Selecting Crafting Textures - Why Can't I?

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There I was, about to attend a funeral, equipped with the best gear the game had offered me yet: Neon pink booty shorts, a motorcycle helmet, a plastic-looking shirt and tie, and I don't remember what else. I looked like I was rejected from a Village People audition. That's when I decided to spec into the Crafting tree. I wanted to be able to use good gear and look good while doing it. So like 15 in-game hours later (it's really hard to tell due to dozens of crashes/reloads), I'm finally more or less set to craft whatever I like. I unfortunately discovered that even if you check every store in the game, you won't end up with all the clothing crafting recipes, and the shops don't tell you what you already have, so you have to menu back and forth to check. But I can sort of make what I want. But...

...I can't select the paint/texture/color that's applied any of this gear? V just creates the most generic-looking version of the gear that he crafts, over and over. Great. Perfect. I invested almost all of my points into this, and I can't even really customize it despite the game having a system for customization. Guns, clothing, etc. come in all sorts of patterns and colors, but the only way to use them is to pick them up as a drop? But they'll be worse than what I make, since I invested so many points into it. If V is a legendary crafter, is he incapable of using some paint or different color textiles? Why is this not an option?

It's not like I can play it right now because it's constantly crashing for me still, but it's just insanity: people choose the Crafting spec tree so they can kit out V however they want... and yet despite the game technically supporting this, they didn't put in any player-facing options to use these systems???
 
Few details if I may :
- One crafting spec > One item/One color,style.
- Unfortunately, the vendors only have few crafting specs.
- I use Tech Skill only for : open locked doors, crafting mods (armdillo for example), recover good legendary mods on looted items, cheap crafting and upgrade (like iconic weapons) and sometimes crafting weapons. Just for that, it's worth it.

But yes, crafting part of the game could need some work for to be a great as possible :)
 
What I am saying is that, for instance, if you find a baseball bat, it can be pink or blue or yellow or whatever. But if you craft it, it is always grey or whatever. I'm pretty sure I've seen lots of colored clothes, but the spec for it is always one color. Maybe there are multiple variations of colors, but from what I have seen (and because the game constantly crashes, maybe I am wrong), there aren't variations of the same crafting spec. Even if there was, it'd cost way too much money. It'd make more sense to purchase 'paint recipes" or whatever, if anything. So maybe you purchase a bright blue paint recipe to unlock that color for all items. But I don't see that much of a reason to prevent the player from just doing it from the start.

Yes, another reason I went with Crafting is because I didn't want to waste mods that were pre-installed in weapons. Took me many hours to enable that. It's also nice to be able to craft ammo or medical supplies, just in case.
 
If you are on PC, the materials system is very flexible and with modding community tools you can access it to change the base surface materials, their colours, the shader types, what shader parameters are exposed and where, the detail maps (microblends) and you can import your own custom assets. You can import your own textures. All of this requires hex editing using a template and scripts written by one of the modding community tool devs.

However, its the kind of thing that doesn't work in real-time while the game is running because of how everything is instanced for a particular item of clothing. You have to exit the game, edit the files, compress them, pack them and re-enter the game. I sometimes wonder how you could design a crafting system in game that gets the most flexibility out of materials. I think it would help if you craft and you could choose the preset meshappearance, but then you would need some way to preview that meshappearance in game. I don't know how they would handle that. For now when editing materials on PC, you preview it in a 2D/3D viewport in a third party application after uncooking the raw files and setting up all the mesh material assignments.

If you are on PC and you are willing to put in the effort to learn the material system and how to work with it, I think that you can achieve everything you want and a lot more. You will be able to do things with clothing in this game that you did not believe was possible.

If you are familiar with material authoring applications like Substance Designer or material editors built into UE, Unity or Blender etc, then you will already understand the general concepts. These applications tend to represent materials visually as a data path with boxes and wires that outputs a texture. Each box has sliders that control shader/math function parameters and so on. You can think of materials as highly programmable texture generators. They are like modular synthesizers but for images instead of audio.

In Cyberpunk we don't have a material editor with a graphical user inteface. We have one with a text based interface. We only have the 010 template and instead of sliders we change integer or float values in an array. To swap textures we don't drag and drop new ones on a box inside a graph. We insert a new index number, associate it with a file path to a new texture and then change the index numbers elsewhere in the file when we want to point to this new texture.

Some basic example of what you can do below. You can go a lot further than this.

Cyberpunk2077 2021-06-12 01-15-30.jpg

This is Alt's top where the base material has been switched to glass. The doll plate/lines are turned to silver by editing basecolor in mesh material buffer. Here you can expose other properties of the base metal shader such as roughness, metalness, emissive etc. so you can make it look polished to a mirror shine or give it a dull satin finish. One of the things I want to do is expose more of the glass material parameters in this material instance such as blur radius, colorscale, IOR (index of refraction). You can turn this frosted glass, tint it any colour you want. You can make it more or less glossy. You can change its opacity.


Cyberpunk2077 2021-05-21 03-58-07.jpg

This is the arasaka agent (Takamura) neck cyberware fitted to Miss V with all the colours changed. You can also change all the surface materials. Rather than glass.mt as before, the base material here is a multi layer diffuse shader (multilayered.mt). For example, the perforated purple bits are enameled high quality metal textures. They are colourized with the associated colour hex value and the perforations are a detail normal map (a dots microblend). These can all be changed. You can make this polished silver, colour it gold and overlay multiple detail textures so it has a hexagon pattern or brushed metal surface or both. For multilayered stuff, I usually create a google docs planner where I map out the surfaces and color scales and this becomes a template for custom material stuff.

1623654946926.png


1623655642732.png


Here are some leggings with pretty much all the multilayer stuff changed. This is the table I made for it so I know what thing changes what:

1623655767809.png


I added a lot of detail textures that are not used at the bottom but the files are setup in such a way that you can just change them with a single number. The abalone shell like appearance is a combination of wrinkle, stone veins and dirt stain microblends on a material surface called "mirror" then you blend colour scales and opacities until you are happy. You can create really detailed surfaces in this game just by mixing/matching stock game assets:

1623656050960.png


So far I haven't done fully custom textures except for 4k hair cards because I'm still learning Substance Designer. But at some point I would like to create new materials because the fashion options at that point are limitless.

For my third playthrough, I've already got an idea of what clothes to wear and when so its really just about modding that stuff. I was hoping to get a third playthrough when I get a 30x0 graphics card but it doesn't look like I will be able to find one at less than 300% msrp until 2024. So that means I have a lot of time to mod V's wardrobe for the 100% canon playthrough. And I get to learn a lot about game dev at the same time so its all good.

Edit: V will not be attending a funeral dressed in the attire shown above. It just wouldn't be respectful!
 
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I found myself reading the first few lines and I was like, yeah. I would also like it if the crafting spec was for the general type of clothing, but you could select via a dialog in what color scheme you'd like to craft said piece of clothing.
 
I found myself reading the first few lines and I was like, yeah. I would also like it if the crafting spec was for the general type of clothing, but you could select via a dialog in what color scheme you'd like to craft said piece of clothing.

The thing is most clothing in the game doesn't have colour textures. Some don't have any textures at all because that is not how the material is composed. Where there are textures, they are often not of the traditional type. They are more like stencil masks or maps, are usually tiny and tileable and other than direction maps are mostly greyscale. They are colourised in game with gradient maps and shader, so you have 3x integers or floats representing red, green and blue channel greyscale value.

What this means is that any surface can be any colour you want so how do you do this in engine in a way that is intuitive to most gamers? How do you do this elegantly on console without a keyboard? Do you pop up a colour wheel, click on it and get a colour hex like in photoshop? Thats going to be fiddly with a control pad. Most clothing has several preset meshappearances with preset colour values and surface types. I think that could be done via an ingame crafting menu with perhaps a thumbnail image to show you what the meshappearance looks like? I dont know.

There are a lot of clothes in the game and even more meshappearance presets. Individually thumbnailing them all and building an ingame crafting UI for them and all the scripts for it would be a lot of work.
 
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The thing is most clothing in the game doesn't have colour textures. Some don't have any textures at all because that is not how the material is composed. Where there are textures, they are often not of the traditional type. They are more like stencil masks or maps, are usually tiny and tileable and other than direction maps are mostly greyscale. They are colourised in game with gradient maps and shader, so you have 3x integers or floats representing red, green and blue channel greyscale value.

What this means is that any surface can be any colour you want so how do you do this in engine in a way that is intuitive to most gamers? How do you do this elegantly on console without a keyboard? Do you pop up a colour wheel, click on it and get a colour hex like in photoshop? Thats going to be fiddly with a control pad. Most clothing has several preset meshappearances with preset colour values and surface types. I think that could be done via an ingame crafting menu with perhaps a thumbnail image to show you what the meshappearance looks like? I dont know.

There are a lot of clothes in the game and even more meshappearance presets. Individually thumbnailing them all and building an ingame crafting UI for them and all the scripts for it would be a lot of work.
Thanks for your great explanation ;)
 
The thing is most clothing in the game doesn't have colour textures. Some don't have any textures at all because that is not how the material is composed. Where there are textures, they are often not of the traditional type. They are more like stencil masks or maps, are usually tiny and tileable and other than direction maps are mostly greyscale. They are colourised in game with gradient maps and shader, so you have 3x integers or floats representing red, green and blue channel greyscale value.

What this means is that any surface can be any colour you want so how do you do this in engine in a way that is intuitive to most gamers? How do you do this elegantly on console without a keyboard? Do you pop up a colour wheel, click on it and get a colour hex like in photoshop? Thats going to be fiddly with a control pad. Most clothing has several preset meshappearances with preset colour values and surface types. I think that could be done via an ingame crafting menu with perhaps a thumbnail image to show you what the meshappearance looks like? I dont know.

There are a lot of clothes in the game and even more meshappearance presets. Individually thumbnailing them all and building an ingame crafting UI for them and all the scripts for it would be a lot of work.
I'll try to be a bit more elaborate on how I would look at is, and I regret not having images ready that would be very useful.

Lets say you have a crafting spec for the pozer bolero (open jacket with short sleeves and the high collar.
That jacket exists in variants, such as:
*bright yellow
*White with some golden trimming
*6th street, basically a camouflaged variant
*Voodoo Boys variant
Etcetcetc.
When you select the crafting icon for that 'generic' bolero, you get a new dialog menu that lists the available variants such as described above. And then it crafts that variant and with whatever stats it ordinarily would.

As opposed to specifically the yellow one if the crafting spec was specifically about the yellow version.

I'm sorry but I have no idea how all these jackets are called for each unique version. I however assume this is based is some combination of strings (maybe based on modeltype, material or whatever.

Core of the point being:
We have the unique variants. Why not gather then in a 'box' from which the crafting spec 'selects' what variant it must craft.
--> thus allowing the player to choose wether he/she want the bright yellow one, or the 6th street camouflaged one, or any other variant currently exists.
 
I'll try to be a bit more elaborate on how I would look at is, and I regret not having images ready that would be very useful.

Lets say you have a crafting spec for the pozer bolero (open jacket with short sleeves and the high collar.
That jacket exists in variants, such as:
*bright yellow
*White with some golden trimming
*6th street, basically a camouflaged variant
*Voodoo Boys variant
Etcetcetc.
When you select the crafting icon for that 'generic' bolero, you get a new dialog menu that lists the available variants such as described above. And then it crafts that variant and with whatever stats it ordinarily would.

As opposed to specifically the yellow one if the crafting spec was specifically about the yellow version.

I'm sorry but I have no idea how all these jackets are called for each unique version. I however assume this is based is some combination of strings (maybe based on modeltype, material or whatever.

Core of the point being:
We have the unique variants. Why not gather then in a 'box' from which the crafting spec 'selects' what variant it must craft.
--> thus allowing the player to choose wether he/she want the bright yellow one, or the 6th street camouflaged one, or any other variant currently exists.
Yes, that's could be great but I am divided on that :(
If I understand, what you said (maybe I'm wrong, it's also possible) :D

Why would you visit vendors (and maybe buy) if you are able to craft all the version with a "unic" crafting spec ?
Like be able to craft all the models of rare pozer jacket with one rare "basic" pozer jacket crafting spec. It would then be useless to go to jinguji to have the "blue" version or in JapanTown for the Voodoo Boys version.

For the weapons, it seems less disturbing to be able to choose the versions (like chromed, gold, "graphiti",...).
 
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Yes, that's could be great but I am divided on that :(
If I understand, what you said (maybe I'm wrong, it's also possible) :D

Why would you visit vendors (and maybe buy) if you are able to craft all the version with a "unic" crafting spec ?
Like be able to craft all the models of rare pozer jacket with one rare "basic" pozer jacket crafting spec. It would then be useless to go to jinguji to have the "blue" version or in JapanTown for the Voodoo Boys version.

For the weapons, it seems less disturbing to be able to choose the versions (like chromed, gold, "graphiti",...).
Haha well you understood correctly. Let me answer that with a question: why are there food vendors?


Additionally, you' first have to acquire the crafting specs and they are/can be all over the place. So to collect what you'd like (which will be different for every player as they'll like different things) the vendors still remain very much a necesity for clothing you may not yet have a crafting spec for

Also: crafting spec that you can buy from vendors can be made more expensive if they would represent more variants.

And yet another thing to consider: grade. A crafting spec could be for a rare piece, but the vendor has a legendary piece.
 
Haha well you understood correctly. Let me answer that with a question: why are there food vendors?
To make it nice, I don't see anything more... :)
I can add, for legendary katana, it's possible to "choose" the one you want (choose is a big word, it's random...)

But for pozer jacket, an epic Voodoo Boy in JapanTown, it's 25K eddies at lvl 50, so not the same as food. If you really want one, you need to invest a little.
 
To make it nice, I don't see anything more... :)
I can add, for legendary katana, it's possible to "choose" the one you want (choose is a big word, it's random...)

But for pozer jacket, an epic Voodoo Boy in JapanTown, it's 25K eddies at lvl 50, so not the same as food. If you really want one, you need to invest a little.
Yeah I came to edit my post 4 times by now. As I see it, there are multiple ways how you can keep vendors for clothing important. Even if you had a crafting spec that allowed several variants to be made.
 
I know what you mean. These are the bolero variants that you can find in the game:

1623671348863.png


They all share the same mesh, a male and female variant:

1623671534021.png


and the 6 different bolero variants are called meshappearances inside the .mesh file. There are quite a lot more than 6. I might take a look at these to see what they all look like:

1623671652072.png


So I find the index numbers for all these meshappearances which are numbered 1 to 16 here:

1623671721219.png


And then go the material buffer to find out how they are all setup:

1623671773884.png


No.4 is Zebra_red (whatever this is ingame, assuming you can even buy or find it), so we expand that out in the buffer and we see this:

1623672003518.png


Ok so the mlsetup (multi layer setup) is the file where you can edit colour, surface type and detail maps. No. 9 is interesting because its a holo variant. so the parameters will look very different:

1623672125525.png


You can change colour, glitch frequency, glow strength, scanline and dot thickness, all kinds of stuff.

I mean I think your idea is good. When you craft a bolero jacket, show a tickbox that lists all of these 17 preset material instances. Pick the one you want and thats the one you get deposited in your inventory. The only annoying thing is that only 6 of them have an icon made for them and presumably can be found in the game. The rest I'll take a look at after work to see if there is anything exciting there. Also the names in the meshappearances in the game files do not correspond to the name of the item in game. you can get half way there in the .app (appearance) files to find the basic, old and rich variants like so:

1623673695546.png


But the ingame names are somewhere else. Probably tweakdb which is out of reach at the moment. Our best people haven't been able to breach that fortress to date.

So as a feisibility study of how something like this could be implemented into the game as a modder, you would need multiple people with quite the range of skillsets - a UI designer. A software engineering type who can script all the functionality you want. You would need a hex god and a whole lot of manual labour because there are so many stock material setups for all of the clothing meshes in the game. It would take a very long time, but hopefully this post gives you some insight into how something seemingly trivial is an unbelievable amount of work.
 
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Yeah I came to edit my post 4 times by now. As I see it, there are multiple ways how you can keep vendors for clothing important. Even if you had a crafting spec that allowed several variants to be made.
Or no, the best for clothes (if you can choose the model what you craft) could be like weapons, the looted/Buy ones will be better than crafted ones (with additional abilities. Like Voodoo Boys pozer jacket add 1 additionnal RAM unit when equiped).

Thanks to Hayte with really good explanation ;)
But we speaking about "predefined" model, like "Voodoos Boy pozer jacket" or "rocker glasses". Obviously be able choose exactly the color in every part, that's could demand way too much work. I wonder if technically it would be possible given the number of parts and variants available. :)
 
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I know what you mean. These are the bolero variants that you can find in the game:

View attachment 11225717

They all share the same mesh, a male and female variant:

View attachment 11225720

and the 6 different bolero variants are called meshappearances inside the .mesh file. There are quite a lot more than 6. I might take a look at these to see what they all look like:

View attachment 11225723

So I find the index numbers for all these meshappearances which are numbered 1 to 16 here:

View attachment 11225726

And then go the material buffer to find out how they are all setup:

View attachment 11225729

No.4 is Zebra_red (whatever this is ingame, assuming you can even buy or find it), so we expand that out in the buffer and we see this:

View attachment 11225732

Ok so the mlsetup (multi layer setup) is the file where you can edit colour, surface type and detail maps. No. 9 is interesting because its a holo variant. so the parameters will look very different:

View attachment 11225738

You can change colour, glitch frequency, glow strength, scanline and dot thickness, all kinds of stuff.

I mean I think your idea is good. When you craft a bolero jacket, show a tickbox that lists all of these 17 preset material instances. Pick the one you want and thats the one you get deposited in your inventory. The only annoying thing is that only 6 of them have an icon made for them and presumably can be found in the game. The rest I'll take a look at after work to see if there is anything exciting there. Also the names in the meshappearances in the game files do not correspond to the name of the item in game. you can get half way there in the .app (appearance) files to find the basic, old and rich variants like so:

View attachment 11225747

But the ingame names are somewhere else. Probably tweakdb which is out of reach at the moment.

So as a feisibility study of how something like this could be implemented into the game as a modder, you would need multiple people with quite the range of skillsets - a UI designer. A software engineering type who can script all the functionality you want. You would need a hex god and a whole lot of manual labour because there are so many stock material setups for all of the clothing meshes in the game. It would take a very long time, but hopefully this post gives you some insight into how something seemingly trivial is an unbelievable amount of work.
Well, my suggestion up front would be, lets start with what is in the game.

I think I'm gonna write this down with some more structure and pitch it at some point.
I also have an idea for a weapon conversion mechanic that I like to craft some more work into.
 
To me, what the OP is looking for is some kind of 'Unify colour' ability (if you have played SWTOR you will know what I mean). Or maybe a dye system like in ESO....
The stores can be relevant (beyond selling the crafting recipe) by selling some minor variations of the clothes. Example - having an eagle in the back or some such....
....but yes, I too would like to be able to choose more stuff when crafting. Especially if my char has specialized in crafting. I ended the game with purple katana because I found it nicer looking than the legendary I can craft:)
 
Or no, the best for clothes (if you can choose the model what you craft) could be like weapons, the looted/Buy ones will be better than crafted ones (with additional abilities. Like Voodoo Boys pozer jacket add 1 additionnal RAM unit when equiped).

Thanks to Hayte with really good explanation ;)
But we speaking about "predefined" model, like "Voodoos Boy pozer jacket" or "rocker glasses". Obviously be able choose exactly the color in every part, that's could demand way too much work. I wonder if technically it would be possible given the number of parts and variants available. :)
The feisibility study is just for the predefined material setups.

Its actually a lot less work to learn how to hex, pick a jacket you want to change (even if its only to another predefined material setup which can be done by changing 1 number in the .mesh file), learn how to edit an .mlsetup (if you want to customize it further) and make that jacket your own!

The reason for this is you don't need to screw with tweakdb or figure out how to do it. You don't need a coder type to script UI behaviour and interaction with appearances, entities and mesh material setups or a UI designer to build a crafting UI.
 
ended the game with purple katana because I found it nicer looking than the legendary I can craft:)
Katanas (legendary), are the only item you can "choose" the model when you craft. (choose... nope craft ten and choose the best looking one).

In any case, thanks Hayte, at least we can see that it is not as easy as it seems at first glance ;)
 
Katanas (legendary), are the only item you can "choose" the model when you craft. (choose... nope craft ten and choose the best looking one).

Really....missed that:)
Thankfully I was WAY overpowered by that point to care:) But would be nice if we can select ourselves the type of hilt, or the blade color etc.
 
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