More "fun" with shaders

Ahmose

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I am trying to get an Imperial patch on the reinforced jumpsuit that does -not- take any color from a palette in the crafting window. I have talked with Tonberry and he says the easiest/best way to do this is to find an item with one more palette option that the item you want to replace (reinforced jumpsuit has 2) and then going into photoshop and dropping the patch on the Alpha layer.

I have found a clothing item with three options (dress uniform jacket), but unfortunately that item has 8 shader files. I haven't the slightest idea which files to rename and what to rename them (other than bodysuit_s13_whatever). The jacket is s_25 I believe.

Anyone with some experience in this field know which files to rename or an easier way to do this?

Thanks!
 

Tonberry

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To clarify again I haven't really done much with this area before. My suggestion simply meant that examining something with three color options just to break down how that works would be a good place to start. If the dress uniform jacket has 8 different shaders and the contents of those shader files are the same as any other piece of clothing then its very likely that it has that many specifically to support those 3 color options.

When I said to look at something like this it was based on the assumption of it being a single shader and looking at the pallette/effect info within the shader. (in a hex editor, it wouldn't be a simple file swap)

Again I haven't looked into this enough to give a solid answer, but I wouldn't base it on one thing. Make a list of items with 3 palette options then examine how they work. If they all use multiple shaders (meaning the model uses separated textures) then there's probably no way around it aside from remapping the model itself to work in the same way.

It's more than possible there is a simple solution and I'm just reading into things too much. I really can't say without looking through things myself but this is what sprung to mind initially. You'll just have to sift through files and see if the multiple shaders thing is consistent for items with 3 color options.
 

Ahmose

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Ah, I didn't want to imply it's the ONLY way, but I would ideally add a third palette option to the 2 stock ones that deals exclusively with the patch and maybe make white.dds that palette color, but that's something I don't know how to do because the shader file names are so dissimilar:

 

Tonberry

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The file names of the shaders don't matter, it's what is in each shader and what textures/effects it links up to that is important as well as it's palette info.
 

Timbab

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Alright I looked into it.

1.) Maximum palette's per .sht is 2, from what I've seen. If there is a file with more, then the texture is split up.

2.) The .eft's pull the palette information from the same .dds, sadly, palette 1 would be MAIN and palette 2 would be HUEB. I've tried numerous ways to reroute the HUEB to a different .dds's alpha, but I really haven't had any real success, the palette 2 part just turns black due to it not being shaded right then. I might have done it wrong and it might be possible if one modifies the .eft passes correctly, but I never really edited them and only have limited grasp of how they work exactly. Don't even try though Ahmose, that's too advance.


So, in the end, you have two options (maybe). One is to rip the palette functions out for yourself and anyone with that mod, so it's only one palette color (color 1), or, I think this could be a thing, but haven't looked into it, you swap textures with a one palette bodysuit (I believe they're the same model/mesh) and move on from there.

Might look a bit more into it later, this made me a bit curious.
 

Tonberry

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Interesting stuff Timbab. I don't know which surprises me more, that nobody has brought up a problem like this before, or that such a simple texture edit has prompted so many questions. :p

Ahmose if you get your goal in the end you'll be getting a custom title in honor of such commitment. Ultimate RP Master. :p
 

Timbab

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Haha yeah, interesting question to begin with if you look deeper.

And, totally messed up on my previous attempt, I fixed it now.

Modified the .eft so it uses the alpha from the duplicated .dds, awesome. Missed some HUEB's in the .eft passes. The way I have it now is, the MAIN uses the white alpha of the original .dds for palette 1, and then made a unique 4 letter name tag for the second duplicated texture that uses the black part of that alpha, for palette 2.

I'll 100% confirm it tomorrow when I'll install my .dds plugin again, to be sure it's working, but I'm fairly confident it works, if I load the stock .eft it blacks out again.

Hope it actually skips the black alpha on the first and white alpha on the second though, that I need to verify with .dds editing. It should, but no idea if it does in reality, since it wasn't meant to do that, but we'll see.

This should enable better texture mods for double palette stuff without completely redoing the UV.

If this really works, I'll make a guide tomorrow and upload the modified .sht/.eft for ya Ahmose.


Edit:

DAMN IT, it doesn't work, still pulls the same alpha of MAIN. So apparently HUEB is irrelevant as a command, it's just a name that gets used, the mechanic of it using a white/black must be hard coded then if there is more than one in the TFNS0000. Ugh.

Edit 2:

Further research, I noticed that the belt (Using jacket_s17 to test 2 color stuff, don't have access to a factory for suits) used a different shader, even though there is just one texture. So now I see that I was wrong on how it's handled when there is more than 2 palettes. Basically, in the .MGN, you can 'select' parts of the UV/.dds and assign a .sht to it, meaning, you can have multiple shaders for one texture without having to actually split up the textures into different pieces in order to get different effects, I assume this would also work if you layer/overwrite some things.

Problem being, it needs the full coordinates for that area on the .dds, so unless I or someone else writes a tool for it, you can forget about it.

I tried everything I can think of in the .eft, to make it target the second .dds, but haven't had any luck.


@Ahmouse, do you want a single palette shader/eft, then? I can most likely do that, so it only uses the main color for the whole suite, that way you can use black to stop the palette from interfering with the emblem, any other colors would have to be done on the texture itself.
 

Ahmose

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Hmmm, some of the uniform combinations we use for this jacket have two different palette uses (i.e. white jacket with black padding), so if it's at all possible I would like it to be a 3rd palette color. I can upload the jacket I'm working with as a .jpg so you can determine the co-ordinates?
 

wefi

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here's mine verson.

Basically.

1.) Uli posted a guide on how Sat files work back couple of years ago. Basically the first node tells the game how many .lmgs are in the file. i needed 6, so i changed the 01 into a 06.

2. I added 5 more lines of the appearance/mesh/vest_s09_m.lmg and renamed them to invisible_XXXX (X = body part)

3. I pulled out a Jedi robe, Bracers, gloves, and a helmet's LMG file, and told them to point to their respective body parts. Jedi robe = Invisible_body.mgn for example.

4. I went through each MGN and changed the shader to invisible.sht

5. I used the a-wing shader file (first one i grabbed) and changed the two textures it uses to invisible.dds.

6. I changed the eft file in the shader to h_pounchout.eft this takes the blacks in alpha and makes them invisible. also this makes the whites change colors.

7. I went into photoshop and made a simple DDS texture. you can take any texture. i made the alpha all black. and saved it as Invisible.dds

and thats basically it.
 

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Ahmose

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Jun 16, 2012
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Freaking awesome! Works wonderfully, except I think the stormtrooper helmet is too big to cover up entirely. That's really not that big of an issue, though.

 
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