Skinning question

[Compans57]

I'd like to have a go at doing some sub and ship skins. I was quite well known a few years ago mainly for my weathered skins for the game IL2 Sturmovik.

Can anyone help me with files, tools needed beyond photoshop for extraction and are there any templates?

Thanks,

Comp

[kapuhy]

Hi Compans57,

I'm not familiar with Photoshop, but assuming it can export files to .dds format, you won't need any other software for editing textures. What you'll need for viewing/adding/removing textures to in-game models are:

GoblinEditorApp - it is in your Silent Hunter game folder.
TDW's GR2 Editor. If you are using TWoS megamod, you will find it in data/applications folder. If not, check this post for download link.

Basics of how SH5 textures work:

- Native format of SH5 stock ship models is .gr2, although if you are using TWoS you will find many ships in .dat format from older SH games. These are supported by SH5 but lack some features. What I write below applies to .gr2 ships.

- All textures are in .dds format, with BC3/DXT5 compression

- Naming convention of textures in stock ships (X being the texture number):

Texturename_T0X.dds : RGB channels are diffuse texture, and alpha channel is used for specular map.
Texturename_N0X.dds : Bump map. In Gimp this can be easily created from grayscaled diffuse texture by normalmap plugin, no idea how Photoshop handles it.
Texturename_AO0X.dds : Ambient occlusion map. Besides ambient occlusion, it's also used for things like rust, leaking, dirt on hulls, and for camouflage patterns, in short - anything that cannot be painted on diffuse texture due to diffuse texture being shared by other ships and reused along the ships hull.

T0X and N0X textures are shared between many ships, and you'll find them in data/textures/tnormal/tex folder
AO0X textures are found in Sea folder within folder of each ship. These are ship-specific.

- If you just want to replace one skin with another, you can simply edit and replace the file (keep in mind that except for AO, textures are shared by other models though). Use GoblinEditorApp to view the results (faster than launching game each time).

- If you want to make new texture, or make a material use multiple textures randomly, you'll need GR2 Editor. There, you can change texture paths assigned to materials, add new textures or delete unused ones (careful though - back up everything religiously as GR2 Editor is very unforgiving app and can make model corrupt causing it to CTD game. Expecially take care when deleting anything).

- Some materials are configured to use multiple textures (you'll see in ship folders several AO texture files for example). This allows for a ship to have different skin on different encounters, increasing variety. It has some limitations though:

For it to work, material must (this can be checked / edited in GR2 Editor) be named cfg#TXRName (where "Name" can be whatever you wish). This tells game to refer to ships cfg file for texture selection.
Alternative textures will not work if another ship of the same type is in the scene. So, if you have three different camouflages for a warship and player encounters convoy with three such ships - they will all "choose" the same camouflage pattern.
LOD versions of game models do not seem to support alternative textures. This leads to sudden colour changes when camera moves to/away from a ship.

[Compans57]

Thanks very much Kapuhi. I’ll look into all of that. I actually use paintshop pro.

Cheers!

Comp.

[gap]

kapuhy's answers have been pretty exhaustive, and there is not much I can add but a few estra tips.

There is a dds plugin for Photoshop, so yes you can export game-ready textures from it. The plugin support various levels of color depth and compression as well as mip-map levels. The compression formats more commonly used in game are DXT1 and DXT5, but since you are no new to game texturing, you are probably already familiar with the different DDS export settings and their pro's/con's

The same Photoshop plugin also includes a tool converting height maps into normal maps. There is a tutoria by danlisa here on subsim which explains how to use the said NVidia tool. It was written for SH4, but most of the information it contains applies to SH5 as well (except for the blue/grees channel swap, which is not required for SH5).

There is another little useful tool called Njob that I use for converting diffuse maps into height maps, and height maps and normal maps into each other. It is very easy to use and it does his job decently but if memory serves me well, the normal maps it generates are inverted (i.e. it treat darker areas in height maps as bumps and lighter areas as indents) so you better invert height maps before feeding them in the program, or you invert the green channel in the generated normal map.

One last tip. As said by kapuhy, many SH5 units use multiple diffuse textures and/or they share the same diffuse texture(s) with other ship. Editing one of the shared textures for one ship will probably affect negatively other ships. Fortunately there is a workaround to avoid that: after reworking a diffuse texture you can save it adding a suffix to its name. You can force a specific ship to use the recently created texture, by specifying the chosen prefix preceded by an asterisk (*) and followed by the texture file extension as TextureName in any roster entry of that ship. A good example of this trick being used is stock game is the Rawalpindi armed merchant cruiser, whose cfg file in the British roster looks like this:

[Texture 1]
TextureName=*mil.dds
LightmapTextureName=data\Sea\NAMC_Rawalpindi\NAMC_Rawalpindi_AO01.dds
NormalmapTextureName=
StartDate=19390101
EndDate=19461231
Frequency=1

[Compans57]

Thanks mate! Very useful.

Comp

[Compans57]

Thanks Gap. Actually it's been a while since I did any skinning and bump maps etc weren't standard fare at the time. So the weathering etc I did was all painted in one image. Most of this was pre-high res too. I think the following images were all 512X512 IIRC. I might need some help with all the overlays you mentioned.

These images are all from IL2 Forgotten Battles. Around 2006 I think. I also designed the landscape textures in the 3rd shot. They probably look somewhat dated but I think they hold up. I love doing weathered work.

I'm keen to start this kind of stuff again. SH5 is great and I'm thoroughly enjoying TWOs.

[gap]

Wow Compans57

Those are indeed some nice aircraft skins!

Air units are actually easier to be re-skinned than ships as they only use one diffuse texture and one specular map. Just to make things clearer, the diffuse map is the actual skin. Specular maps are used for simulating the 'shininess' of an object i.e. how much they will reflect direct light.

[880-5]

My respect for the work of the modders

[Demon777]

Hi,

Looking forward to see your skins. I remember your great job in IL-2!

If you wish to begin with air units for SH5, I suggest to look at Wellington bomber (ALB_Wellington folder: silent hunter5/data/Air), because as you see now it has quite an 'ugly' look (this is not vanilla unit, it was added with TWOS)

[Compans57]

Originally Posted by Demon777

Hi,

Looking forward to see your skins. I remember your great job in IL-2!

If you wish to begin with air units for SH5, I suggest to look at Wellington bomber (ALB_Wellington folder: silent hunter5/data/Air), because as you see now it has quite an 'ugly' look (this is not vanilla unit, it was added with TWOS)

Thank you Demon.

I'm more interested in doing subs right now but maybe later on.