Recolouring Architectural World Props - Windenburg
Jul 6, 2016 4:58:30 GMT -5
kymscreations likes this
Post by phyre on Jul 6, 2016 4:58:30 GMT -5
Hi there,
In an effort to finally get rid of those horribly over-used timber truss houses in Winderburg I explored the possibility of recolouring all the architectural world props.
However, unlike the other worlds, Windenburg does not use unique models + textures for each architectural world prop. Instead, it uses several generic bottom and top meshes that are invisible in the game. Throughout Windenburg, these different tops and bottoms are mixed and match to create various unique designs from a limited subset of meshes. To these invisible meshes, textures are then applied which make the architectural world props visible.
Below you can see the solid (white) meshes of this "mix-and-match" subset (see figure 1 (red circle) and figure 2). The textures for all of these is transparent (see figure 3). Alternative, unique Windenburg architectural world props conform to the previously used format of including textures with the meshes itself (see figure 2 (black circle)).
The textures for these "mix-an-match" architectural world props can be found in the ClientFullBuild0.package file that comes with EP2.
These image files contain several different textures for one mesh, so that the architectural world props do not only have different 3D designs but also have different appearances (see figure 4, 5 and 6).
In order to recolour these world props, I would have to go through the entire ClientFullBuild0.package file and find all the textures that appear to belong to the same building, replace those, and then hope I did not forget one or two. This is, of course, a herculean task with a very high risk of imperfect work. Especially considering that a lot of these texture files contain nothing more than windows in different colours, or building corners. These are very hard to make out to start with and even tougher to recolour without a proper UV map that can be applied to these meshes in order to test them outside of the game.
However, considering the fact that the game knows which textures need to be applied to which mesh in which location, this information must be somewhere in the game files. My question is thus, is it possible to retrieve this information? Or is this hidden in those obscure .world files? If I could retrieve the sets of images that belong to a single architectural prop more easily, I might considering recolouring them. However, if I have to do everything manually and only go by trial and error, I am not sure this is a task I want to even start considering the time that would cost.
I hope someone can shed some light on whether or not it is possible to locate this information somewhere.
Thanks in advance!
Phyre
In an effort to finally get rid of those horribly over-used timber truss houses in Winderburg I explored the possibility of recolouring all the architectural world props.
However, unlike the other worlds, Windenburg does not use unique models + textures for each architectural world prop. Instead, it uses several generic bottom and top meshes that are invisible in the game. Throughout Windenburg, these different tops and bottoms are mixed and match to create various unique designs from a limited subset of meshes. To these invisible meshes, textures are then applied which make the architectural world props visible.
Below you can see the solid (white) meshes of this "mix-and-match" subset (see figure 1 (red circle) and figure 2). The textures for all of these is transparent (see figure 3). Alternative, unique Windenburg architectural world props conform to the previously used format of including textures with the meshes itself (see figure 2 (black circle)).
The textures for these "mix-an-match" architectural world props can be found in the ClientFullBuild0.package file that comes with EP2.
These image files contain several different textures for one mesh, so that the architectural world props do not only have different 3D designs but also have different appearances (see figure 4, 5 and 6).
In order to recolour these world props, I would have to go through the entire ClientFullBuild0.package file and find all the textures that appear to belong to the same building, replace those, and then hope I did not forget one or two. This is, of course, a herculean task with a very high risk of imperfect work. Especially considering that a lot of these texture files contain nothing more than windows in different colours, or building corners. These are very hard to make out to start with and even tougher to recolour without a proper UV map that can be applied to these meshes in order to test them outside of the game.
However, considering the fact that the game knows which textures need to be applied to which mesh in which location, this information must be somewhere in the game files. My question is thus, is it possible to retrieve this information? Or is this hidden in those obscure .world files? If I could retrieve the sets of images that belong to a single architectural prop more easily, I might considering recolouring them. However, if I have to do everything manually and only go by trial and error, I am not sure this is a task I want to even start considering the time that would cost.
I hope someone can shed some light on whether or not it is possible to locate this information somewhere.
Thanks in advance!
Phyre
