Some people who have had success with swapping may have noticed the trend where you have all the files with your swap character’s name on it – but there are clearly some files not there. Maybe they don’t have any ptables, or maybe you’ve done your swap and parts of your character are just missing. You can’t find any files you missed and you’re wondering where they must be if you don’t have them already.
And the reason this happens is because your swap character normally uses reused assets. They don’t have their own ptables because they are using someone else’s, or they don’t have unique textures for their eyes because they share a file with other characters.
You can trial and error your way into finding which assets they are using, or you could try using the Telltale Inspector Tool created by Lucas in the Telltale Modding Group. (massive brain on this bloke – if you want to donate to him for his major efforts, it would definitely be appreciated) The readme and information on the tools can be found >>here<< and the most current release can be found >>here<<.
At the time of making this mini-tutorial, the most current version is ALPHA 1.0.2 – the information I’m presenting here and the screenshots used relate to this release, things may look or work differently in future.
The tool itself is capable of a lot more than I’m making note of here, and can be used to edit the information within the files if you know what you’re doing… I’m only giving a very layman’s explanation of one use of it to look at file information. Below you will find a very simple set of directions on using the Inspector tool to open props to find a character’s ptables, and then opening a character mesh to find the associated textures.
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Ptables and Animations
For example, let’s say we want to figure out what ptables Carley uses in season 1, and we notice that she doesn’t have any ptables in any of the data archives. We therefore have to find out whose ptables she is using if we want her to have an animated face during swaps.
First of all, we want to use Telltale Explorer to export out her prop file (save it somewhere handy so you can find it again later), and from there we can use Lucas’ Telltale Inspector to look at it properly.
1. Run the TelltaleInspector.exe, and click the [Open] drop down menu and select [Open Prop]
2. There will be another drop down menu that says [Select], we want to select the game where this prop file came from – in this case we need to select [The Walking Dead: Definitive Series]
3. Press the [Select] button to confirm you have selected the correct game
4. You should now have the interface for prop files from that game, but to look at the specific file we have previously exported using the Telltale Explorer, we need to click on [Import Property Set]
This should open up an explorer window where you need to direct the Inspector to the prop file you want to open.
5. Once you have successfully loaded the prop file, you need to click on the [>Properties] sub menu to expand the information shown at the bottom of the window. The information about phonemes is right near the bottom of the list as shown here when hovered over:
Click on the [Modify Handle Value] on the right column next to where the phoneme information was shown.
A new window should open, and here we can see the name of the phoneme file that her default state is drawing from. In this case, we can see Carley is using Lilly’s ptables.
However, I will note that in other seasons of the game, this same information can be seen in a different location but with the same 5 steps leading up to it… for example, in A New Frontier, if you wanted to know which ptables and animation files are used on Javier’s father when he appears in flashbacks near the end of the game, you could look into the sk61_salvador305.prop.
Here we can see that his “Skeleton Face” is wd300GM – this means he uses the ptables and animations with this name. I assume the name implies “Walking Dead, Season 3, Generic Male”, I don’t know if that’s accurate, but what matters is that you now know it’s these generic files that he uses.
And if you want to look for a minor character in The Final Season, like the rancher who was taking care of baby AJ, the same situation applies here.
Her skeleton face is the same as Lilly’s in season 4, and therefore when Rancher Helen doesn’t have her own files to load, she is loading Lilly’s ptables and animations.
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Meshes and Textures
Let’s say we have tried to do a swap, but for some reason part of the swapped character isn’t loading. A common one that can happen is characters having missing eyes, but it could be something like missing hands or missing hair if it turns out we are swapping a character who uses a texture that is not named in the same manner as their mesh.
Since it has been a problem I’ve seen a few times, let’s use Kenny in season 2 as an example. If you try swapping him into another season without knowing what files he uses which are not named with “kenny202” at the start, he won’t have eyes or hands. And since Kenny in season 2 is one mesh called “sk54_kenny202.d3dmesh”, we can use the Telltale Inspector tool to see what textures we are missing.
1. Run the TelltaleInspector.exe, and click the [Open] drop down menu and select [Open D3DMesh]
2. There will be another drop down menu that says [Select], we want to select the game where this prop file came from – in this case we need to select [The Walking Dead: Definitive Series]
3. From here we need to click on [Open File] and an explorer window will open – we need to direct it to the mesh we want to look at.
4. And now we should have all the relevant information about the selected mesh.
What we are particularly interested in is the list of “Mesh Textures” shown at the bottom. Here we can clearly see the texture files that aren’t named consistently, and what we likely would miss without prior experience or knowledge of the character files.
Aaaaand because I have the opportunity to share this little titbit, if you have tried editing textures, or simply swapping textures to see the results – you may encounter some instances where you simply wonder “I thought this would have changed? Why didn’t it?”, or alternatively “I changed this, why did this also change?”
Here’s my contribution to fun trivia that I found myself quite some time ago, but now I can show it with the Inspector.
ive been following a rly cool artist on twitter and it was their bday today so i went ahead and gushingly wished them a happy bday, mentioning that we had been tumblr mutuals since the twdg days… and then i went and looked them up on tumblr and realized. we’re not mutuals anymore.
and it’s just like!!! ok that is fine! it’s totally fine and i understand, nobody is obligated to stay my friend and everyone is free to unfollow at any time if that’s what you want to do. but just.
i explicitly ask in my about that if we’re mutuals, that you please softblock me if u decide to unfollow. it’s embarrassing for me to continue to interact with your posts all enthusiastic and shit like we’re friends when we dont actually follow each other anymore. u know??? i have no hard feelings and i will never bear any ill will to anyone who decides to unfollow me no matter what the reason, but fck man this just feels so shitty.
and the thing is, this is not the first time this has happened, there have been MANY mutuals over the years who i’ve noticed no longer follow me, or have deactivated, and some of them have in fact softblocked which i appreciate!!! i do not believe anyone is EVER under any obligation whatsoever to explain their reasoning to me. u don’t even have to HAVE a reason! it’s fine! (and sidenote that recently i mistakenly followed somebody again after they softblocked me without realizing that OOPS they actually unfollowed so i unfollowed again right after that. but it just makes me so fcuking sad, bc i have no idea what i did to make them unfollow me in the first place!!!)
it’s just. the problem with the current situation is, this is not the first person who has unfollowed me without also softblocking me as well, and it just!!! puts me in a very potentially embarrassing situation!?!!! and ig i just dont know what im supposed to do now??? do i unfollow them too??? like fck i m at a loss here. i guess i just dont understand, why would you go to the length of pressing that unfollow button if u dont also bother pressing the block/unblock button as well?? youre already there, what’s so hard??? especially on tumblr where follower count isnt displayed, i would understand better if this was ig or twitter where everyone can see the follower/following ratio and that matters to some ppl but idk!
idk i guess i m just. paranoid and sad now bc it’s like… ok did i do something at some point that made a bunch of ppl decide to unfollow me or someth??? bc if that’s the case then again, that is fine, but please. if im fucking up or doing something that would warrant mass unfollows then i would like to know!!!
anons are welcome to weigh in here, im also going to tag this as twdg bc that was the fandom i met most of my old mutuals from and i’d like anyone who still lurks there to weigh in as well ig
Guess who just played the first episode of the new Walking Dead!? A New Frontier is off to a good (and heartbreaking) start.
ME TOO! I played 2 episodes. I could only play it on my phone, but it was still super fun.
UNFORTUNATELY I had to make up a backstory for Clem. For some reason the latest telltale games haven’t been available on Mac, but they are on ios (hence the phone), however there’s some bug/glitch with the telltale accounts that won’t let you transfer your choices from previous games onto different platforms :/
I love Javi so far <3 I love my daughter. I really want to know what happens to AJ :/
What are your thoughts? How did you end your previous game again? Where did your Clem leave off?
Hello, I'm very newbie to model swap and I need some help :C I've been wanting to swap BEN and TRAVIS, could you please help me out? I know that Ben appears in a lot of episodes (not sure which ones), and I also know that Travis barely have archives since he appears very quickly on episode 2, I already learned how to extract the files with the extractor and everything (I have all the files from ep1 and ep2 already extracted), I don't know how to swap the models, which files I should replace etc.
Well hello, luscassache! I'm sorry to hear about your trouble getting swaps to work, it's fiddly to figure out, especially when you're new to it.
Season 1 is also a bit more tricky to swap around since a lot of the files aren't in the episodes ttarch files, but instead they are in the projectseason ttarch files. And you're also right about Travis being a bit more trouble since he doesn't appear for long in the game and therefore has less files that are made specifically for him.
And without knowing where exactly things have gone wrong for you when trying your swap, it's hard for me to say definitively how to correct it. Off the top of my head, I can only suggest double checking that you have the correct files, you have renamed them properly, and that you have overwritten your archives in your game directory.
However... I do still have archives saved of a lot of my old swaps (not the Travis and Doug one, unfortunately), and I have been experimenting with the Telltale scripting tool to figure out how to form these into mod files.
So to cut a long story short, I set up a google drive and made a zip file with the necessary archives pre-built to have Travis replace Ben in season 1 of the Definitive Series (It doesn't make them swap places, there are just two of Travis). You can >>click here<< for the download link.
It does still have some problems with facial animations/lip syncing not always working, and the eyes not moving correctly - but it should be playable from episode 2 onwards. [hopefully... I tested it in episode 2 and it works there]
There he is - the animations don't line up properly when interacting with other characters, but it's something.
To get the zip file to work in your game, you can load it using the >>Telltale Mod Launcher<<.
Or you can extract the zip archive and place the extracted ".lua" and ".ttarch2" files into the game's "Archives" directory. And to remove the swap, all you have to do is delete all the the files again - they should be easy to identify as they all have "Travis replaces Ben" somewhere in their name.
Hey there!
Do you have any tutorials on how to model swap in season 1 specifically? I'm trying to swap Travis and Doug and am completely at a loss due to the way the files are so funky with season 1 - any help is much appreciated!
The tutorial I have >>here<< is specifically walking through a swap to put Vince from the 400 Days DLC into the role of Lee in Season 1. It isn't really specifically about Season 1, but it focuses and shows a swap happening in that season.
It covers the basics of file types and how to get them working for a swap. It also goes over the method to load a swap without remaking your archives, which I would highly recommend as it is both much easier and quicker that way.
But if you're having issues finding files for Season 1 in particular, a big differences between that season and any of the others is that it has a lot of files in these archives instead of the individual episodes:
This doesn't mean that all of the files you need will be in those, but if you're looking for something specific in the episode archives and can't find it, it's probably in those Project archives instead.
And at the most basic level, the meshes and textures you will be looking for are probably going to look like this:
Even though there are separated meshes for Travis (body, hair, head), he also has a singular combined mesh with everything - that's the "sk54_travis.d3dmesh". This will be the easiest one to work with since a lot of Season 1's characters only have one mesh.
And Doug has three meshes depending on the episode he appears in "sk54_doug.d3dmesh" is the appearance he has in episode 1, "sk54_doug103.d3dmesh" is his appearance in episode 3, and "sk54_dougJacket.d3dmesh" is his appearance in episode 2.
If you want Travis to appear in Doug's place in your game, you will have to use the "sk54_travis.d3dmesh" and rename it to overwrite the Doug mesh you want to replace. If you want him to appear in all of the episodes instead of Doug, then you'll have to duplicate the Travis mesh (just copy + paste) and make sure you rename each copy to cover all three of Doug's meshes.
If you want the inverse and to have Doug appear in Travis' place in episode 2, you do the same process but in reverse. You'll have to pick which version of Doug you want to appear, then use that mesh to rename into "sk54_travis.d3dmesh".
The rest of those .d3dtx files need to be in your archives too in order for the mesh to load it's associated textures. And you DO NOT want to rename your textures if you're just trying to do a standard swap. They just need to exist in their unaltered state in a way the game can load.
You also will want to find both Travis' and Doug's .skl files in the data, and there should thankfully only be these ones:
And it's the same principle as the meshes before. Whichever mesh type you used to overwrite the others, use the matching .skl to overwrite the remaining .skl files that your swap is going to cover.
The most difficult part is going to be getting your swapped character to emote properly in the role you put them in. You might be lucky and the characters you've swapped share base animations and therefore their faces move appropriately... if not, you're going to have to go through the other character's files and experiment with .ptables in the data, and the .anm files in the anichore archives.
If it helps at all, I do know that Doug's character shares files with the cop at the start of the game (sk54_copWD), and Travis shares at least some files with David, the teacher who is with him and Ben in the woods. There are likely even more characters with compatible files that intermix, but I can't personally tell you what they all are, I'm afraid.
Hopefully something in either the tutorial or my rambling helps you, mate. Good luck!
Hi Pi! So I'm trying to swap AJ and Clem around for TWDG S4 E2. All I want is for Louis to carry Clem instead of AJ in that one cutscene when they return to the school after AJ is shot. I am however very confused with some of the renaming parts since AJ and Clem have different model parts and such and I don't want everything to break. Could you please help me?
Sure thing!
I'm assuming by the way this is worded that you are familiar with the basics of how to unarchive the files and such, but I'm gonna link the bigger tutorial here just in case. [Model Swap Tutorial]
For that specific moment, AJ is using different files to his 'normal' files. If you extract the e2txmesh, sort the extracted files by 'file type', then this should be all of the AJ mesh files:
Those 'ajWounded' files are the ones used for the camping with James scene, the return to the school, and the scene where Louis comes to bring AJ clothes in the dorms. So these are the files we want to replace if you want another character to appear in that place.
We have 6 basic model areas to work with:
bodyLower
bodyUpper
eyesMouth
hair
hands
head
-and we have the outlier file of the gunShot which is specific and unique to these scenes. There isn't an equivalent file to overwrite this, but it does give a theoretical 7th swap slot if needed.
If you're having trouble understanding what parts do what, I've colour coded them here:
Now if we go look at Clem's files in episode 2, they look like this:
You need to pick out which files you want to use to overwrite those 6 files that a wounded AJ uses. As you can see, Clem has more than one option for the bodyUpper, hair, and hands. And if you went into the future episodes there would be even more options in regards to Clem's lower body (wounded, bitten, and with the missing leg).
So for your swap you'll have to be selective and choose one option for each file you're overwriting. So for me, I wanted Clem without her hat, with her normal clothes, and with all of her fingers, therefore these are the files I chose and then renamed:
The 'sk_ajWounded_gunShot' is a 0kb file I created by making a blank text document and changing its file extension from '.txt' to '.d3dmesh'. There is also the option to simply duplicate one of the other files so the game tries to load it twice. This will simply delete the meshes for the gunshots from appearing in scenes. In theory, if you wanted Clem to be wearing the pins that appear in Violet route you could use the 'gunShot' slot to have the pins appear in those scenes.
[pre-warning that trying to swap/remove the 'sk63_ajWounded_gunShot.d3dmesh' will break the one scene where you try to remove the buckshot with James - it removes the interaction points so you can't advance the scene]
Outside of the meshes, you also have to make sure you replace the 'sk63_ajWounded.skl' file in the data folder. And since you're replacing his files with Clem's in an episode other than ep1, make sure you use the 'sk62_clementine402.skl' instead of the 'sk62_clementine400.skl' file.
Aside from that, the other data files and the animation files are standard to any other swap. I hope that helps.
[Oh, btw... I should mention that taller characters will 'hover' when they are lifted/seated in a scene that is supposed to be occurring to a shorter character. This won't break most scenes, but it does look odd. If you're looking to get screenshots or record the scene, you'll have to get creative with angles to hide the more glaring issues that pop up like that]
You know in that moment in 4x02 when Mitch did that slight shove on Violet while asking since when does she call the shots? I was surprised that Violet didn’t retaliate via bitch-slapping him across the face or even kneeing him in the groin. Especially since Ruby gasps like he just fucked up.
That being said, why do you think Violet didn’t physically retaliate against Mitch at that moment?
My thought is that Vi didn't retaliate because it was simply a bad move to make in that situation. And personally, I viewed that gasp from Ruby as more of a reaction that she was upset/shocked that the verbal argument was devolving into contact and she didn't want it to escalate into a brawl.
It's actually one of the moments where I give Violet props for knowing when to de-escalate or drop an argument that isn't going anywhere, because she normally doesn't do that. She's being confronted with her choice to overrule the results of the vote, something that we recognise has happened because the situation has changed, but Mitch finds that sudden rise in authority troubling regardless of if the situation has changed (especially since the change in vote results is to the stance Violet had before the situation changed). They both have a point, and they both get right into the other person's face to shout about it - and when Mitch gets backed into a corner by Violet's orders to cooperate anyway, he pushes back...
If Violet escalated in that moment by hitting him back, chances are she wouldn't win an actual fight with Mitch. He's bigger and has more physical strength to throw around. So she risks getting hurt if he continues the escalation, and she also risks proving his point that she doesn't have the clear head of a leader. Because there is no doubt in my mind that if Violet had hit Mitch in the office at that moment, she would not maintain any loyalty amongst the other kids - no leader who cares for the people they lead should have a primary tactic of "if you question me and don't fall in line, you get hurt".
