MOD:JC's Shader Fixes for K2

[JCarter426 1,214]

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JC's Shader Fixes for K2

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When they made K2, Obsidian removed several shaders from characters that had them in K1. I suspect this was part of a systematic effort to improve performance on the Xbox. There's no such technical limitation on modern computers, however. But the perplexing thing about it is the shaders weren't just removed, but for some characters you can't even give them shaders in the conventional way that would always work in K1. There is another way, oen that other mods have used already, but I think it's a bit of a hack method. Even though I've used it myself for years, I never released my work as a mod because the installation process is less than ideal. Recent insights, however, have allowed me to finally understand why the heck this happens and come up with an alternative solution that doesn't require mucking around in appearance.2da.

This mod alters the appearance of certain characters in the game, giving them shaders, making them nice and shiny. The affected characters are Mandalorians, T3-M4, and all the HK units (HK-47, the 50s, and the 51s).

For the Mandalorians, I can safely say their shaders are just straight up missing. They're shiny in K1 and not in K2. In K1 they only ever appear in small numbers, but in K2 there's a whole camp of them on Dxun - I think that was the problem for the poor little Xbox. I've made them shiny again, though I didn't just copy the alpha channel from K1 as I didn't particularly care for it. It looked like there was too much contrast to me, with some parts having no shader and then parts right next to them were totally shiny. I tried to make mine subtler so all the metal pieces have a mild shine, with none on the body glove.

I've also fixed some other issues present on the Mandalorian model. One of the finger bones was visible and there were some smoothing and weighting errors. The HK-51s aren't even in the original release of the game. But HK-47 is quite shiny in K1 and I think the later models ought to be as well. While the 51s don't appear and the 50s only appear in small numbers, there was supposed to be an entire factory of them late in the game, so - I think they had their shininess removed for the same reason as the Mandalorians.

For the HK-51s, I've also fixed some texture issues around the photoreceptors.

HK-47 himself is not shiny in K2 because he's worn down and rusted all over. I don't think a technical reason was responsible for the lack of shaders here; he probably looks as the designers intended. But I thought he could do with a little bit, a hint of his former glory. T3's situation was similar. For both of them, I tried to apply shiny to the parts that look like they're still working, with the amount on all the rust and banged up bits reduced to almost nothing.

I've separated them into different folders in case you only want to use some of them.

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• Submitter
  JCarter426
• Submitted
  06/18/2018
• Category
  Mods
• TSLRCM Compatible
  Yes

 

[ebmar 893]

Greetings,

so there's HK model [P_HK47.MDL/MDX] included with the archive and there's no documentation of what it's doing there. Can you help elaborate on that? Thanks for considering this.

[JCarter426 1,214]

Shaders are loaded from the texture that is present on the model by default. The HK model previously had no texture on it at all, unlike the one in K1, so the model has been edited to apply it.