[TEC] textures for ships

[sergei]

Look in the SH4/Data/Sea folder, for the folder relating to the ship you want to skin.
In this case NBB_Iowa.
In it you'll find a file called NBB_Iowa_T01, this being the file for the main body of the ship.
Looks something like this



Make a backup of this file, and get your hands on S3D.
In fact, what I would do is just copy the whole NBB_Iowa folder onto my desktop temporarily.
Why do you need S3D? Because of a cool feature it has that lets you see a live preview of your skin change without having to load up SH4.
(I can't believe I made the whole Merchant skinpack without knowing about this! Man it would have saved me so much time!)

Right, let me show you S3D.
Open up the ship DAT into it. (Open it from your copied NBB_Iowa folder on your desktop).
Looks like this.
Click on the Node for the ship, then click on model preview.



Now, click on the 'Enable Diffuse Map' button and voila, a preview of the ship with the tex file enabled.







Right, lets try something a little funky.
I'm going to make some changes to the tex file in GIMP.



I've made what looks like the main hull texture purple, made below the waterline a much stronger red, changed the panel that I assume is used for the superstructure green,and replaced the decking texture.
Re save this, keeping the same file name. S3D shows you the preview with the tex files that's called T01. It calls on the first one. So, if you have a ship with maybe 3 or 4 different tex files, it'll only show you the one called T01.
You are saving this into the copied NBB_Iowa folder on your desktop, aren't you? To make sure you're not overwriting any game files? Good.

To update the image in S3d, close the model preview, then open it again.
And here you have it.



This is typically how I would start to skin a ship. Make bold colour changes to different parts of the tex file, so you can easily see where it gets applied onto the model.
I do this because in a lot of cases, it does not apply certain sections of the tex file to where you would logically assume it goes.

Once you have a good idea of what goes where, you can start editing your tex file properly.

When you are happy with your NBB_Iowa_T01 file, I suggest making it JSGME friendly.
Make a folder, called, oh I don't know, 'My Cool Iowa'.
We want to follow the same folder structure that the game uses, so JSGME puts our file in the right place.
So, in 'My Cool Iowa', we need additional folders and our tex file
Data/Sea/NBB_Iowa/NBB_Iowa_T01.dds



Drop this in your mods folder and enable.
Go to the musem to check out how your work looks in game.



Mmmmm, nice

Now strictly speaking, you don't actually need S3D for any of this. You could just copy out the tex file into a JSGME friendly folder, edit it, enable it, launch SH4, go to the museum, find you're not happy with it, disable it, re-edit the tex file, re-enable it, launch SH4 etc etc etc.
Which is fine if you're only planning on doing one or two ships.
But if you are planning on doing a whole load of them, S3D's preview feature will save you an absolute ton of time.
I've just come off the back of doing a dozen skins with dazzle variants for 17 ships. And only found out about this feature right near the end of it all.
I'm not exaggerating when I say knowing about this this would have saved me literally days, if not weeks, of work.

I would advise getting the skin to being where you are happy with the way it looks in S3D, then enable it and view it in the museum, so you can decide on finishing touches.

Don't know where you'll find the tex files for the turrets and guns, I've never skinned a warship.
But I'm sure someone will pop along shortly to enlighten us

Useful links

S3D
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=119571

GIMP
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/down...o=file&id=1356

Credits: SKWasjer for giving us S3D. A massively useful application. Thanks mate