Help With Simple Retextures Please :)

[McCarronXLD]

Hello there, I am completely new to modding (not just in Empire) and I have had an itch lately for putting in some custom units to spice things up. I am 99% sure of myself when it comes to editing stats and such thanks to a wonderful guide here on the forums, but despite the guides for retextures, I feel lost.

My intentions are simple. I am not looking to create new objects within textures but rather recolor current textures for custom units and place them within various factions. My first project was going to be, for example, copying the Swedish Life Guard textures and just recoloring them to be Venice's colors and placing them on a custom made unit in DBEditor. I do not have photoshop but I did download GIMP.. I just don't know how to use it and I definitely don't know how to use it for this.

If someone could hold my hand perhaps through creating this one unit I could probably apply it to future creations.

Thanks!

[husserlTW]

Hello there, I am completely new to modding (not just in Empire) and I have had an itch lately for putting in some custom units to spice things up. I am 99% sure of myself when it comes to editing stats and such thanks to a wonderful guide here on the forums, but despite the guides for retextures, I feel lost.

My intentions are simple. I am not looking to create new objects within textures but rather recolor current textures for custom units and place them within various factions. My first project was going to be, for example, copying the Swedish Life Guard textures and just recoloring them to be Venice's colors and placing them on a custom made unit in DBEditor. I do not have photoshop but I did download GIMP.. I just don't know how to use it and I definitely don't know how to use it for this.

If someone could hold my hand perhaps through creating this one unit I could probably apply it to future creations.

Thanks!

It is not possible to tell you how to work with Gimp and I am not "professional" in retexturing but I can provide you some basic info. Unit textures can be found in models.pack/unitmodels. There are three files for every texture, XXXX_diffuse.dds, XXXX_gloss_map.dds and XXXX_normal.dds. Supposing that you have already install dds plugin for Gimp, start by changing the colors you like in XXXX_diffuse.dds. To help you understand what there is in there have open the info card of the unit (ui/units). When you've done with diffuse take the gloss_map and delete everything. New diffuse, blank gloss_map and old normal will be the new textures which you have to place them in a mod.pack file.

I think the tutorial about making a custom unit has infos about that. I should suggest to start from that first. Make a mod.pack with vanilla textures (!!!), test it and if it works then make your new textures. In this way and placing the new texture you will be able to test your changes and see how is it going.

[McCarronXLD]

Thanks a bunch I'll try that

[McCarronXLD]

Grrr.. after trying all night it seems I fail at both creating the unit and creating the texture is there a place where we can perhaps request custom units?