 and I made it cave in slightly with the height parameter. Over these I added a warp with an intensity around 3 and a source tiling of nearly one.

Now I made some bigger more noticeable cracks that are now almost white with their colour and go in more on the height. The grunge I sue is marble_veins with a scale around 3 and a balance of 0.23.

Then I added a layer that is a bit whiter with its colour again and used a marble fine in the mask, on this one I added a sharpen as well to get the corner of the cracks to be sharper.

Here a comparison between sharpened and normal.

New cracks on top, even whiter even bigger. Still marble fine just adjusted the scale. I also added a rather intense warp to this and then sharpened it aswell.

Now I copied this top layer and moved it below all pervious marble veins. I changed the colour to be a more saturated and way brighter green. I then used a blur on what I had to get an area around the veins, so it’s a intense blur at 5.6.

I used a level to get it brighter again.

I blurred it out again then applied a warp to get that Stoney stepping effect and applied a blur slope again.

Now again a fill on top that is set to multiply with an grunge_dirt_splats in its greyscale. And I sharpened that result again.

Here I went all the way up the layer stack again and added a fill layer in which I removed the colour channel and only left the glossiness. I set it to around .5 and the grunge I used it grunge_concrete_cracked.

Another fill with only gloss, this time a value of .8 and an inverted grunge_marble_veins for the mask.

This was now basically my finished material and I moved on to other things. Keep in mind that this is just my way of doing things and substance painter has nearly infinite ways of doing things and getting results. And getting to a result like that isn’t as straight forward as it seemed in this explanation, it’s always way more trying around with what grunges fir where and so on. Also height tends to be less noticeable in game then in substance so a bit more then u think looks good in substance is good for it too have a similar look in game.

Things like the gold highlights.

Gold:

The process this time is similar, instead of diffuse we use the specular channel now.

So I firstly applied the brass pure base material that is already included in substance.

I Googled the correct RGB values for gold which turn out to be this.

I then applied a mat fx called matfinish_rough. Matfx can give great results for if you want to create different types of surfaces on metals, there is one for galvanized, brushed, grinded, hammered and many more metals. Try around with them. In the matfx I set use custom grunge to true and used ratio_grunge_map_012 for its input and adjusted its balance and contrast a bit.

I then added the steel rough material on top and used a smart mask to get a nice edgewear from it.

The process was the same as before, try around and find smth that fits, I couldn’t even tell you what I used as substance doesn’t tell me and I forgot by now.

I then added a new fill layer, disabled everything besides glossiness and dragged a ratio_grunge_map_004 into it. I then added a levels to this layer and set it to affect glossiness.

Slightly adjusted.

And that’s the final result of it.

Glow and extra bits:

My skin had gold cracks on the marble as well, I achieved that by duplicating the gold material and adding one of the marble veins grunges to a mask for it.

I added a 3rd material to the final gun, what I used was steel dark aged, a smart material. I was already with most of it. Usually I would advise against just slapping random smart materials onto your models and leaving it at that as they become pretty noticeable and honestly only look ok in a lot of cases. However on this gun it would be hard to notice and dark steel aged is much rarer and less obvious compared to steel painted rough damaged. So all I did is add a paint to break up its extremely smooth edgewear.

And the glow was pretty simple as well. I added a fill layer at the top of all my layers, gave it an even blue colour, enabled emission and gave it roughly the same colour. The mask I used for it has a fill with substances generated AO. I adjusted it with levels to actually have it appear in the right spots.

This is what it looks like, it should be noted that I inverted it as most of an AO map is actually white so the effect would be the opposite of what I’m trying to create. I then fixed some more things with an paint layer and added a blur to create the illusion of the glow affecting the gun around it.

I then added another fill layer, this time with a pretty blue green and an even greener emissive. Same setup in the mask, just reduced it even further with the levels.

I then added another layer that is bluer again, brighter, and is like the first one again just with the blur being way more intense.

Here I will be talking about i i created this material with only the tools substance provides you with, and i used some techniques i havent meantioned in the previous substance tutorial.

Setup:

Under Files there is a tab called open samples. The one called basic sphere is the one you want to use to get this sphere here.

This Project is in a different template so you will have to go into your texture set settings to change the channels accordingly and also open your shader settings all the way on the right to edit your project template.

Now if all you have seen of substance so far is my last guide this might get a bit more complicated then that altho i do not think that its to bad, either way thats just your friendly dissclaimer.

The Material:

I created a fill layer and added a grunge map 014 directly into their gloss and diff channels with identical settings for all of them.

Now onto that layer i also directly added a gradient filter, these are again added by going into the effects dropdown, selecting filter, and then searching for the one called gradient.

This is what it looks like, and its function is pretty simple yet really handy. As you can see i have its channel set to diffuse. and since i have the grunge map in the filllayers diffuse layer, I am able to asign different colors to different levels of luminocity on that diffuse and they are interpolated between. So as you can see in the screenshot i have increased the color quantity to 4, then I assigned a really dark blue to the black value, then a lighter blue and an even lighter one up to 0.5 and then for the reast I set it to a nice green.

Here is a before and after.

To this fill layer i now added a levels adjustment filter to bring its glossiness back to something reasonable. When you work with levels outside of masks you need to set the affected channel in a dropdown.

You could now add a slight blur aswell if you find the details to be to harsh.

Now ontop of this layer i added one with only a gloss channel and a valuje of around 0.58 for it.

After that i added a mask to this layer.

As you can see this is already creating more intersting patterns in the roughness.

Now i basically duplicated that layer and hardly changed its gloss at all and in the mask i only applied a grunge 004 map witha scale of 3.5.

Now ontop of this i added a fill layer with grunge dirt splats as its gloss input.

I went into the glossines channel on my layer stack.

And i set the layer to soft light here.

Now this has a really nice way of taking brighness away from what i had before to create additional breakup and i also reduced it with a levels on gloss again.

Now i started to create some edgewear. So i started off by making a new layer with a gloss of .15.

And in the black mask of this i added a generator and selected curvature for it.

Ontop of this I added a fill layer with a simplex noise 3d for its input in the greyscale and i set it to multiply.

The effect this has it that its randomly reducing the strength of the curvature map so its less uniform around all edges.

Only curvature.

Simplex noise on multiply.

I added a blur slope for additional breakup.

And then some warp ontop of it.

Then i added another fill effect with grunge scratches for its greyscale and i also set it to multiply.

While the direct comparison between the two looks of edgewear and no edgewear arent to noticable edgewearr is just the kind of thing that looks wrong when its missing. However to get it a bit more visually interesting i decided to add some discoloration to the plastic around these damaged edges.

So what i did for that is duplicate my base layer right underneath the one i was just working on and i copie pasted the edge wear mask on it.

Then to the fill layer i applied a HSL perceptive filter.

This is what I used to create the discoloration.

Now the last step I took is adding some subtle dirt or dust.

So I created a new fill layer all the way at the top of the layerstack, added a grunge rough dirty to its diffuse and i applied this gradient to it.

I also added a HSL perceptive to this to have some easyer control over the color of the dirt. With it I lowered its lightness slightly and lowered its saturation a lot.

The mask for it is a simple AO generator with the same simplex noise multiply and a blur as well as a blur slope on top of it.

Conclusion:

As you can probably see this way of creating your details is alot less clutered in your layerstack compared to the marble guide. Creating something that looks as unique as the color of this material would also be pretty hard without gradients. So both ways are viable. you should just know what to do when and how.

Me calling these guides ways of doing things is also a bit of a stretch, there is no real border or distinction, i just used some different methods here that also require a bit more familiarity with substance.

Ill add this tomorrow