How do you create texture mods?

[Tuft]

You can create replacement textures that you can put into your CoH folder, but how do you actually create them? Has anyone got any tools and pointers for the procedure?

 

[drdread]

Here is a document on how to modify textures in CoH.

 

https://corps.ouro-comdev.com/index.php?title=Texture_modding

 

Enjoy!

 

Edit: There are links to tools on the page. Here is a little recap of what is possible and what isn't:

 

Detailed Guide by Flashtoo

What you can do:

• Change some aspects of existing graphics that you find undesirable (e.g. if you don't like the built-in lipstick on the female Steampunk and Sci-Fi faces you can remove it).
• Remove effects that you dislike from the game by replacing them with "blank" images.
• Replace a graphic with a completely different one, if you don't mind it being replaced across the board - I remember that back on Live there were some people who replaced the female "Leather" top-with-skin with the Carnie corset this way, before players were given access to it as its own costume piece.

What you cannot do:

• Increase texture resolution. Altered textures will not render unless they have the same pixel dimensions as the original.
• Add new effects, such as glowing or mirror-shine, to items that did not have them before.
• Add new costume parts or base items. Without access to the game's code, we can only overwrite what is already there.

Edited October 18, 2019 by drdread

[WanderingAries]

7 hours ago, drdread said:

Detailed Guide by Flashtoo...

I like that you (?) covered the last bit. While I Do understand the Why about the resolution increase, it really does put a damper on the quality.

Edited October 18, 2019 by WanderingAries

[drdread]

6 hours ago, WanderingAries said:

I like that you (?) covered the last bit. While I Do understand the Why about the resolution increase, it really does put a damper on the quality.

The resolution limit is due to the age if the game. However, now that the game client was updated to 64bit, new textures have the potential of having higher resolution. The old textures are pretty much hard set tho'.

[Giovanni Valia]

Very cool that this exists! Thank you for sharing this DrDread. I have been searching for this exact thing for some time now. I was planning on modifying some of the textures of items in my SG base. In particular, the SG banners or signs.

[Sylar]

i love this idea, i was wondering, can we, for instance, change a costume to say something like Hawkeyes costume? like the costumes you unlock in halloween events, can we overwrite one of them and replace it with anything else? thanks.

[drdread]

2 hours ago, Sylar said:

i was wondering, can we, for instance, change a costume to say something like Hawkeyes costume? 

You could by replacing a current texture of a costume. However, keep in mind the following:

1.  The replacement texture needs to be the same resolution as the texture it replaces. This might be tricky if you have a lot of small details to show in the new costume.
2.  Only you will see the changed costume, unless you share your modified PIGG file(s) with other people.

[Sylar]

9 hours ago, drdread said:

You could by replacing a current texture of a costume. However, keep in mind the following:

1.  The replacement texture needs to be the same resolution as the texture it replaces. This might be tricky if you have a lot of small details to show in the new costume.
2.  Only you will see the changed costume, unless you share your modified PIGG file(s) with other people.

ahh i see, is the process easy to replace the costume? and if i already have a costume in mind is it possible to lower the resolution of it to fit into the game? thanks.

[drdread]

There are tools in the link above which makes it as easy as replacing a file on your computer. So long as you know which texture you are replacing, it isn't hard.

 

The harder thing is actually making the costume texture. If you haven't made texture maps for 3d models, it can be confusing. There are some tutorial videos on Youtube that explains how texture mapping works, and it'll give you an insight on how to accomplish this.

[Mina Valerious]

Anyone else having issues with Pigg Viewer 1.61? For me Pigg Viewer 1.61 hangs when I try to select the the individual file I want to replace, the program hangs when I try to right click any .texture file

I've been able to extract .textures and .dds by right clicking the folder of the file location and extracting all textures from the folder.

 

Quote

 

5. Putting Your Changes Into Action

Back to Pigg Viewer 1.61.

The process here is similar to how you extracted the original textures: Open the .pigg that contains the textures and navigate to them and right-click your first texture. Begin with the diffuse texture (Cape_Valkyrie_01; the diffuse texture and grayscale map). This time, after clearing the error message, choose "Create texture from .dds." You will receive a window similar to an Open dialogue - choose your altered version of Cape_Valkyrie_01 and click Open.

You should now see a window titled "Browse For Folder" containing a file tree, to choose a location to save the converted textures. It is always safest to make a new folder to save your modded textures into at first; this makes sharing easier as well. Repeat this for each of your modded textures (you can put them all in the same folder). Pigg Viewer will save the texture into that folder and will generate the entire path for you, beginning with texture_library - copy this texture_library into your CoH install's Data folder to put your new textures into the game.

 

 

[Lost Ninja]

On 11/4/2019 at 7:04 PM, Mina Valerious said:

Anyone else having issues with Pigg Viewer 1.61? For me Pigg Viewer 1.61 hangs when I try to select the the individual file I want to replace, the program hangs when I try to right click any .texture file

I've been able to extract .textures and .dds by right clicking the folder of the file location and extracting all textures from the folder.

 

 

I've used Piglet to extract, but I don't see the point of baking the replacements in, if the game updates the pigg you'd need to do it again and the override system seems to work.

[sponazgul]

On 10/18/2019 at 9:54 AM, drdread said:

Here is a document on how to modify textures in CoH.

 

https://corps.ouro-comdev.com/index.php?title=Texture_modding

 

 

Doctor Dread,

 

I was looking forward to seeing how to change one texture to another, but the link doesn't seem to be working. Do you know if there's another link that I can check out, for City of Heroes Texture Modding?

 

Best regards

[sponazgul]

3 minutes ago, sponazgul said:

Doctor Dread,

 

I was looking forward to seeing how to change one texture to another, but the link doesn't seem to be working. Do you know if there's another link that I can check out, for City of Heroes Texture Modding?

 

Best regards

(It's possible I couldn't get to the site because of my anti-virus software.)

[AboveTheChemist]

On 11/14/2020 at 4:38 PM, sponazgul said:

Do you know if there's another link that I can check out, for City of Heroes Texture Modding?

I think that article might have been moved here, not 100% sure though:

 

https://wiki.ourodev.com/view/Texture_modding

[sponazgul]

On 11/16/2020 at 10:29 PM, AboveTheChemist said:

I think that article might have been moved here, not 100% sure though:

 

https://wiki.ourodev.com/view/Texture_modding

Thank you!

[Herotu]

Ugh, why did it have to be DDS format?! Yuck! 😞

[PsiBug]

 

On 4/24/2021 at 9:28 PM, Herotu said:

Ugh, why did it have to be DDS format?! Yuck! 😞

LOL I know!

 

If you are using photoshop, the nVidia website has a good free plugin for editing (importing and exporting) .dds files. There is version of the plugin for photoshop cc and newer (which requires you to sign up as a developer to download it) link: https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-texture-tools-exporter  and there is a "legacy" plugin (if you use that same link and then scroll down that page to find the link for legacy files) for photoshop 5 through cs6 ( I am using cs5- so I use the legacy plugin) that just requires a basic login account on the nVidia site to download it for free.

 

Like Mina said above, the pigg viewer 1.61, or whatever version it is, crashed/did not work for me.

My process has been to use pigg viewer PRO to export a file as a .texture file, use  DeTexturizer (from this page: http://www.cityofplayers.com/pks-tools/ )to break it into a .dds and an xml file, edit the .dds file in photoshop, then recombine it into a .texture file using detexturizer with the original .xml file and the new .dds file, and then test it in CoH. Vidiotmap maps seem to use no compression and no mipmaps (edit: they DO use mipmaps). Character textures seem to use dxt5 (if an alpha channel is included) or dxt1 compression.

 

Gimp and Paint seem to offer some .dds tools but the files they produces did not work for me, at least for vidiotmap editing. Those programs may actually produce usable results for costume texture files which seem to use different save options (dxt5 and dxt1 in some cases I believe).

 

With trial and error for the rather wide variety of save options, I have successfully edited and used one of the face textures, but failed with another. The costume and face textures are slightly disorganized, of various image dimensions, sometimes single files and sometimes two or more files (to include bump maps or other effects), and sometimes stored in multiple folder locations, some of which may not be used in-game. If you are starting to experiment with texture editing, I suggest finding a face texture with no bump map companion file and edit that for an easy first attempt. It appears that the newer, larger, better looking textures are going to be more complicated to edit than the older smaller ones.

 

The loading screens for various zones that I have tested, break down into jpg files instead of dds, so they seem to be less complicated to edit and convert back into a .texture file than costume files.

Attached is an example replacement loading screen for ouroborus which goes into :"<whatever folder contains your game>\data\texture_library\loading_screens\City_Zones

 

City_06_01.texture

Edited November 28, 2021 by PsiBug
(wording changed for clarity and accuracy)

[PsiBug]

Also working on a pocket D loading screen to replace the paper flyer image. Screenshot and texture file attached. texture file goes in <wherever you have the game installed>\data\texture_library\loading_screens\City_Zones\

City_02_04.texture

Edited May 21, 2021 by PsiBug
updated image

[PsiBug]

Finally sorted out how to successfully edit and replace face textures in this other thread:

 

Same steps seem to work for chest emblems and other costume pieces, although I have only tested a few pieces so far.

 

Hope that helps,

=:Psibug

Edited November 15, 2021 by PsiBug

[TalonGrayson]

Thanks for the topic. I'm glad to see this is still a thing, but I'm having a problem when I create the *.texture file. The *.DDS file looks fine, at least.

 

Evidently there's some LOD issue, which at first I assumed was to do with the MIP maps setting in the Nvidia plugin. but the second (closer) image has strange corruption on the bottom half regardless of what setting I use.

I'm using Photoshop CS6 and NVIDIA dds Format (v8.55.0109.1800) and I've done this sort of thing before, but it's not playing ball all of a sudden. Any advice?

 

Side quest note, any idea how to get rid of the brick bump/normal map?

 

 

 

Edited January 13, 2022 by TalonGrayson

[AboveTheChemist]

35 minutes ago, TalonGrayson said:

I'm using Photoshop CS6 and NVIDIA dds Format (v8.55.0109.1800) and I've done this sort of thing before, but it's not playing ball all of a sudden. Any advice?

Does the stock version of the texture that is there (without your mod installed) change resolution with different world texture quality settings (in Options > Graphics and Audio)? If not, it probably doesn't need mipmaps. For the textures I have created that don't need mipmaps (mostly maps that go in the map window), none of the DDS converter tools I tried set the mipmap count correctly and I have to set the mipmap count to zero manually. I have not used Photoshop, though, so it might be able to set that flag correctly. I don't want to go into the weeds too far in case this isn't applicable to your case, but I can provide more info if needed.

 

You can also try cycling through those same world texture quality settings with your mod installed and see if the issue goes away at higher quality settings. If it does, then that's another sign that it might be that mipmap count flag.

[TalonGrayson]

59 minutes ago, AboveTheChemist said:

If it does, then that's another sign that it might be that mipmap count flag.

 

Skipping that, I resaved it without mipmaps and got the following result. A visually different corruption but it looks like the same portion of the texture is corrupted. For what it's worth, this corruption appearance is consistent whenever I don't mipmap, and the previous corruption is consistent whenever I do, if that makes sense.

 

I'm running PiggViewer 1.61 in compatibility mode (XP SP 2, and have also tried SP 3 with the same result).

 

 

[AboveTheChemist]

31 minutes ago, TalonGrayson said:

Skipping that, I resaved it without mipmaps and got the following result.

It might be easier if I just took a look at it myself. If you like, feel free to PM me the texture file in question and I'll try to take a look at it later tonight and see if it's the issue I think it is.

 

EDIT: Is the location in your screenshot behind the tram in Atlas Park?

Edited January 13, 2022 by AboveTheChemist
added question

[TalonGrayson]

24 minutes ago, AboveTheChemist said:

Is the location in your screenshot behind the tram in Atlas Park?

 

Yes, it is.

I'll PM you the texture file now. Thank you!

[PsiBug]

Hi,

In case you did not find a solution yet, or for anyone else who happens to visit this thread, here are the settings that I have used to successfully replace that billboard image:

(DXT1, RGB, 4BPP, No Alpha, Generate mipmaps)

 

 

Edited January 23, 2022 by PsiBug