Tutorial--How to apply paint scheme's with Droid Armors.

[Darkkender]

Original Thread

 

Well this has been along time coming. This will be a multi-part segment breaking down the entire process to make it easy for everybody.

 

PART 1: editing your Baseitems.2da file

 

The first 2 sets of columns you will want to change are "modeltype" and "partenvmap" as these are rather simple. The default value is "0" you want to change this to "1".

 

The next field you can change I believe is more optional. I don't recall there being any difference when I changed them but it just made more sense to have a default value that is not "I_Null". The field I am refering to is the "defaultmodel" field. I changed each line to the default icon for it's item type.

 

Here are a before and after screenie of the above 3 changes.

 

Before

After

 

The final field to change if the "bodyvar" field. The default value is "****". We need to change it to an apropriate "modeltype" column in "appearance.2da"(This will be covered in Part 2 editing appearance.2da). For the purposes of my original mod and this tutorial we will keep it simple I changed the "bodyvar" value too "B" for light droid armor, too "C" for medium droid armor, and "D" for heavy droid armor.

 

You can refer to the following screenshots for these changes to compare.

 

Before

After

 

So it is rather simple for the changes in baseitems.2da. The Next segment will be editing your appearance.2da file. I do hope this will be helpful to anybody planning to make use of this type of mod.

[Darkkender]

PART 2: editing appearance.2da

 

Ok the first part of adjusting and editing the appearance.2da file. The first field we will be changing in there is "racetex" we actually want to set this to the default "****" setting. Some of the droids such as HK have a texture here is why.

 

Here are some screenshots.

Before

After

 

The next field we want to change is "modeltype". The default setting for most droids is "F" some have type "L". However to be able to have new skins we will need to change this to "B" for the setting.

 

The next fields we will change are the model fields:

 

modela

modelb

modelc

modeld

 

there default settings are "****". We need to change this to the name of your droids base model. The name of the model can be found in the "race" column which is the 3rd column in on appearance.2da.

 

Next we change the texture fields attached to these models.

 

texa

texb

texc

texd

 

They are also set to the default "****" setting. We want to change "texa" entry to the name of your model plus a "_" at the end. Example T3's entry would look like this "P_T3M4_". This is a must as this tells the game to use the default skin on the base model without having to rename it.

 

The next texture columns "texb", "texc", & "texd" need only to add a numeric value on so that you can differentiate between the columns. Example I set T3's entries as follows. "texb"=="P_T3M4_02", "texc"=="P_T3M4_03", & "texd"=="P_T3M4_04".

 

Here are some screenshot showing my example:

Before part 1

Before part 2

After part 1

After part 2

 

That's it that is all that must be done to the appearance.2da file. Next how to name your texture files.

 

PART 3: Naming textures.

 

This is so simple there is no screenshots and only requires a couple of lines.

 

In Part 2 we covered setting different names in the "texb", "texc", & "texd". Here we take the names we set here and add a 2 digit numerical value. The easist method is to start at "01". Example we named T3's "texb" entry "P_T3M4_02". So this means we want to name the texture file with the tga exstention "P_T3M4_0201.tga". We follow the same naming conventions for each of the texture types.

 

The next part coming soon changing your UTI files.

[Darkkender]

PART 4: changing your UTI files.

 

Ok this is also relatively simple. First we will compare a droid armor uti to a standard uti. Take notice standard armors have 2 extra fields "body variation" and "texture variation".

 

here are some screenshots :

 

Armor UTI

Droid Armor UTI

 

Ok what we want to do is open the armor UTI file and the Droid armor UTI file side by side. In the Armor UTI file set all of the fields that match the fields in the Droid Armor UTI file to match with the exception of the model variation field. The model variation field must remain "0" in our new droid armor UTI. Next set the body variation and texture variation field to the number that coresponds to the droid armor's model variation field. Example In the pictures following I have shown HK's special droid armor d_hk47_02.uti.

 

Original droid armor UTI

New droid armor UTI

Comparison of differences in the UTI's

 

As you will notice these are in GFF editor form this is due to the bugs still floating around in KOTOR tool's uti editor. You will notice in the "New Droid Armor UTI" file that there is no model variation field. This is because regular armor does not use this field it uses body and texture variation. Which means for the purposes of having droid armors change skins you do not need this field any longer.

[Darkkender]

Originally posted by Lion54

Awsome , I have never seen the "custom .2da" tutorial, but if its as good as this, I will certainly put both to good use.

 

The custom.2da tutorial can be found on This Thread.

 

The process to do this is so simple the thread is more like a jump for joy.