EDITING TEXTURES TUTORIAL
what will you need:
1 FrostyBits texture converter; to extract .dds from .itexture
2 Any dds editor; to edit the texture i will be using photoshop with a dds plug-in.
3 Any hexadecimal editor; to restore the header of the texture so the game can read it ( i will use HxD hexeditor)
4 ddsviewew to view textures (optional)
1- Find the texture, back up, and extract:
Once you find your desired texture, make a back up, (you will need this back up later) and extract it with FrostyBits, just by drag and drop the texture to the FrostyBits windows. (don't do this process with the original texture and make sure you extract the back up texture in a working folder, not the game folder)
You will see this windows with the info of your texture, my texture is housebackdrop-1.itexture.
after you extracted the texture with texcon your texture file has changed, now it is a dds.
2- 1st Renaming
rename the file to dds (change the extention from .itexture to .dds)
3- Importing:
open the file with your dds editor to start editing.
use this settings to import
you have two choises now, you can start editing over this file, or copy the content of the texture to put it in a big texture (housebackdrop-1.itexture is a file of 256x512, really small size).
this is the ingame quality:
I am going to take the long road because i want a big texture (more quality); i am going to use a 2048x4096 texture size, keep in mind that i have the same pixel ratio that the housebackdrop-1; so a texture of 2048x2048 or 4096x2048 is not going to work, it has to be the same ratio that the texture to edit.
This is the original texture
This is the big edited texture, i took this texture from i don't remember what. but you get the idea, just find a texture that match your original texture pixel ratio to use as a base, and paste the original content here to start editing; keep reading to understand more.
3-a Editing the texture
since i want a big texture, i will have to put the content of the original texture (the small) to the big texture.
to do this you will have to find a big texture to use as a template, sorry i have no shortcut to do this, i just start to open textures based on the size and cross my fingers to find the desired one, in this case i needed a texture that was vertically twice bigger than horizontally, because the original was 256x512 (verticalXhorizontal).
Once you find the big texture make step 1, 2 and 3 with this big texture.
Now that you have the two textures opened, transfer the content of the small to the big one.
Go to the small texture and select all, copy,
now go to the big texture and paste,
then resize but do it proportionally, so the small texture fill all the space from the big texture, and do not go out of the edges, edges are important because the game will automatically join this edges to create walls and new houses.
3-b Editing the texture
In this case i will be creating a texture from scratch, so i will be creating the walls, then the windows, then the dors, and making sure that the texture can be automatically joined to create new houses, to do this you have to keep an eye on edges and how texture can blend itself, to avoid this bug:
4a- saving the texture
to save the texture you have to check what dxt format the texture that you used as a template is, so open the extracted texture with any hexadecimal editor, in my case i have to open the big texture i used as a template since i will be saving that archive not the small one, i use the small one only as a guide to know where to put the windows, doors, etc.
As you can see, the texture is a dds file with DXT5 format.
4b- Flatten the image if needed, then if you like change the image mode to 32bits/channel (optional). then press save as
chose dds, and select DXT5 ARGB 8bpp interplorated alpha.
leave all the other options as default and press save
NOTE: when you save a dxt1 image use DXT1 RGB 4 bpp | no alpha. Because if you use 1 bit alpha the image will take several minutes to save and there is no visual diference.
5- Changeing the header of the file:
now you need to open with the hexeditor the original unmodified texture and the modificated texture.
Copy the header of the unmodified texture, like in the image below and paste it to the header of the edited texture then save.
paste it to the header of the edited texture then save.
6- 2nd Rename:
Rename the image from .dds to .itexture, paste it to where it belongs, archive the map file with mod tools, and enjoy the naked ladyes on this great, now even greater game.
UPDATE:
Thanks to graspingcp we found this error
after he did all the steps this was the resulting texture:
this happens because sometimes you have to copy the header in a diferent way as usual
so this is the original header and how to copy, note that i copy one bit less
and this is where/how to paste
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Two new textures from graspingcp:
and
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some jet texture
just by editing the texture you can have dinamic flags of anything you like.
real textures test
The helipad without the"H" to use as floor
Some jet texture and the huge death star
Real houses
Thanks to:
Danilius
Badbaubau
Bochi
and the authors of the tools used in this tutorial.