Help with custom textures

**ben5010** · December 26, 2010, 11:10 AM

Hello. I want to reskin the British coldstream guard unit to have a better texture. I've tweaked it so it's the best line unit in the game, so I feel it should have a better skin than the ugly vanilla one.

I was thinking of using one of Sir Digby Chicken Caesar's excellent textures. His texture is specific to the British faction, but currently the coldstream guards use the generic euro_superior_line_infantry texture, with British red splashed onto their coats.
So I downloaded Sir DCC's British guard texture, renamed the texture files, and added them to my pack. Then I went to the units_stats_land table and changed the texture of the coldstream guards to match the name of the texture files I used (this table is in the same pack that I put the texture into). I launched the game and tried to play a battle with the coldstream guards, but no dice, the game crashed.

How do you get a vanilla game unit to use a custom texture, which has no pre-existing "framework"? What I mean by this is that the coldstream guards are coded to use a non-faction specific skin (shared by other infantry units), but i want them to use this new skin, specific to them only.
Can anybody help me?
Thanks

**Geronimo2006** · January 01, 2011, 06:02 AM

Textures are linked to units in the warscape_animated_lod tables and the warscape_animated_tables in DB Editor. By changing the name you have left the unit with no skin at all as the game can no longer find the skin the unit is linked to. That is my guess. A loading-screen crash usually happens when a texture for a unit to take part in the battle is missing.

**ben5010** · January 03, 2011, 08:35 PM

Thanks for the help. Sometime (hopefully soon) I will get around to trying this to see if it works.

**Toombs** · January 18, 2011, 01:03 PM

Hey sounds like cool stuff, I'm always up for a good retexture. Add me on steam: fulltimeevil . And we can get this rolling. Look forward to the final product

**ben5010** · January 19, 2011, 07:02 PM

Well, I followed Geronimo's advice, and it worked sort of. There was no ctd with the coldstream guards and the texture even looked okay...aside form the bright white papery tricorn hats and the pupil-lacking eyes. That can't be right. Oh well. I will keep on trying. Thanks for the help Geronimo and I would +rep you if I could.

**Geronimo2006** · January 19, 2011, 11:38 PM

Originally Posted by ben5010

Well, I followed Geronimo's advice, and it worked sort of. There was no ctd with the coldstream guards and the texture even looked okay...aside form the bright white papery tricorn hats and the pupil-lacking eyes. That can't be right. Oh well. I will keep on trying. Thanks for the help Geronimo and I would +rep you if I could.

Sounds like you might have the warscape_lod1, 2, 3, 4 etc. entries in the wrong way around. I ran into this problem when I first started making mods a long time ago, and it fixed itself when I corrected the entries. Make sure your warscape_animated_lod table entries for your unit model are as below in the third column, with the lod1 value being 5, the lod2 value being 10, the lod3 value being 15 and the lod4 value being 0:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

If that doesn't fix it then you might have matched the texture to the wrong model. The second column in this table is the path to the model you are using, while the 4th column is the texture that is matched to the model.

Another possibility is that you mistakenly deleted the pupil textures from the diffuse file or pasted over it.

**ben5010** · January 23, 2011, 08:40 PM

Nope, I've got all that correct and didn't mess with the texture at all. I could be that I am using the superior line infantry weighted mesh with it, but then that doesn't really explain why only the colors are distorted.
Perhaps off topic, but what is the significance of the numbers in the first column in the warscape animated lod table?

To add, I have successfully managed to substitute the skin blue/yellow for the Netherlands Marinier Corps from the AUM for a Dutch-ized version of the spanish guardias de infanteria skin. So I've got the fundamentals down, but it is still a complicated process.

Re Toombs: haha thanks but it's not my skin I'm working with. Only Sir DCC's stuff

**ben5010** · January 23, 2011, 08:53 PM

Well, I finally figured it out. It's all in the weighted variant meshy thing. Once I set the texture to have the guard mesh things worked swimmingly.

I guess the texture has to match the mesh it was made for.
Anyway, thanks for the help geronimo. I now have some quite valuable experience in texture changing field.

**Geronimo2006** · February 06, 2011, 06:40 PM

Lod 1 is the level of detail close up, while 2, 3 and 4 are for further away. Glad to see you're getting the hang of things.

**ben5010** · February 06, 2011, 09:42 PM

Just one more question, if that is okay. Have you had any success making the lod 1, 2 ,and 3 lines use the same file? It would be nice to get rid of the cnages to soldiers' uniforms everytime you move 5 feet away from them.