I am currently creating a dino overhaul mod and i need some custom textures. How do i go about doing this? I have experince with the development kit but i dont understand how to create textures. I would like do do them in photoshop.
If anyone could help and guide me step by step how to make custom textures that would be great.
Hey there,
I’m fairly new to the dev kit, but I have a bit more experience with the art asset side of things, so I’ll attempt to impart what I know (and if anyone has corrections, feel free to chime in! I could definitely use more info as well :b)
So basically when you open the dev kit, you’ll want to navigate to game>primalearth>dinos>[whatever dino you’d like to modify]. Inside that folder you’ll see a lot of files like [dino]_diffuse, [dino]_colorized, etc. In order to get those files out to modify, you just need to right click on the texture (and textures specifically are the ones that have the red stripe along the bottom) and export (to whatever image format you’d like to work with). They’re a bit of a jumbly mess, but unless you want to also export the meshes and re-uv everything, you’ll have to work inside of those boundaries.
Also worth noting that before you make modifications to these files and bring them back in, you’ll likely want to duplicate all of the dino’s assets to your own mod file so you don’t completely overwrite that particular dino (unless that’s what you’re after)-- see here for adding your own variant.
I know some mods just over write the diffuse texture file, and leave the normals and things as is (you’ll end up with something like these guys in that case), so you’d have whatever colors you wanted with the depth information over top.
In any case, once you’ve made the modifications to the texture that you want, you just need to navigate back to your mod folder, and you can drag and drop the image file in. Then go into the material instance assigned to the dino (it’ll be [dino]_MIC) and under Parameter Groups>BaseColor, tell it to use your file instead of its default.
For texture files associated with color regions (this will be [dino]_colorize_m)-- you’ll notice they look super funky. This is because those files are actually used sort of piecemeal-- if you open one up, there’s a little button called ‘view’ in the top left of the screen. If you drop that down, you can check or uncheck different RGB channels-- each channel is responsible for it’s own ‘region’. So if you want to change where on the dino’s body that regions get expressed, this is the file to do it in. For the changes you make in photoshop you’d work only in one color channel at a time, or else the changes you make will show up on all of the color channels (and you’d end up layering different colors over each other in a probably unappealing way).
To figure out which layer of that file is associated with which colors on the final dino material, if you go back into [dino]colorize_MIC, under Paremeter Groups>Colorization, you can tweak around with the color value for each Color# that is active. To change which colors that zone is allowed to choose when you have a random dino spawn, you’d need to go into Game>PrimalEarth>CoreBlueprints>DinoColorSet[dino]. Remember to duplicate and rename this file for your mod if you haven’t already (it seems like it’s good practice to do this for most of the assets that your custom dino will be referencing). A decent series of videos that talks about duplicating materials n stuff (although his focus is on static meshes mostly) is here. But that file is where you get to assign the colors and weights for each color region.
Once you’re done modifying the colorize texture in photoshop, you can drag and drop it in to your mod folder the same way you did your diffuse texture, and go into the [dino]_colorize_MIC to reassign the ‘colorizationmask’ to your file.
And that’s pretty much it, as far as I know. If other people have more insights, I’d love to hear them-- for my mod I want to be able to add a mask that can select randomly from a few different patterns (belly and eye markings for a whale, basically), but I’m not sure how to add that in over the base colors. I’m also not sure how to accomplish male/ female dimorphism (like you see in the deer), but it seems to be at the material level, so I guess it could be based on a mask of some kind.
Anyway, hope that helps!