Texture Editing with Photoshop (Neck Seam)
Jan 16, 2020 12:48:14 GMT 10
EvilLord, Night Furious, and 9 more like this
Post by alphaz on Jan 16, 2020 12:48:14 GMT 10
For this guide, I will be taking the face texture from "Claire Bad Cop Volunteer" by Arison_C and blending it to match the body texture of default Claire using Photoshop. This tutorial is about diffuse (color) textures, but this same technique can be used to blend normal maps, ATOS maps, roughness maps (the alpha channel of a RE2 normal map, which makes textures look wet) from the head to the body or vice versa.
Normally, Claire Bad Cop Volunteer has perfect skin that is much paler than default Claire, so just using the Bad Cop Volunteer face texture as the default Claire face texture will make a big obvious neck seam where the body and head textures meet, like below on the left. The guide will show how to go from this to this:
First you will need to extract the default Claire face texture file from your game files. You do this by taking the biggest file in your game directory (re_chunk_000.pak) and dragging + dropping it on RETool (see tutorial). A huge "natives" folder will be created containing all the default game files in it, for your reference. The high-resolution Claire textures can be found in the folder in the below picture:
"pl1000" is Capcom's code for Claire / her body. pl1050 means her head. pl1070 means her hair. It is like this for Ada as well, with Ada's folders being called pl2000, pl2050 and pl2070, respectively.
Regular diffuse / color texture files are called "albm.tex.10" files and can be previewed in Noesis. Here I will find the face texture file for Bad Cop Volunteer ("pl1558_face_albm" because Arison_C names his Claire head files starting with pl1558) within the extracted mod folder, open it using Noesis, and export it as a.DDS file EDIT: I now recommend exporting it as a .TGA file, because DDS files are lossy and you are degrading quality by using it as an intermediate format.
Now, this DDS file can be opened and edited in Photoshop, but only if you install the Intel Texture Works plugin for Photoshop so it can read and write DDS files (download here).
Once Photoshop is able to read DDS files, open the exported DDS face texture file for Claire's default face that you extracted from your game's PAK file using RETool, and open the exported DDS face texture file for Bad Cop Volunteer alongside it. Check "Load Transparency as Alpha Channel" when it asks.
Use the quick-select tool to select her neck as pictured below, then right click and say "Feather". I usually use a radius from 50-150 pixels.
If you cut this feathered selection of her neck out, you will see that it fades out instead of just cuts out, like this:
This fading-in is what allows it to blend so well.
Now, paste the feathered neck in place over the Bad Cop Volunteer neck:
(the eyes will not actually change color to blue, their color is determined by the ALB texture file instead of the ALBM file).
Here is how it looks blended at the neck:
You can also use feather-select to seamlessly copy and paste-in-place different parts of the face like the eyes, nostrils, mouth, hair etc from one face texture to another. The Spot Healing Brush tool is excellent for cleaning up any parts that look bad. You can also often cut + paste-in-place *without* using the feather tool on many parts of the body textures to in order to transfer elements from one skin to another skin.
Now save the texture as a DDS file with these settings:
Before the game can possibly read the new face texture file, it needs to be changed back into a RE2 tex.10 file from a DDS file. So using a HEX editor such as HXD, select the "TEX" header section at the start of any working RE2 face texture file (that has the same filesize as the texture you are trying to modify) and copy+paste it over the "DDS" header that Photoshop saved your modified texture with, so that RE2 will recognize it as a real game file. Like in this picture, copy+paste the highlighted part on the bottom over the highlighted part on the top so that the top part looks like the red text, and save:
Now, create your mod folder inside your mods directory for FluffyModManager and inside create the same "natives/x64/..." file structure as where the Claire default head texture goes (but in sectionroot, not streaming - the "streaming" folder is unnecessary for mods), and rename your modified face texture file so that it has the same name as the default Claire face texture and will thus override her default face texture when you install the mod. Rename like this:
After that, you can just install the mod using FluffyModManager and viola, it will work!
If anyone wants to download this little makeup mod, you can get it here.
And here is the "Goth Style" version listed in the screenshot above, if anyone wants that as well:
Normally, Claire Bad Cop Volunteer has perfect skin that is much paler than default Claire, so just using the Bad Cop Volunteer face texture as the default Claire face texture will make a big obvious neck seam where the body and head textures meet, like below on the left. The guide will show how to go from this to this:
First you will need to extract the default Claire face texture file from your game files. You do this by taking the biggest file in your game directory (re_chunk_000.pak) and dragging + dropping it on RETool (see tutorial). A huge "natives" folder will be created containing all the default game files in it, for your reference. The high-resolution Claire textures can be found in the folder in the below picture:
"pl1000" is Capcom's code for Claire / her body. pl1050 means her head. pl1070 means her hair. It is like this for Ada as well, with Ada's folders being called pl2000, pl2050 and pl2070, respectively.
Regular diffuse / color texture files are called "albm.tex.10" files and can be previewed in Noesis. Here I will find the face texture file for Bad Cop Volunteer ("pl1558_face_albm" because Arison_C names his Claire head files starting with pl1558) within the extracted mod folder, open it using Noesis, and export it as a
Now, this DDS file can be opened and edited in Photoshop, but only if you install the Intel Texture Works plugin for Photoshop so it can read and write DDS files (download here).
Once Photoshop is able to read DDS files, open the exported DDS face texture file for Claire's default face that you extracted from your game's PAK file using RETool, and open the exported DDS face texture file for Bad Cop Volunteer alongside it. Check "Load Transparency as Alpha Channel" when it asks.
Use the quick-select tool to select her neck as pictured below, then right click and say "Feather". I usually use a radius from 50-150 pixels.
If you cut this feathered selection of her neck out, you will see that it fades out instead of just cuts out, like this:
This fading-in is what allows it to blend so well.
Now, paste the feathered neck in place over the Bad Cop Volunteer neck:
(the eyes will not actually change color to blue, their color is determined by the ALB texture file instead of the ALBM file).
Here is how it looks blended at the neck:
You can also use feather-select to seamlessly copy and paste-in-place different parts of the face like the eyes, nostrils, mouth, hair etc from one face texture to another. The Spot Healing Brush tool is excellent for cleaning up any parts that look bad. You can also often cut + paste-in-place *without* using the feather tool on many parts of the body textures to in order to transfer elements from one skin to another skin.
Now save the texture as a DDS file with these settings:
Before the game can possibly read the new face texture file, it needs to be changed back into a RE2 tex.10 file from a DDS file. So using a HEX editor such as HXD, select the "TEX" header section at the start of any working RE2 face texture file (that has the same filesize as the texture you are trying to modify) and copy+paste it over the "DDS" header that Photoshop saved your modified texture with, so that RE2 will recognize it as a real game file. Like in this picture, copy+paste the highlighted part on the bottom over the highlighted part on the top so that the top part looks like the red text, and save:
Now, create your mod folder inside your mods directory for FluffyModManager and inside create the same "natives/x64/..." file structure as where the Claire default head texture goes (but in sectionroot, not streaming - the "streaming" folder is unnecessary for mods), and rename your modified face texture file so that it has the same name as the default Claire face texture and will thus override her default face texture when you install the mod. Rename like this:
After that, you can just install the mod using FluffyModManager and viola, it will work!
If anyone wants to download this little makeup mod, you can get it here.
And here is the "Goth Style" version listed in the screenshot above, if anyone wants that as well:
