Trying To Re-Texture Armor, Some Questions

[MatthiosArcane]

Trying To Re-Texture Armor, Some Questions

Hey everyone, hope all is well!


I'm attempting to make my first mod, a re-texture for the Grandmaster Ursine Armor. So far, everything has been pretty straightforward, except for the Ursine skirt. I can only find a RedCloth file, which I assume is some sort of PhysX file. As far as I can find online, this sort of file isn't a model and therefore can't really be worked with. The methods I'm using rely on having the models themselves to do the re-texture. I've seen a few mods here and there that have redone the skirt, so my question is this: what are typical methods for armor re-textures?

In case it matters, I'll detail what I'm currently doing.
After obtaining the models and textures, I'm importing them into Blender and prepare them for import into Quixel Suite, IE making color maps, making sure normals are consistent, typical stuff there. Once I get to using Quixel, I use nDo to make any sort of surface detail I would like, importing that into dDo alongside the exported model and color map.
The critical part is that Quixel requires me to have a fully unwrapped model, so I need to be able to get the skirt, in this instance, into Blender with proper UV coordinates for this to work.

I currently have a workaround in the form of making my own skirt model and matching it as best I can to the texture that I've unpacked. I don't see this as being ideal, so if it's at all possible, I would love to know how I could get my hands on the original skirt, if such a thing is even doable.

I'll continue looking into this myself, but I always find it best to ask when stuck just in case someone can help me before I spend too much time on something. =-)


Thanks, and take care!

 

[Quantifiable]

Hey everyone, hope all is well!


I'm attempting to make my first mod, a re-texture for the Grandmaster Ursine Armor. So far, everything has been pretty straightforward, except for the Ursine skirt. I can only find a RedCloth file, which I assume is some sort of PhysX file. As far as I can find online, this sort of file isn't a model and therefore can't really be worked with. The methods I'm using rely on having the models themselves to do the re-texture. I've seen a few mods here and there that have redone the skirt, so my question is this: what are typical methods for armor re-textures?

In case it matters, I'll detail what I'm currently doing.
After obtaining the models and textures, I'm importing them into Blender and prepare them for import into Quixel Suite, IE making color maps, making sure normals are consistent, typical stuff there. Once I get to using Quixel, I use nDo to make any sort of surface detail I would like, importing that into dDo alongside the exported model and color map.
The critical part is that Quixel requires me to have a fully unwrapped model, so I need to be able to get the skirt, in this instance, into Blender with proper UV coordinates for this to work.

I currently have a workaround in the form of making my own skirt model and matching it as best I can to the texture that I've unpacked. I don't see this as being ideal, so if it's at all possible, I would love to know how I could get my hands on the original skirt, if such a thing is even doable.

I'll continue looking into this myself, but I always find it best to ask when stuck just in case someone can help me before I spend too much time on something. =-)


Thanks, and take care!

You can't do anything with .redcloth files except changing some of their properties with the Mod Editor if it's anything like .redfur, they are apex physx files packed into CDPRs proprietary formats. You could change the textures associated with it.

 

[MatthiosArcane]

Hey Quantifiable, thanks for the response!

That's unfortunate, would have loved to get my hands on it, but if you can't, you can't. =-)
Luckily, I got myself a work-around, so hopefully things will turn out as expected regardless.

Take care!

 

[GMSBS_Ghost]

Hey Matthios, very nice approach. Especially using Quixel/nDo sounds awesome (I would want to try these tools at some point myself, but Photoshop's subscription model has been keeping me off).
Be sure to post some screenshots if you can

 

[MatthiosArcane]

No Title

Hey GMSBS_Ghost!


Quixel Suite is amazing, to be honest. I don't think I could ever go back to a pure Photoshop approach to making textures at this point. The whole subscription thing for Photoshop is definitely less than ideal, though, unfortunately. I've been seeing other people that use CS6 for it, though, so that may be an option for a persistent license. Something I may look into in the future because paying Adobe money indefinitely doesn't appeal to me at all.
In this situation, there's a lot of post work that has to be done, though. But all in all, I think it works wonderfully for this sort of project. I've been running into difficulties getting it to show up properly in-game, but I think that's mostly due to the undocumented system that's in place in the game. Lots of guesswork, that's for sure.
I'm hoping that when I get this done, I'll be in a position to write a tutorial about all the things I've learned/found out.

I'll attach some screenshots, one of the initial release in-game, and one of the set in 3Do. I'm currently working on getting it to transfer over better, which may or may not take some time. We'll see.

If you're interested in following the progress, here's a link to the mod file. =-)
http://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/2280/?


Take care!

 

[MyrddinImreis]

MatthiosArcane Your work work looks absolutely brilliant. I like the look very much.

A few things on the redcloth assets. As far as I know you can only, as Quantifiable sugessted, use the texture file for your rework of the skirt. Technically wcc_lite is able to work with those redcloth assets, as you can see when using the ModEditor. For some reason unpacking them is not possible. My guess is that it has something to do with cooked and uncooked files. So until the community has found a way to make wcc_lite export those into the uncooked format we have to work with the texture files as such.

I noticed you mentioned that you had problems with the editied files showing up in-game. Were you able to resovle that issue?

 

[MatthiosArcane]

Hey MasterOfTheRings, thanks for the compliment! =-D


Fortunately, I was able to resolve the issue you mention. The problem lay with Sarcen's Mod Editor. Something about it kept corrupting the files. Even when I simply reverted a change, it still ended up corrupting the mesh.
I was able to solve this problem by finally figuring out the proper method for exporting an FBX using W3Oven. It got me an FBX file and an XML file. I just edited the XML file to point to the new textures, did the packing process, and everything showed up in-game. For some reason I couldn't do it directly through wcc_lite, however I suspect my commands were somehow incorrect. Doing it directly, it would give me what looked to be a default XML file with nothing useful in it and a cube in the FBX file.

Now the only problem with edits is with, once again, a RedCloth file, specifically part of the belt that seems to be a separate RedCloth file from the usual W2Mesh file. Looking into possibly using a hex editor to make that happen as any further work with the Mod Editor is proving to be useless. We'll see what happens, at least.


Thanks again, and take care!

 

[MyrddinImreis]

MatthiosArcane My advice is that you use W3Oven as the tool for uncooking and extracting any model related stuff, including textures from W3. For me it proved to be the best solution.

I am looking forward to see some of your new stuff