Skins

[19Herr_Rapp86]

Does anyone know how to create skins? I play Microsoft Flight Simulator X and for repainting aircraft its as simple as using a program like adobe photoshop or paint.net. Is SHIV skinning as simple? Is there some sort of procedure for creating your own skins? I just want to experiment with maybe some all black paint schemes, or some drawings similar to RR's Kraken, or maybe a conning tower emblem of some kind. Tick marks for ships sunk, etc.

[DrBeast]

Does anyone know how to create skins? I play Microsoft Flight Simulator X and for repainting aircraft its as simple as using a program like adobe photoshop or paint.net. Is SHIV skinning as simple? Is there some sort of procedure for creating your own skins? I just want to experiment with maybe some all black paint schemes, or some drawings similar to RR's Kraken, or maybe a conning tower emblem of some kind. Tick marks for ships sunk, etc.

You'll need a .dds converter, but since you've already worked on FSX skins you should already have one.

The .dds files you can work on are located in Data\Submarine\NSS_Subclass (NSS_Balao, NSS_Gato, etc), and Data\Textures\TNormal\tex.

Meanwhile, you can find a large assortment of submarine skins with conning tower emblems at www.battleflags.us, and if you check out this discontinued thread (http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=122870), you can see how some guys here at subsim used to add kill flags and such.

[19Herr_Rapp86]

Thank you for that info sir! I appreciate that

[19Herr_Rapp86]

Gonna try and put killroy on my conning tower tonight

[19Herr_Rapp86]

Okay. I've downloaded one of the skins to see what files and how it's painted and what not. Hopefully I'll be able to post some screens tonight of a "beta" skin that I'm working on to get some feedback on it.

[19Herr_Rapp86]

Okay. I can make tower emblems, but does anyone know what file to use to change the paint scheme of the boat?

[stanger]

Like DrBeast said, subs textures are in data/submarine/(subname): for example NSS_Gato_T01.dds and NSS_Gato_T02.dds are main tex for early war and late war, conning tower textures are in data\textures\tnormal\tex: NSS_GatoTower_T01 and NSS_GatoTower_T02 (they all have NSS_ in its name).

Hull: NSS_Gato_T01.dds
NSS_Gato_N01.dds - normal map
NSS_Gato_O01.dds - lightmap

The same with conning tower textures, but without normal map - it seems sh4 doesnt use normals for CT.

You wont be touching lightmaps, but the more detail you put on a texture (rust and so on), the better normal map will be generated from it; you can compare normals generated from stock textures with normals from some downloaded sub skin - stock ones are much better. The drawback of stock textures is they are too small, there is a lot of detail on it but its pixelated too much and simply resizing them to 2048x2048 wont do much except eating GPU memory. 2048x2048 is probably best res for sub textures, as the game uses only this one texture for whole hull (unlike sh5), and even if you do 4096x4096 tex the difference in game will be minimal (again, waste of GPU memory).

[19Herr_Rapp86]

Okay. Thank you. I was looking at the wrong folder. Was still in textures for the hull. Found it. Thanks a ton