By: Alice
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.
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.
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.
By: Alice
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.
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.
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.
By: E3VL
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]
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.
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
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
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)
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.
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)
By: Alice
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.
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.
By: Alice
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.
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.
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.