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far-butter · 8 months ago

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Thank you for writing all of that! It's pretty useful!

Porting Models from Dragon Age: Inquisition to Dragon Age: Origins or Dragon Age 2

Part 3: Converting Textures using Paint.NET

Tools needed: Paint.NET BoltBait's Plugin Pack

In hindsight, I probably should have started with this tutorial. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ For reference, I'll be converting the HF "prisoner" model (largely unused in Inquisition; only female NPC I could find using it is the infected woman in Sahrnia Quarry) I chose this model because it doesn't have any transparency or exposed skin. If your model does have exposed skin, you'll have to paste the outfit map together with the skin texture map, and adjust the model's UV map accordingly, unless you're using one of the very rare DAI models whose skin texture is on the outfit diffuse.

Normal Map:

I usually start with the normal map, since I follow magpie's method and paste it onto the diffuse. So, let's open up that DAI normal map. It should look like this:

If you're used to Photoshop, the first thing you'll likely notice is that it hasn't been nicely divided into RBG layers. That's something we're going to have to do ourselves. A lot.

Hopefully, you'll see a Layers box, probably on the far right. If not, hit F7 to bring it up. Now click 'Duplicate Layer' at the bottom of the Layers box.

DAI puts the X in the red channel, and Y in the green, while DAO and DA2 have X in the alpha channel, and inverted Y in the green.

With the upper layer selected, use Curves or Levels (both under 'Adjustments') to reduce the red and blue output to 0. Then do the same with the lower layer, reducing green and blue output to 0.

Using Curves: Change the Transfer Map to RBG, and uncheck the box for the color you want to keep. Then reduce the other colors to zero by clicking on the tiny dot in the upper right, and dragging it to the lower right. Hit 'OK'.

Using Levels: Uncheck the box for the color you want to keep, then reduce the other colors' Output to zero by either clicking on the uppermost bar and dragging it to the bottom, or by changing the 255 to 0. Hit 'OK'.

Since DAO and DA2 use an inverted Y map, invert the Green Y layer by selecting it, and hitting Ctrl+Shift+I. Yes, it will be very pink.

Now, turn each layer to grayscale with the Adjustments menu, Black and White. To help keep the layers straight, you may want to rename them by double-clicking on the layer in the Layers box, or clicking the little wrench.

Chances are, your Y layer is rather light and your X layer rather dark, compared to vanilla normal textures. You can adjust both manually with Brightness / Contrast, or just use the Autoscale adjustment on both layers. It usually does a pretty good job. Your Y layer should look like it's an stamped impression of your texture--concave when it should be convex--while your X layer will pop out like the actual texture.

The next step involves transparency, so we should do a save as a PDN in case we later need to go back and make adjustments to the individual layers. (other image formats will combine the layers - "flatten" - so it's good practice to save a PDN before saving into another format, or combining layers manually)

In the Layers box, hide the Y layer with the checkbox, and make sure you have the X layer selected. Then do Ctrl+A to select the whole image, and Ctrl+C to copy.

Then unhide the Y, and hide the X.

In the Effects menu, go to Object, Paste Alpha. Make sure you have 'Replace current Alpha with' 'Shades of gray from clipboard' selected, and hit 'ok'.

Now we almost have a proper DAO normal map! :D Despite the color, it'll work fine in DA2, too. (DAO & DA2 both read Y from the green channel and X from the alpha, but DAO has duplicates of the Y in both red & blue, while DA2 has a perfectly red red channel and all-black blue channel).

If you want to mimic the DA2 orange, you can undo the transparency for now, then add another layer in the Layers box. Move this one above the Y, and fill it with red FF0000. Using the Curves or Levels adjustment, change the Y to fully green. Double-click the all-red layer, and change the Blend mode to 'Additive'. In the Layers box, use the Merge Layers Down button to merge the red onto the Y. Then copy the X, and use Paste Alpha.

Delete the X layer.

Save as a .dds. The only setting you'll need to change from the defaults is to put the compression at BC3 (Linear, DXT5).

Diffuse Map:

Open up both the diffuse map and the specular. You'll probably notice that the diffuse map looks rather flat compared to DAO & DA2 maps. We're going to fix that by overlaying a bit of the normal and specular maps (thanks again, magpie!!).

First, we need to separate the specular map into RGB layers. Use the Layers box to make two duplicates of the base layer. Like with the normal map, you can use either the Curves tool (Adjustments, Curves) or the Levels tool (Adjustments, Levels) to make the three color channels.

With either method, Paint.NET remembers your last adjustment, so you'll have to undo it when you change the next color layer. You should end up with the layers like this:

Go back to your diffuse map.

If your diffuse has transparency, make a duplicate layer, and turn the bottom one into a transparency layer with Effect, Object, Switch Alpha to Gray. Hide this layer. We won't be using it again for a while. Turn the other layer completely opaque by clicking Adjustments, Transparency, and moving the slider all the way to the right.

Make two new blank layers above your diffuse layer.

Open back up the normal map PDN you made earlier, and copy the Y layer.

Paste the normal Y layer into the lower blank layer on the diffuse map.

Go to the specular map, copy the green layer, and paste it into the upper blank layer on the diffuse map. Sometimes one of the maps isn't the same size as the other. In that case, first adjust the size with Image, Resize. The sizes are multiples of 256, usually 1024x1024, 2048x2048, or 4096x4096.

Run the Black and White tool to turn the specular layer grayscale. Do the same to the normal layer, if it's the orange DA2-style. (You can close the normal PDN if you want now; we don't be using it again. Keep the specular map open, though.)

Your diffuse map and layers should currently look like this:

Hide the spec layer, and double-click the normal layer.

Change the Blend Mode to 'Overlay', and play with the opacity slider a bit. You can see that creases/shading are added, but the colors are also whiter. I usually end up with the norm opacity in the 170-190 range. You might want to invert the normal layer (Ctrl+Shift+I), or use the X normal layer instead. See what works best. :)

Unhide the spec layer, and set its Blend Mode to 'Overlay' as well. Play around with the opacity slider. This darkens the map and adds contrast. I usually end up with the spec opacity around 130.

If your combined texture doesn't quite look right, you can also try different adjustments to the diffuse. Keeping all layers visible, have the diffuse layer selected in the Layers box, and try one of the Adjustment tools. The ones I use most commonly are Brightness & Contrast and Hue & Saturation.

If you want to do larger recoloration, the tint map can be quite useful to select all areas of a certain component: Open up the DAI tint map, and copy it. Back on the diffuse map, make a new blank layer above the diffuse layer, and paste the tint map into it. The Magic Wand tool in the tools box will select a contiguous area of the same/similar color (the Tolerance scale at the top is used to set how picky it is). Holding Shift and then clicking will grab all areas of the matching color. Once you have a selection in the tint layer, hide the tint layer in the Layers box, and select the diffuse layer. Now any edits you do will only affect that selected area of the diffuse layer. I'm going to use the Color Balance tool to change the cloth shirt to light blue, and the leather straps & pants to brown.

Once you're done with your edits, save the diffuse map as a PDN.

Delete the tint layer if you have it, merge the normal layer onto the diffuse, and then the specular onto the normal/diffuse combined layer. (merging the specular onto the normal and then onto the diffuse will result in a slight color difference)

If you have a transparency layer, we are now going to apply it.

Select the transparency layer in the Layers box, then use Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C to select and copy the entire image. Select the merged diffuse layer in the Layers box, then use Effect, Object, Paste Alpha. Delete the transparency layer.

Save as a .dds. Diffuse maps without transparency should be set to BC1 (Linear, DXT1), while maps with transparency should be BC3 (Linear, DXT5).

Specular Map:

A specular map consists of two layers: the main layer, and a transparency layer. The main layer controls what color is reflected, while the transparency layer controls the shine (more white = more shiny).

The main layer will be an edited version of your opaque diffuse map. (if you still have the diffuse transparency layer from earlier, delete it)

If you haven't done any significant changes to the diffuse, you can copy the green layer from the the DAI specular map as your transparency layer by making a blank layer under your diffuse layer, and pasting the green specular in it.

If you have made large changes to the diffuse, duplicate it, and use the lower layer as the transparency layer.

Turn the bottom/transparency layer to grayscale using the Black and White tool under 'Adjustments'.

Select the top/main layer in the Layers box, and then open the Hue & Saturation tool under 'Adjustments'.

The specular texture should be both darker and less saturated than the diffuse, so reduce them to around 60 and -50, respectively.

If your texture has large metal areas, you may want to exclude them. The DAI specular's blue layer is a metallic mask; you can copy/paste it into another layer and use it to select the metal parts like we did for recoloring above. Ctrl+I inverts your selection. Now you can use the adjustments without affecting the metal.

Save your specular texture as a PDN (separate from your diffuse PDN).

Select the transparency layer, then do Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C to copy it.

Switch back to the main layer, and then do Effects, Object, Paste Alpha.

Delete the transparency layer.

Save your new specular map as a .dds. The compression should again be BC3 (Linear, DXT5).

Tint Map:

If you don't want/need tinting, this will be really easy--don't bother with a tint map, and set the semantic in the .mao to NoTint, or AlphaNoTint if your diffuse has transparency. :p

If you don't want the armor/cloth to tint but you have exposed skin, this will still be pretty easy:

Open up your diffuse map, make a new blank layer above the diffuse, and fill it with black (000000). Hide the black layer, go to your diffuse, and select the skin, either with the magic wand or the lasso select. Invert your selection (Ctrl+I), and fill that with black. Fill your skin with white (for DAO, use FFFFFF. For DA2, start with E5E5E5. The vanilla maps aren't terribly consistent: sometimes they're as light as E4E4E4 or as dark as DBDBDB). Unhide the all-black layer. Save your tint map as a PDN. Copy the transparency layer, and then use Paste Alpha on the all-black layer. Delete the transparency layer. Save as a .dds, with compression BC3 (Linear, DXT5). The semantic in your .mao file should be 'ArmourSkinTint', or 'AlphaArmourSkinTint' if you have transparency.

If you want material tinting, be prepared to love layers. ;) Open up the DAI diffuse map (if you've made a lot of changes to the texture layout, like adding/removing sections, use your diffuse instead).

Make the diffuse grayscale using the Black and White adjustment, and then make two duplicate layers, and four blank layers.

Open up the DAI tint map. If you exported it from DAI with the alpha channel and have transparent areas, make it completely opaque with the Transparency slider in the 'Adjustments' menu.

Make two duplicate layers.

Using Curves or Levels, like we did earlier, change these three layers into red, green, and blue channel layers. The red channel is usually for cloth tinting, and the green and blue channels for leather tinting.

Go back to the DAI specular map, and hide the red and green layers so that only the blue layer is showing. The blue channel in the DAI specular is for metal tinting.

One-by-one, copy each of these tint layers, and paste them into the blank layers you made on the DAI diffuse map. To keep your layers straight, you may want to rename them.

If you haven't seen it already, I highly recommend reading sapphim's and Ottemis' tutorials about textures.

In short, what a tint map does is allow you to easily re-color items using a RGB system (+ skin on the alpha). A tint file (.tnt) holds three colors, one to apply to the tint map red channel, one for the blue, and one for the green. The tint map is overlaid on the diffuse map, and the colors from the tint file essentially painted on. This is why if you look at the base diffuse maps for DAO and DA2 (or at the untinted models in-game), they tend to be rather bland: neutral colors take tints better than bright colors.

What we're going to do is use the tint maps' color channels to select different sections of the diffuse map and make the RBG layers for the tint map.

As you might have realized, we have 4 tint layers, but only need 3.

If making a robe/clothing model for DAO, you can just delete the metal tint layer. Otherwise, the simplest thing to do is combine the two leather layers, or delete one of them entirely. You might want to open up a similar model's tint texture from DAO/DA2 (whichever you're modding for) to see what materials each color layer corresponds to. The tint map will open up mostly or completely transparent - you can turn it opaque with Adjustments, Transparency.

Depending on what kind of model you're texturing, you will probably need to re-color the layers.

I'm going to port this outfit to DA2 as a light/mage armor, which usually seems to use red for the heavier leather/cloth areas, green for lighter leather/cloth, and blue for metallic accents. First thing I do is combine the leather layers by hiding the red tint layer, and use color picker to grab the green color code from the green leather layer (it's 00FF00). Then I fill the blue with green, using the paint bucket. Then I'll double-click on the upper green layer in the Layers box, and set the Blend Mode to 'Screen'. And finally, merge the upper green layer down onto the lower green layer. Now I'll swap the colors of the red and green layers. I already have the color in the Colors box set to green, so I'll unhide the red tint layer, and use paint bucket to fill all the red. (holding Shift and then clicking will fill in all the red at once) In the Colors box, I'll swap the green to red (FF0000). I hide the green cloth tint layer, and fill in the green leather tint layer with red instead.

Now we'll start combining the tint layers with the diffuse layers.

Click and drag the layers in the Layers box (or use the Move Layer Up/Down buttons) so that the layers alternate red/diffuse/green/diffuse/blue/diffuse.

On each of the color tint layers, change the Blend mode to 'Darken'. If you have skin tinting, make another duplicate layer of the diffuse, put it at the bottom, and hide it. We'll come back to it in a bit.

At this point, it's a good idea to save as a PDN, to make it easy to adjust tinting later if necessary.

Then merge each color layer onto the diffuse layer beneath it.

Finally, change the Blend Mode on the red and green layers to 'Additive'.

Then merge the layers into one, starting at the top. Now it should look like a proper tint map! :D

One last thing - if this texture is for armor/clothing, we need deal with skin tinting.

If you don't have visible skin, simply turn the whole thing transparent using the Transparency adjustment.

If you do have visible skin on your textures, unhide that last diffuse layer you made a few steps ago.

Select all the skin with the magic wand tool or lasso select. Invert the selection (Ctrl+I), and fill it with black. Now fill the skin with white (for DAO, use FFFFFF; for DA2, start with E5E5E5). In the layers box, have the skin layer selected, and hit Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C to copy it. Paste it as an alpha on the main layer. Delete the skin layer.

Save your tint map as a .dds, BC3 (Linear, DXT5). The semantic in your .mao should be ArmourSkinTint, or AlphaArmorSkinTint if your diffuse map has transparency.

Here's what my model looks like in Blender, in-game with no tint, and in-game with the red "mercenary" robe tint:

It's kind of shiny for cloth, so I'm probably going to go back to the specular texture and darken the cloth parts, and maybe slightly darken the diffuse texture.

The difference between the untinted and the tinted is also…disappointing, so I also need to brighten the tint map. (there are two ways to do this: either go to the .dds and turn up the saturation on the selected areas that need it, or open up the PDN and turn up the brightness on the individual diffuse layers before you merge them) Alternatively, I could desaturate the diffuse a bit.

But, what I have is a pretty good start. :)

#I haven't processed it in my mind and will need more caffeine to try my hand to it #but maybe MAYBE I won't lose my sanity trying it next time #dao modding #dragon age modding

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tranquilweek · 4 months ago

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