#retexturing a mesh

[modding-dao]

Tutorial - Retexturing A Mesh Part 1c - Rendering a UV Unwrap (Optional)

Pre-Reqs:

Extract the necessary files to work with (link)

Basic understanding of using 3D editing software

A way to import DA:O meshes into your 3D software, such as the "DAO Model and Animation Import and Export" (link)

Embiggen: To view larger versions of the images below, see here.

This is an entirely optional step, but is one of those things that if you have the ability to do it, makes editing textures much easier. What we're going to do is use some 3D modelling software to load the textured mesh we've extracted from the game, and render out what is known as a "UV Unwrap". This is a map that shows how the 3D polygons of the mesh are mapped to the 2D space of the texture. If you can remember mapping out a cube into a flat drawing of six edge-joined squares in school, this is essentially the same thing, except for a much more complex shape made entirely out of triangles.

In this case, since it's what I have on hand and am familiar with, I'm going to use 3DS Max for this step. Most modern 3D editing tools have the capability to do this; it's all a question of you learning how to do it with whatever tool you have available and are comfortable using. Or skipping it entirely; it is, as I say, optional.

The first step is to go to our importer, and load any of the female versions of the mesh.

All of them will use the same mapping to the texture. The size and shape of the mesh polygons in 3D space has changed to reflect the size and shape of that race, but how each polygon maps to the texture to be applied is the same.

The default import settings are fine for what we want to do, so once the mesh has been chosen, all I need to select is the Import button under the "Import Meshes" and "Import Collision" check boxes:

And then I can see this mesh (and its simplified collision representation) in my editor.

In the stack menu on the right I can see I'm currently at a "Skin" parameter (which is where 3DS Max attaches a mesh to the invisible bones that animations drive). Underneath "Skin" is the paramter I need; "Unwrap". If there was no "Unwrap" in the stack, I could temporarily add one. In this case, all I need to do is click on the "Unwrap" paramter, ignore the warning message that pops up becasue there are things above it in the stack, and then click on the "Edit" button that appears under "Parameters" further down in the right-hand menu:

3DS Max will now open a floating window that shows how the mesh is mapped to the texture space.

We don't want to touch anything here; all we want to do is save this out as a usable texture. To do this, we go to the "Tools -> Render UVW Template" option.

We'll next be shown a dialog where we have some options we can set. Most of the default settings are fine, but we should uncheck "Show overlap" and "Seam Edges" as these are both things we don't need to see, and which will add unnecessary colours to our UV Unwrap texture.

Click on the "Render UV Template" button at the bottom of the dialog window, and a new floating window will pop up, containing a white-on-black rendering of the polygons:

Clicking on the little diskette icon at upper left of the window will allow us to save it out to our hard drive. I usually prefer to save to a non-lossy format such as BMP or TIF, so that we don't have things happening like JPGing artifacts blurring the lines.

This texture can then be layered over top of our diffuse texture in our texture editing software, so we can see where the lines of the mesh fall.

Notice how much of the detailing in the texture follows along the lines of the mesh; the edges of the bracer, the belt, where sewn seams are, etc. This gives crisper edges and usually less distortion. Note that in the majority of the texture, the colour extends some distance outside of the mesh lines; this allows for the fact that there will pretty much always be some minor variance between what we see here and how it will actually get applied in game (due to rounding errors with the values, if nothing else). Ever noticed a mesh in game where you could pick out a seam because there was a fuzzy intrusion of a wrong colour along it? That's a spot where the colour didn't extend far enough beyond the edges, and rounding errors/blurring are causing bleed through from the surrounding texture.

Note - I've included the unwraps for both the male and female versions of the clothing mesh as part of the photoset here, so even if you don't have access to 3D editing software, you can grab the textures from the photoset to use.

Last Modified: April 6, 2013

[modding-dao]

Tutorial - Retexturing a Mesh Part 1b - The Texture Files

Pre-Reqs:

Extract the necessary files to work with (link)

What files make up the textures for a mesh in Dragon Age: Origins? For most meshes, there are four separate textures in use. And for any given set of textures, we'll notice that the file names all start off the same, and then end in a letter indicating which type of texture that one is:

D - The first, and simplest, of these is what's known as the "diffuse" texture. This is the texture that gives the surface of the mesh its appearance. In the simplest cases, it controls the colour of the surface without any additional variance.

N - There is also a texture in use called a "normal" texture. This is a special texture whose purpose is to fool our eye into thinking there's more shape to the mesh than is really there, by encoding information into a texture which makes a flat polygon look like a shaped surface by changing how it's lit. Basically, it's a method of lighting a flat surface as if it was a curved surface or a rough surface, so our eye sees "curved" or an appearance of rough texture even though that bit of mesh is still nothing more than a flat polygon.

Origins, being an older game, is using an old greyscale version of normal mapping where the only information being encoded in the map is the height variance of the pixels; more recent versions, which you'd see if you extracted a set of textures from DA2, encode not just the height but the tilt of the pixel, and tend to look either blue-purple or orange-red, depending on which version of several different encoding methods is being used. Such normal maps are only rarely hand-generated, and are normally automated output from 3D modelling or 3D painting programs such as 3DS Max, Maya, ZBrush, Mudbox and so forth. In our case we'll be having to fake the normals in order to get it to roughly match our retexture, so we're lucky that all we have to deal with is the greyscale version.

S - The third texture in use is the "specular" texture, or shininess. The blacker the texture, the more matte the output; the lighter, the glossier. We can also control the colour of the shininess by having colour in the specular; for example, in an area that was going to be gold, the specular map might be tinted yellow; for copper, tinted red. For silver or steel, a pale blue. Since this is mostly just a very darkened version of our diffuse texture, mocking up an edited version of this will be comparatively easy.

T - And the fourth and final texture is what's called a "tint map". It's called a map because it's a guide to the game as to where an additional thing is to go. The additional thing being a tint, or an additional layer of colour that's applied over top the underlying diffuse colour.

In the above example, for instance, we can see that the reddish plaid parts of the female outfit and the reddish-brown leather parts of the male outfit are mapped to the red channel of the tint map. The skirt of the female outfit and the sleeves and leggings of the male one are mapped to green. There's a bunch of detail pieces in both outfits that are mapped to blue. And finally, though we can't see it in these JPG versions of the textures, there's a fourth channel, known as an alpha channel (transparency information is usually stored there) which maps any visible skin, so that a skintone tint can be applied.

The way the tint map works is that there'll be a separate file which defines a colour for each channel of the tint map. So three different colours plus the skintone can be mapped over top of the diffuse texture, and modify it to a differently coloured look that is otherwise identical in pattern, normals and specular. For example if we applied a green-blue-purple tint to this particular pair of diffuse textures, the female would be in a greenish plaid top with a blueish skirt and purplish detailing, while the male would be in a greenish leather top over bluish sleeves and leggings with purplish detailing. And if the female had a dark-skinned head morph and the male a pale one, any visible bits of skin in the texture would be tinted to match.

Note that I say "-ish" on the colours. That's because there is already colour in the diffuse pattern, so the final colour isn't just our tint colour, but is underlying colour + tint colour. If we're making a retexture that we'd like to be very compatible to things like the Universal Dye Kit, then we should give thought to making the diffuse texture greyscale in any areas that will be tintable, and only colouring the non-tintable areas.

Last Modified: April 5, 2013

[modding-dao]

Tutorial - Retexturing A Mesh Part 1a - Extracting the Necessary Files

Pre-Reqs:

Download and install the DATool from BSN.

Some degree of familiarity with using image editing software such as PhotoShop or Gimp. Software must be capable of working with DDS files (see the Getting Started page for links to DDS utilities and plug-ins).

Embiggen: To view larger versions of the images below, see here.

In this multi-part tutorial we're going to look at extracting and retexturing a mesh, and then making it available for in-game use by the player. In order to recolour the mesh, we need to extract a number of files from the game; the mesh, its textures, and the material definition files that link the two. Thankfully there's a tool that does that easily for us, called "DATool".

When we run the tool, it will complain that it's not the most current version; sadly this is a lie, there is no more current version, so just ignore the error message.

This tool works as a mesh-viewing program. The first step is to tell it what kind of mesh we want to look at. We'll start off in the first available "Characters" category, as characters is where clothing and armour pieces are stored (also hair, beards, eyeballs, and eyelashes). So File -> Browse Models -> Characters -> Dwarf Female, as shown below:

A set of armour - or at least the torso of such a set - will appear on screen. To switch to the next mesh in the category, you need to press CTRL-→ while to scroll backwards to one you've already passed you use CTRL-←. Scroll forward past the armour and boots and so on until you reach the clothing, the first item of which is the "Commoner A" retexturing of the clothing mesh:

Now we want to extract that mesh and all its associated files to an easily relocatable location. Thankfully, DATool makes that simple; just click on File -> Save As. A folder-selection tool will pop up; create a named directory somewhere to save the files into. In my case, I'm going to put them in a named subdirectory of my "D:\Dragon Age" folder that I keep all my working files in.

Once the folder has been created and selected, I can click "OK", and the DATool will extract all of the files relevant to this mesh and place them in my new folder.

With very few exceptions, most meshes and textures are available in linked pairs for both sexes, so the next thing I need to do is to repeat all of these steps for the dwarf male version of the Commoner A mesh. Instead of creating a new folder, I'll tell the tool to "Save As" all the files into the same folder as the female version.

And then I go through all the steps again for the female and male elf, and female and male human versions of the mesh. Bonus points if you extract the Qunari male version as well!

Once all of this extracting is done, I can go to my file folder, and there are all the files I need in order to modify the textures of this mesh and have it be available for all races and both sexes.

But what is this mess of files? What are they all for?

PHY - this is the physics file for the mesh, which contains collision information for it (an approximation of the shape of the physical surface, reduced to geometric objects such as cylinders and spheres).

DDS - Direct Draw Surface texture files, a format from nVidia that is a way of optimizing textures for graphics/gaming application use. If our OS has the ability to view DDS files (a utility for which is linked to in the Getting Started page), we can see them in thumbnail view:

MAO - Material Object file, this is a small text file that esstentially tells the game "these DDS files are the ones to be used with this mesh to create this particular texture variation". Note that in this case there's only two of them; the "pf" and "pm" at the start of their file names means that one if the definition for all female versions of this mesh, and one is the definition for all male versions of the mesh. Or to put it another way, the dwarf female, elf female, and human female versions of the mesh all use the same material object definition, and therefore the set of textures used is applied in the exact same way to all. And then all male version of the mesh do likewise with a second set of textures.

MMH - model mesh hierarchy - how the mesh hooks up to the invisible skeleton that drives animations of the mesh. If we were going to modify the mesh itself, and not just the texture on it, this would be important.

MSH - mesh file - the shape of the actual mesh, ie where vertices are and the triangular polygons that link them all together to form a visible surface. If we were going to modify the mesh itself, and not just the texture on it, this would be important.

Last Modified: April 5, 2013