Creating a head texture from scratch?

[N-DReW25 1,338]

So I have a head model for K2, it works flawlessly as a head but it has one major issue... it totally lacks a texture or any form of reference which would make it difficult for me to 'create' a texture for it.

 

I am asking if it would be at all possible for me to somehow create some sort of "UV Map layout" of the head in a similar fashion to the image of Svosh's collar fix mod down below

Spoiler

 

Or perhaps maybe some sort of program where I can load the head into a model viewing program where I may attempt to create a texture from scratch and use this program to 'view' the texture and the model without launching the game thus giving me more time to experiment with the texture?

Or am I just delusional in even asking this?

[Stormie97 253]

Absolutely!

First, you'll want to UV unwrap the head. I recommend watching this tutorial, it is for Blender but the underlying principles will apply for any 3D software.

Once you have your UV layout nice and flat, you can start the texturing process. There are a few ways to go about this. You can either use real photographs of human faces and manipulate them to fit your UV layout. It's the kind of process that was used a lot for low-poly models from older generations of video games. You can also paint the textures by hand, which is my preferred way. It's not as daunting as it sounds, but I do recommend some sort of graphics tablet to make your life easier. I heavily recommend Substance Painter for this part, you can get it with a 30-days trial here. This software allows you to drag and drop pre-made materials and blend them together using masks. There are a lot of nice tutorials on Youtube for that. For 100% hand-painted textures, 3D-Coat is a nice alternative.

I also recommend making a high-poly version of your model even if it's just the low-poly subdivided a few times, as long as it has the same proportions as the low-poly one. The high-poly will allow you to bake mesh maps such as the normal map, AO map, curvature map, etc. directly in Substance. KoTOR only uses diffuse maps (and technically normal maps, too) but you'll be able to overlay the details of the mesh maps on top of your layers in Substance. Alternatively, I've been playing around with SoMuchDiffuse, which is a plug-in material for Substance painter that directly integrates the detail from the mesh maps in a colour map, perfect for games like KoTOR or Dota, which it was developed for. It's not free however, but it only goes for USD25.

 

[DarthParametric 3,785]

If this is an existing untextured TSL head then it is just leftovers from K1 and you don't need to re-unwrap it. You can easily dump a UV layout image from Max or other 3D apps, but since it presumably already has a texture in K1 you just need to identify which it is. What's the model?

[N-DReW25 1,338]

2 hours ago, DarthParametric said:

If this is an existing untextured TSL head then it is just leftovers from K1 and you don't need to re-unwrap it. You can easily dump a UV layout image from Max or other 3D apps, but since it presumably already has a texture in K1 you just need to identify which it is. What's the model?

The name of the model is "n_dansalvagerh".

 

It resembles Jorran and Goto however it certainly isn't just a carbon copy of those heads unfortunately.

[DarthParametric 3,785]

Ah, that one. Yeah you're out of luck for a texture for that one, but here's the UV template:

 

[N-DReW25 1,338]

On 11/11/2020 at 3:25 AM, DarthParametric said:

Ah, that one. Yeah you're out of luck for a texture for that one, but here's the UV template:

 

Thank you so much for sharing this! I was able to use it to create an 'adequate' texture for the model, just need to add some final touches before I release this abomination into the wild.

 

And thank you @Stormie97 for your interjection, while I didn't use your recommendations this time around as both DP shared what I needed and I used photoshop for the skin BUT after the deep frustration I endured during the skinning process I shall take your tips for when I try doing this again in the future.