And you Necromancers thought your Runic pet was fearsome.... :haw: Admittedly, the model's animations and scrawny frame aren't in line with those of the T-800, but it's not all that far-fetched!
GRINKLES! You HAVE to share that with me!!!
Adventures In Texture Editing
- Thread starter Grinkles
- Start date
GRINKLES! You HAVE to share that with me!!!
Dark Elves and Wood Elves share 100% identical wireframes even down to the ears with one exception -- the male Dark Elf sports a mullet that the male Wood Elf lacks. The Dark Elf models contain referencing data in global_chr.wld to handle robes, whereas Wood Elves do not. With this in mind, I decided to superimpose the Wood Elf head onto the Dark Elf body in an attempt to see what a non-robe race would look like with full robe functionality (unlike my improvised Troll robe attempt in an earlier post). The only "giveaway" for this trick is the male Wood Elf rocking the Dark Elven mullet. Here are the results:
(Jelly, Jarh?!)
It would have been so easy for the developers at Verant to copy + paste the robe referencing data with very minimal tweaking for all races based on the Human model, and this is almost certainly what was done across the so-called "medium" races that we are used to seeing in robes, yet for whatever reason, Barbarians, Half Elves, and Wood Elves were left out in the cold.
As can be seen from the above screenshots, Wood Elves certainly do not look "wrong" or out of place in robes. In fact, the robed female looks especially graceful. I suppose it simply came down to the inflexible expectations of classic Live; Wood Elves were not to be Enchanters, Magicians, Necromancers, or Wizards, and in Live's early development days, these were the only only four classes ever envisioned or intended to don robes. Hence, what need would there be for adding robe referencing data to, say, the Barbarian models when none of the four "pure caster" classes would ever be accessible to that race in the first place?
Again, if one could access and make sense of the .wld file in question (the best I've come up with is a heaping, unworkable binary mess), expanding the list of robe-enabled races would not be an impossibility for our server...
(Jelly, Jarh?!)
It would have been so easy for the developers at Verant to copy + paste the robe referencing data with very minimal tweaking for all races based on the Human model, and this is almost certainly what was done across the so-called "medium" races that we are used to seeing in robes, yet for whatever reason, Barbarians, Half Elves, and Wood Elves were left out in the cold.
As can be seen from the above screenshots, Wood Elves certainly do not look "wrong" or out of place in robes. In fact, the robed female looks especially graceful. I suppose it simply came down to the inflexible expectations of classic Live; Wood Elves were not to be Enchanters, Magicians, Necromancers, or Wizards, and in Live's early development days, these were the only only four classes ever envisioned or intended to don robes. Hence, what need would there be for adding robe referencing data to, say, the Barbarian models when none of the four "pure caster" classes would ever be accessible to that race in the first place?Again, if one could access and make sense of the .wld file in question (the best I've come up with is a heaping, unworkable binary mess), expanding the list of robe-enabled races would not be an impossibility for our server...
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Well, this is an interesting find! I had intended on waiting to post it until someone else had posted in this thread, but I cannot wait (and I doubt any will mind a double post here).
While perusing through akanon_chr.s3d, the file which handles all the models and textures used in that Live zone, I could not help but notice several scattered texture pieces that I could not place simply by looking at them. They looked similar to a clockwork Gnome in some areas but other pieces bore what lookted like a strange, reddish coat. I say they were scattered because they contained only a mysterious two-letter prefix (cl) rather than the standard three, which meant that they ended up being mixed in with a ton of the male and female clockwork pieces (clm and clf, respectively). For instance, clft0001.bmp, piece one of the foot textures for this mysterious cl model, was alphabetized in with the female clockwork's textures (all of which begin with clf), yet the head, chest, etc. pieces were elsewhere in the listing.
Finally, I gathered all the pieces and noticed they corresponded nearly perfectly to the set for the clockwork Gnome model, which (unsurprisingly) corresponded nearly perfectly to the playable race Gnome model. I had a hunch what the model was intended to be just based on eyeballing the texture pieces, but I had to see it in action, so I went about renaming the pieces from, say, clhe0001.bmp to gnmhe0001.bmp (gnome / male / head region / set 00 / piece 01). Down the line I went, overwriting each vanilla Gnome texture in global_chr.s3d, and when I logged into the game, this is what stared back at me after I eagerly shifted to third-person view:
Look at that! I am certain that this was intended to be used for the curiously lore-deprived King Ak'Anon of Live, but oddly enough (check that P99 screenshot), I already knew that he had never been given such textures on Live. In fact, remember how I just said that this set corresponded "nearly perfectly" to the clockwork and playable Gnome models? In fact, there was a single leftover texture piece which, sadly, I had no way of seeing in action. I could tell from the name, clhe0004.bmp, that it pertained to the head region, and viewing the bitmap showed that it was indeed a very low-resolution crown. Unfortunately, as no such working Gnome-related model has any referencing data to accommodate a crown atop the head, there seems to be no way whatsoever to see the would-be King Ak'Anon in full, gleaming glory.
I then remembered a fun little program called Delphi Zone Converter, which is used to peep into .wld files to render the wireframe of any given zone or model. I opened the program, pointed it to akanon_chr.s3d, and lo and behold, there was indeed a listing using the oddball two-letter prefix cl. Here is what it looks like:
That fixture atop the Gnome's head is where the orphaned crown texture piece would have gone! This is about as far as the resources can take us, so you have to use your imagination beyond this.
So, apparently in the early stages of development, the art team put together this unique model, textures and all, and the developers included King Ak'Anon the NPC in the game, yet the poor king was never assigned his own custom-tailored texture and model! What a shame. In fact, I distinctly remember hearing circa 2000 of a clockwork king in my hometown on Live, running around the zone and eventually through the central clockwork "castle," and then being utterly disappointed to find that not only did he not respond to hails, but he looked like every other humdrum, run-of-the-mill, mass-produced male clockwork whom I had passed by the dozens in my quest to pay respects to the king.
Given that the texture set is complete and the model itself is fully capable of animation (presumably by piggybacking on the global playable Gnome model's animations, which is what standard clockwork Gnomes do), the one thing that seems to hold this model back from working in-game is that he simply has no numerical entry on the huge list of races. Apart from that, everything else is perfectly in place for a working King Ak'Anon.
Why did this mishap occur? Poor communication on the ~1998 dev team, maybe? I have my own suspicion that the ornery two-letter prefix is what might have been the king's downfall, as his texture pieces were all over the place between the standard clockwork textures, and even his wireframe listing looks amiss next to the seventeen other three-letter prefixes for the models used in akanon_chr.wld. Whatever the reason, I'm just glad to have made this little discovery.
While perusing through akanon_chr.s3d, the file which handles all the models and textures used in that Live zone, I could not help but notice several scattered texture pieces that I could not place simply by looking at them. They looked similar to a clockwork Gnome in some areas but other pieces bore what lookted like a strange, reddish coat. I say they were scattered because they contained only a mysterious two-letter prefix (cl) rather than the standard three, which meant that they ended up being mixed in with a ton of the male and female clockwork pieces (clm and clf, respectively). For instance, clft0001.bmp, piece one of the foot textures for this mysterious cl model, was alphabetized in with the female clockwork's textures (all of which begin with clf), yet the head, chest, etc. pieces were elsewhere in the listing.
Finally, I gathered all the pieces and noticed they corresponded nearly perfectly to the set for the clockwork Gnome model, which (unsurprisingly) corresponded nearly perfectly to the playable race Gnome model. I had a hunch what the model was intended to be just based on eyeballing the texture pieces, but I had to see it in action, so I went about renaming the pieces from, say, clhe0001.bmp to gnmhe0001.bmp (gnome / male / head region / set 00 / piece 01). Down the line I went, overwriting each vanilla Gnome texture in global_chr.s3d, and when I logged into the game, this is what stared back at me after I eagerly shifted to third-person view:
Look at that! I am certain that this was intended to be used for the curiously lore-deprived King Ak'Anon of Live, but oddly enough (check that P99 screenshot), I already knew that he had never been given such textures on Live. In fact, remember how I just said that this set corresponded "nearly perfectly" to the clockwork and playable Gnome models? In fact, there was a single leftover texture piece which, sadly, I had no way of seeing in action. I could tell from the name, clhe0004.bmp, that it pertained to the head region, and viewing the bitmap showed that it was indeed a very low-resolution crown. Unfortunately, as no such working Gnome-related model has any referencing data to accommodate a crown atop the head, there seems to be no way whatsoever to see the would-be King Ak'Anon in full, gleaming glory.
I then remembered a fun little program called Delphi Zone Converter, which is used to peep into .wld files to render the wireframe of any given zone or model. I opened the program, pointed it to akanon_chr.s3d, and lo and behold, there was indeed a listing using the oddball two-letter prefix cl. Here is what it looks like:
That fixture atop the Gnome's head is where the orphaned crown texture piece would have gone! This is about as far as the resources can take us, so you have to use your imagination beyond this.
So, apparently in the early stages of development, the art team put together this unique model, textures and all, and the developers included King Ak'Anon the NPC in the game, yet the poor king was never assigned his own custom-tailored texture and model! What a shame.
In fact, I distinctly remember hearing circa 2000 of a clockwork king in my hometown on Live, running around the zone and eventually through the central clockwork "castle," and then being utterly disappointed to find that not only did he not respond to hails, but he looked like every other humdrum, run-of-the-mill, mass-produced male clockwork whom I had passed by the dozens in my quest to pay respects to the king. Given that the texture set is complete and the model itself is fully capable of animation (presumably by piggybacking on the global playable Gnome model's animations, which is what standard clockwork Gnomes do), the one thing that seems to hold this model back from working in-game is that he simply has no numerical entry on the huge list of races. Apart from that, everything else is perfectly in place for a working King Ak'Anon.
Why did this mishap occur? Poor communication on the ~1998 dev team, maybe? I have my own suspicion that the ornery two-letter prefix is what might have been the king's downfall, as his texture pieces were all over the place between the standard clockwork textures, and even his wireframe listing looks amiss next to the seventeen other three-letter prefixes for the models used in akanon_chr.wld. Whatever the reason, I'm just glad to have made this little discovery.
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bignirish88
Dalayan Adventurer
Grinkles that was as thorough as it was awesome! Thanks for explaining how the confusing looking prefixes are broken down. Bring the king to life I say!
Carrying on with the theme of non-robe races wearing robes, I remembered that a few of them do indeed have skirts that can accommodate robe textures. Whereas I transplanted Wood Elf heads onto the Dark Elf models in a previous post, this time around I simply tweaked the robe textures a little to work with these non-robe, skirt-wearing races. The effect on the female Halfling is pleasing and fairly convincing, too:
Unfortunately, the male Barbarian experiment did not turn out as nicely. It does look a bit drafty, especially for a Halas-dweller:
Unfortunately, the male Barbarian experiment did not turn out as nicely. It does look a bit drafty, especially for a Halas-dweller:
Admittedly, I probably could have snapped the poor Barbarian in a more flattering pose (and color, for that matter).
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In case anyone ever wondered what Erudites would look like without their security blankets--uh, I mean hoods:
As you might have guessed, I achieved this by transplanting Erudite heads onto Human bodies. The male was slightly more work as Erudite head textures are only about half the pixel width of human head textures; this is because an Erudite head texture consists only of a face and maybe some bangs or a widow's peak, whereas a Human head texture stretches out to the sides of the face in a full head of hair that wraps around the top, sides, and back of the head. For the Erudite, no such hair is necessary because that area is ordinarily covered up by their trademark hood. I ended up strategically pasting an Erudite face smack-dab in the middle of a black-haired Human head texture, and the effect worked about as well as could be expected.
I must say, that cheering female looks pretty happy to finally let her hair down after all these years! :dance:
Manluas
Dalayan Elder
Talking about names to make one feel young....
That aside: I am glad you posted here because I seriously did not see this gem of a thread until right now. Cool stuff indeed!
After looking back on my Wood Elf-to-Dark Elf experiment above, I wanted to see how well some textures from non-playable models would work on playable ones.
This first experiment is a Half Elf with the textures of a Qeynos Citizen. Everything worked out very well except for the hands initially, which looked pretty bizarre. I reverted just the hands back to the original Half Elf texture and the result was pretty decent. I should also note that the skin tone is about as good as could be expected without doing any recoloring; this texture set would probably not look very good on, say, a Dark Elf unless I were to recolor the visible skin on the chest and neck to match that race's dark features.
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Next in line is a female Dark Elf whose textures have been replaced with those of the female vampire found in mistmoore_chr.s3d (also known as Eldenal's Mansion). I chose to do this because I always wanted to see this vampire stand in a normal posture instead of the hunchbacked pose we ordinarily see her in. I was pleased to find that the texture pieces lined up perfectly despite being designed for a model with a radically different pose to the playable Dark Elf. She even looks pretty cool in a robe!
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Lastly, I was poking through sdpaludal_chr.s3d recently--I've been informed the "sd" stands for "Slaariel does"--and stumbled upon something amusing. This is a "dummy" zone file whose only purpose is to provide custom textures for certain mobs in Marza's The Overgrowth zone. Only a few of the textures in this .s3d are utilized, however. Among these unused ones, I found this:
Slaar humor.... :toot:
This first experiment is a Half Elf with the textures of a Qeynos Citizen. Everything worked out very well except for the hands initially, which looked pretty bizarre. I reverted just the hands back to the original Half Elf texture and the result was pretty decent. I should also note that the skin tone is about as good as could be expected without doing any recoloring; this texture set would probably not look very good on, say, a Dark Elf unless I were to recolor the visible skin on the chest and neck to match that race's dark features.
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Next in line is a female Dark Elf whose textures have been replaced with those of the female vampire found in mistmoore_chr.s3d (also known as Eldenal's Mansion). I chose to do this because I always wanted to see this vampire stand in a normal posture instead of the hunchbacked pose we ordinarily see her in. I was pleased to find that the texture pieces lined up perfectly despite being designed for a model with a radically different pose to the playable Dark Elf. She even looks pretty cool in a robe!
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Lastly, I was poking through sdpaludal_chr.s3d recently--I've been informed the "sd" stands for "Slaariel does"--and stumbled upon something amusing. This is a "dummy" zone file whose only purpose is to provide custom textures for certain mobs in Marza's The Overgrowth zone. Only a few of the textures in this .s3d are utilized, however. Among these unused ones, I found this:
Slaar humor.... :toot:
cian2
Dalayan Master
Daffie
Dalayan Pious Diety
Grinkles, I found this link for a guy that is into EQ texture editing and thought that you may have some interest. I think he took textures that some other guys did in high res. Pretty cool stuff.
This guy likes texture editing
Personally, I really like his project 2 'A Scanner Darkly' type look. The below video showing the textures is truly amazing looking. I don't think it looks cartoony at all, and I would love to be playing with these textures.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iKSbsphJ6c&feature=youtu.be
This guy likes texture editing
Personally, I really like his project 2 'A Scanner Darkly' type look. The below video showing the textures is truly amazing looking. I don't think it looks cartoony at all, and I would love to be playing with these textures.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iKSbsphJ6c&feature=youtu.be
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I would love to have those textures!
Thanks for sharing this cool project from P99! I see that this person references Xevin and Nysus in his opening post. Incidentally, the two of them have come up with some impressive higher-resolution textures for many armor and face textures. You can find their work in this thread among others. Click the pictures in that first post to view them at full resolution, where the subtle improvements are most apparent. Should anyone wish to use them, I can confirm that they are fully compatible with Shards of Dalaya, though they are far from complete.
I cannot say I am a fan of the "cel-shaded" textures myself, but they certainly are unique! Incidentally, it would probably not be all that difficult to do this for virtually any zone of your choosing, though as Psycher, the creator of these nifty textures, points out, "It is entirely too time consuming to re-texture every zone." There are certain presets in digital editing software (both high-end stuff like Photoshop and freeware like Gimp) that can apply a multitude of effects to an image using algorithmic patterns and what not, ranging from fur to stained glass to mosaic to cubism. This means that all of the actual "artistry" is taken care of by the software with just a few clicks, though this leaves the tedious grunt work of handling and sorting the files up to you. Psycher himself mentions having used Vector Magic, though I have no experience with this site/program.
The reason retexturing every last zone is impractical is because a given zone file could have anywhere from a dozen to a few hundred images solely in the zone.s3d file, and this would still not take into account the objects placed in the zone which are not part of the terrain/topography (pots, beds, podiums, torches, and so forth), which are drawn from zone_obj.s3d. Then there is the added aspect of NPCs; non-global ones are drawn from zone_chr.s3d, all of which would need to be modified to create a perfectly uniform texture set in this style.
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Regarding your difficulty in getting them to work, one of the first things you'll come to learn when you delve into texture editing for any EQ client version is that you must first delete the appropriate world texture cache file (.wld.txc) in order to see changes in .s3d files. For example, if you are trying to see the Eastern Plaguelands (East Commonlands) using these cel-shaded textures, you must hunt down ecommons.wld.txc in your install directory. This deletes the world texture cache so that the client will create a new one using the updated/modified ecommons.s3d file. The same process applies to all modified textures--items, NPC models, zones, and so on. In order to see the modified PC model textures, you'll need to repeat this step for the wld.txc files associated with global_chr, global2_chr, global3_chr, global4_chr, and possibly a few others in that set, depending on just how far Psycher ended up going with his upscaled textures.
Of course, this is not an issue if you disable texture caching in the options menu. Texture caches are neither built nor used if this option is disabled, meaning that any and all changes you make to textures will be reflected in the game each time you reload the client with no need to hunt down a pesky .wld.txc file. (As I recall, even simply toggling caching from on to off to on again actually deletes all texture caches, which can serve as a quick fix if you require en masse deletion of cache files; your first time zoning into each zone will be slow for a while, though, as the client builds up a fresh set of caches.) If you elected to play with caching on in the first place, it's probably on for a good reason; personally, my load times approximately double when I deactivate caching.
If you manage to get it working, Daffie, let us know of your success and also how you like it! :dance:
Daffie
Dalayan Pious Diety
Thanks Grinkles. Based on your info, I gave it a small shot tonight since I was working pretty late. I'll work on it more when I have a bit more free time another day this week.
EDIT - I made some of my own changes to the zone files instead and got things to work with SoD. My first attempt didn't look very good, at all. I will put some screen shots up when I have something worth showing
EDIT - I made some of my own changes to the zone files instead and got things to work with SoD. My first attempt didn't look very good, at all. I will put some screen shots up when I have something worth showing
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Daffie
Dalayan Pious Diety
I clearly have some work to do, but I am getting close to Psycher original vision. Lines are not lining up right, and it looks like textures are not lining up correctly. Also, the tops of the trees clearly need reworked. I do like the direction it is heading though. I started in old EC as did the guy who started the project. Check out some of the screen shots.
What do you guys think? (it was night when I took the screen shots.)
What do you guys think? (it was night when I took the screen shots.)
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