Question about the metalic details in the soldier clothing texture

[cicnos 0]

Hi everyone, i just recently started to mess around with kotor modding, simple stuff tho since curently i'm lacking time, but things will get better. Yesterday i modified my first texture, the initial soldier cloth texture(PM/FBBL01). I used GIMP, went to "image>scale>image size>width2048xheigth2048" (saw it on a tutorial, don't know if it actually helps), and then, noticed that the shiny metal bits of the armor in game were erased in the .tga file, so i did the same for all the other little metal bits of the armor that weren't erased, very happy with the results even if it's barely noticeable (you can see the little shiny highligths in the image below).

My question is: does the intensity of the erase affect the texture in some way? Also, is it the same for every texture in the game? or its a special code stored somewhere in the archives of the game for this specific item? Because there's a lot of shiny armors in the game that have color (like Davik's or Space Suit), so i imagine that is not possible for those tga files to be transparent. Any help will be greatly appreciated it, sorry for my bad english.

[JCarter426 1,235]

That is determined by the texture's alpha channel. Depending on what you did with the texture, you might have saved it without an alpha channel or you might have scaled up the RGB but not the A or some such.

[cicnos 0]

51 minutes ago, JCarter426 said:

That is determined by the texture's alpha channel. Depending on what you did with the texture, you might have saved it without an alpha channel or you might have scaled up the RGB but not the A or some such.

Oh okay, i'll look up more into this hole alpha cannel thing cause im fairly new to this, should of gone to the tutorial section, also i'll look up about scaling textures. I tried erasing parts of the republic armor but instead of adding metalic details it just made it transparent lol so it doesnt work with all textures. Thanks for the reply!

[Effix 542]

If you open PMBBL01 with KotOR Tool you will see "envmaptexture CM_Baremetal" on the bottom left side of the window.
CM_Baremetal is another texture you can find with the KotOR Tool.
The alpha layer will determine how much CM_Baremetal "shines" through.
Pure black = 100% shining through, white = none. So, the edges of the backpack are very shiny/metallic (see below).



I'm not sure how things look in GIMP, since I don't use it.

This one already has this functionality of the alpha layer doing that, in other cases you can add a basic text file with the extension .txi instead of .txt, with the same name as the texture to add this functionality *. In that basic text file you would simply have "envmaptexture CM_Baremetal", it's like an instruction on what to do with the alpha layer.

About Targa (.tga) types (also not sure how it works in GIMP). There's 3 types; the first is just 1 pixel has a color (16 bits/pixel), the middle one (24 bit/pixel) can have a transparency value per pixel next to the color, the third type (32 bits/pixel) has that alpha layer which we need in this case. So in this case you would want to save your reskin as the 3rd type.

* This doesn't always work, sometimes another file says "no, that's not how you behave", but that's a problem for another day.

[cicnos 0]

On 12/5/2020 at 8:06 PM, Effix said:

If you open PMBBL01 with KotOR Tool you will see "envmaptexture CM_Baremetal" on the bottom left side of the window.
CM_Baremetal is another texture you can find with the KotOR Tool.
The alpha layer will determine how much CM_Baremetal "shines" through.
Pure black = 100% shining through, white = none. So, the edges of the backpack are very shiny/metallic (see below).



I'm not sure how things look in GIMP, since I don't use it.

This one already has this functionality of the alpha layer doing that, in other cases you can add a basic text file with the extension .txi instead of .txt, with the same name as the texture to add this functionality *. In that basic text file you would simply have "envmaptexture CM_Baremetal", it's like an instruction on what to do with the alpha layer.

About Targa (.tga) types (also not sure how it works in GIMP). There's 3 types; the first is just 1 pixel has a color (16 bits/pixel), the middle one (24 bit/pixel) can have a transparency value per pixel next to the color, the third type (32 bits/pixel) has that alpha layer which we need in this case. So in this case you would want to save your reskin as the 3rd type.

* This doesn't always work, sometimes another file says "no, that's not how you behave", but that's a problem for another day.

Wow thank you so much! will really help me a lot to understand how textures work in this game, definitly will experiment with  .txis to see how they behave. Wich program do you use for textures? i used gimp because it was used in the tutorial i saw, but could learn another program.

Probably should google more but it's kinda fun to first get in game and see the results of randomly experimenting lol Srry for the late response, had tons of work.

[Effix 542]

I'm using Photoshop, but GIMP should work fine.