So You Want To Make A Custom Texture

So You Want To Make A Custom Texture

What You Need

What you'll need for making custom textures for M:PN will be listed here.

- A legal copy of MADNESS: Project Nexus. (NEM won't work on older versions, sorry pirates.)

- Not Enough Madness (If you don't know what this is or how to install it, check out xdefault's guide.)

- NEM Dossier (If you don't know what that is either, also check out xdefault's guide.)

- Unity Assetstudio

- A program that can open and edit .pngs

- A program that can open and edit .obj files.

DOWNLOADS:

Not Enough Madness: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1COW73fbzlPJStjU-nJ1SMbNf8_SdW_Fm

DEM/Dossier: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1o2IyZLc5Psh6reOKZh-Gu7b5eGQU2E8B/view

Unity Assetstudio: https://github.com/Perfare/AssetStudio/releases

Blender: https://www.blender.org/download/

Extracting Game Assets


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Now that you have all of the necessary resources, it's time to get started by extracting some textures from the game. Note, before you do any of this, you MUST have NEM installed on your game. Install it and make sure it's working properly before continuing. The Dossier is also highly recommended, it's not exactly necessary, but it helps a lot.

First, launch Unity Asset Studio.

Don't worry about anything on this screen except the file button. Click the file button and a drop down menu will appear. Press the "load folder" button. When you do this, it will open up your file viewer.

Paste your game directory into the search box that says "folder". Typically your game directory is in C:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Madness Project Nexus 2, but you can also access it by right clicking the game on steam, pressing "properties" and hitting the "browse local files" button.

Once you have pasted this directory, simply hit the "select folder" button. Asset studio will begin reading the contents of this folder, as indicated by the green progress bar on the bottom. It may take a few seconds before it's done.

Once asset studio has read the folder, you will be greeted with this screen:

Don't worry about any of the stuff that says level0, level1, etc. These are not needed. You want to hit the tab that says "asset list" near the top. This is where we will be extracting our assets. For the sake of this guide, we will be extracting the default grunt face texture, as well as the grunt head .obj file.

First, search for your asset. If you don't know the names, feel free to scroll through the assets list and learn them. The asset we're looking for is called char_grunt_head_darkerline, but we can find it by simply typing in "grunt" into the search bar.

We will be extracting both of these files, one is a texture and the other is a mesh. I will show you what to do with these in the next segment. For now, right click one of your selections and hit the "export selected assets" button. Choose a file on your computer to extract these assets into.

Once they have extracted, you're ready to start editing them!

Editing Assets


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Now that we have extracted the assets we need, it's time to begin the editing process. There's a few ways we can approach this.

For textures, you can simply load the texture into your image editing software of choice (for example, Photoshop) and start drawing right away. However, this method requires a lot more trial and error when it comes to getting the texture into the game, so it is not fully recommended for inexperienced modders. I will show you a much easier method of editing textures.

First, you must download and install Blender. If you don't know how to do this, there's plenty of tutorials on youtube, so I won't bother explaining it here. Once you've got Blender up and running, you'll want to hit File > Import > Wavefront (.obj) > And then select the folder where you stored your .obj file for the grunt head. Go ahead and load it.

Once your grunt head is loaded, follow this quick tutorial on how to place your texture onto this grunt's head. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5YNJghc81U

Your blender screen should now look like this. Isn't he pretty?

Now, we will draw on this texture. To do this, select the tab that says "texture paint" near the top of the screen. Once you have selected this tab, you can freely draw on this texture, and it'll even appear on the mesh you loaded! Isn't that neat?

Once you are finished with your texture, it's time to export it. Smiles all around.

To export your texture, simply hit the "save all images" button. This will save your texture as an image in the place where you had originally loaded it from. You may want to change the name of this texture after exporting it in order to avoid conflicts with Vanilla game textures.

Now that your texture is exported, it's time to place it on a character in game!

Putting Your Texture Onto A Custom Character


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Before we begin placing textures onto our character, first we must create them. But before that, we must also place our custom texture into the Dossier's materials folder.

Go to the folder where you have the M:PN Dossier installed.

Select the folder that says 'db', short for database.

Open the folder that says 'new'.

Open the folder that says 'materials'. If this folder does not exist, create it.

Place your custom texture inside. Ensure it is saved as a .PNG.

Now, open up the Dossier program. When you open the Dossier, you will be greeted with this screen:

Press the "Create New Entry" button to get started.

Once the next screen has opened up, press File > New > Character.

For the sake of this guide, my custom character will be named Jimothy. Say hi to Jimothy, everyone.

Anyway, it's time to apply our custom texture. There's also a ton of other stuff you can edit on this statcard, but that is not the purpose of this guide. If you want to know how to make custom characters in a more in depth way, I highly recommend May's guide to modding M:PN.

The tab of interest here is the 'swapmaterials' tab. Click on it, then click the "click to add to list" button near the bottom of the screen. Once that's done, you'll see two new tabs, parts and materials. Select the part you want to add the new material to. In our case, we'll be selecting the head. Once you've selected 'Head' under 'parts', select the materials tab.

On the right side of the screen, you'll see a huge list of materials you can add. In our case, we'll be scrolling down to the very bottom until we see our custom texture. In my case, for the sake of simplicity, I've named my custom texture "JimothyFace".

Once you're done, your swapmaterials tab should look like this. Go ahead and save your custom character by selecting File > Save.

Now that we have a custom character, we need to know where to find him. Remember the 'new' folder stored in DEM's database I mentioned earlier? That's where we'll be finding our custom character. He will be stored in the 'characters' folder. Once you've got him, copy him onto your clipboard.

Now we need to get him into NEM itself, along with his brand new face.

First, go to your M:PN install folder.

Open the game's Data folder.

Then open 'custom stuff'.

Place your custom character into the 'characters' folder.

Place your new texture into the 'materials' folder.

Launch M:PN.

Open up the game's "Playground" mode, and select your custom character from the character select terminal.

It'll be pretty obvious when your custom character is working. What a handsome boy!

In the next section of this guide, I'll be teaching you how to create and use color maps.

Color Maps


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Color maps can be a little confusing, so I thought them worth including in this guide.

For this section of the guide, I'll be using a texture from NEM itself as an example.

This is the face texture for the Cyber Bandit character.

This is the color map for this texture. What does any of that mean?

A color map, in essence, is an image that tells the game to decide what parts of the texture can be colored and what parts cannot.

Tint1 is the main color of the texture, you will want to color this black. The majority of your texture will be colored like this, depending on where you place this color. This will allow you to freely color your character's head using DEM's 'variabletint' tab.

Tint 2 is the accents or highlights, or secondary color. This part of the texture should be colored 'light blue', aka 255, or if you're using hex.

Dark blue is do not color at all, these are parts of the textures that will not receive any colors whatsoever and will retain the color they are in the texture themselves. 123 or 00007B is Dark Blue.

Red is the emissiveness of the color, aka how much of it actually goes through, or how strong the color is on the actual texture itself. 0 is none, 255 is full.

Color maps MUST be saved as .pngs, same as textures, and they must end with _MAP in the filename. For example, the cyberbandit's color map is called Char_Head_CyberBanditDark_MAP.png. This image MUST be placed into NEM's materials folder alongside the texture itself.

That's pretty much it for this guide. If you have any questions, concerns, or complaints, leave them in the comments below.

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2920470538					

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