Wych Reskin

[Birchtree]

This is my first foray into modding for DoW, a quick retexturing of Soulstorm's wych models to make their skin paler. Hopefully they now look a little more like nasty, soul-drinking aliens and less like the militant wing of the WI.



Download link

Just unrar to your dark eldar texture_share folder.

(Note: Affects wyches and succubi but not beastmasters, since they use a different texture.)

[IBBoard]

Militant Women's Institute? I like the description! That would be a somewhat scary prospect!

I'm not on my gaming machine at the moment, so I can't compare them, but paler sounds better for Wyches Adding the Beastmaster's exture so that all Wych-esque models match might look good.

If this is your first venture in to the world of DoW texturing then how did you find the tools and tutorials? Was everything comparatively straight-forward?

If you want us to host this on Skins@HWT then just submit it via the submission form and I'll try to get it approved at some point soon.

[Birchtree]

Hey there. I've submitted the skin to your site, along with a retexture of the warpbeast master. Feel free to use the above screenshot if and when you approve it.

>If this is your first venture in to the world of DoW texturing then how did you find the tools and tutorials? Was everything comparatively straight-forward?

Yep, I didn't have any problems since this reskin is just a simple change to the default layer. The tutorials I looked at gave me a good idea of how the various layers operate, so that was handy. Using THQ's Texture Tool has been relatively painless too, especially compared to the trouble I've had in the past with DDS textures -- most programs I could find for modding Neverwinter Nights were unstable, and NVIDIA's DDS plugin for photoshop just crashes on me (I'm using CS2 incidentally).

Tried something a little more ambitious today and ran into problems, though: I was attempting to reskin the Space Marine Librarian to alter his face. Converting from RSH to DDS to TGA is fiddly but unproblematic, but when I convert back to RSH and place in the relevant texture_share dir of both the campaign and skirmish locations of my Soulstorm install, it refuses to show up in-game.

Are there any eccentricities to reskinning in DoW that might be causing a problem here? TGA to DDS conversion was tried with DXT1 and DXT5, but no joy with either.

Also, on a related note, do you have to convert the DDS file in both skirmish and campaign dirs, or can I just convert the DDS in one and then C&P to the other? I really don't understand why the RSH has to be created within the relevant dir structure...

Finally, is there a tutorial out there where I can learn about specular mapping? Cheers.

[stfas]

yes you need to convert the tga's to dds to make them work in an rsh, to do so, just use the tga>dds converter inside IBBoard's texture tool, then use the "make rsh" and press the default map (not the specular map which is the same texture with another name, and maybe some editing as it can be mostly black too), then it says "do you want to add additional maps?" press yes and select the textures (etc: reflection (needed to make the specularity work), (texturename)_spec and if you want (texturename)_illu/glow/illumination (okay you can name it anything), then make sure there in the right field (spec into spec field, reflection into reflection field and illu into illumination field)

[IBBoard]

I'll try and approve them later today once I get on to my main PC.

I'm not sure which texture tool you used, though. AFAIK Relic/THQ never made one - there's either my Dawn of War Texture Tool or the old (and buggy) WTP Tool from Beroc.

With regards "correct folders", the folder is the one that it's in within the SGA file (the one it should be extracted to by default). The reason it needs to be built in there is that each RSH file contains that path within it. That path is important to the loading of WTP (team colourable) and RTX (additional team coloured) textures. Without being in the right folder when it is built then the tool can't know what path to use.

The path should be something like data/art/ebps/races/[race_name]/texture_share (from memory), so I wouldn't expect any copying and pasting to be necessary.

The main reason I can think of for the texture not working is that I think Soulstorm uses RTX files (similar to an RSH in that they use DDS images, but they can only have one layer).

From what I remember then Soulstorm uses RTX textures in-game. There should be a post somewhere in the past few on the forums (one of Raven's) where someone listed which race used which RTX set in each of the game's campaigns. The Force Commander or whoever on the main menus still use RSH, but in the campaign they use RTX.

I still need to make a tutorial on specularity mapping (I understand the implementation, I just need to work out how best to explain it). If anyone else wants to make one then they're welcome, but Stfas's instructions cover it at a basic level.

Be careful when converting TGA->DDS as DDS is lossy. Always keep the original TGA so that you don't keep saving the DDS and losing detail.

[IBBoard]

Just a quick note to say that I would have approved the download today, only you didn't follow the instructions in the Submitting your Work submission guidelines (which you had to tick a box to say you had read ).

If you email me a readme I'll add it to the download and approve it to save you resubmitting the entire thing.

[Birchtree]

Thanks for the information, stfas and IBBoard. Also, yes, it must be your (IBBoard's) texture tool I'm using. It's a good program.

>readme

Eh, must've forgotten to add it to the archive. I'll sort that out in a bit.

[Birchtree]

I've resubmitted the textures along with a readme and a dir structure this time, to make installation easier.

[stfas]

well you could use the submitter and maker with your name to make not everybody unknown

[IBBoard]

I'll try and get that approved later today. Thanks.