By: Alice
This chapter talks about everything you need to know that doesnt yet have to do with actually texturing your models.
By: Alice
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.
The 2 Formats and uses for either.
These are not the only ways to customize a skin. You can innovate as always. If you feel you made a discovery feel free to share it in the Discord server!
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 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
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.
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:
Change "texturescrollrate" "-0.03"
to change speed of movement.
Change "texturescrollangle" "180"
to change direction of movement.
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.
Change "animatedtextureFrameRate" "2"
to change framerate in game.
By: Alice
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.
It simply defines the RGB value of a given part of the gun and nothing else.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tools for skin creation.
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.
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.
"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."
"Adobe photoshop is a image editing and photo retouching application."
"Substance painter is a specialized texturing tool which utilizes a procedural Physically Based Rendering (PBR) workflow."
"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)
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.
- "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)
- "The world is your canvas, so grab inspiration from all around you and have fun experimenting." (paid, app)
" GIMP is a cross-platform image editor available for GNU/Linux, OS X, Windows and more operating systems. It is , you can change its and your changes."
and offers trials, and offers their software at $50 USD per app. I have seen extended trials(3 months) and deals for $25 USD per app. I enjoy this software for being capable and affordable, although I haven't found an add-on for real-time support in Blender.
- "All your reference images in one place."
AutoHotkey is used by many to create custom keybind macro. Usually using a numpad as the macro start key. Find their website and info at . As coding goes, there is many ways to code macros. Personally i use the code below to refresh Photoshop file to update the skin in Blender;
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.
Once you have set the game path, we can continue with the tutorial. Open the tool now and click on the tools tab towards the top, then on "skinpack maker".