SC2Mapster

I've been working on some Terran texture mods for a project.

Modding the Terran texture is fairly easy: there are lots of straight lines and textures are made up mostly of metal plates so simple modifications aren't difficult.

You can find a great tutorial on applying custom textures to units using the data editor here: http://www.sc2mapster.com/forums/resources/tutorials/20772-data-actor-events-message-texture-select-by-id/#posts

Here are my textures so far (I am mostly concentrating on the Data work at the moment so only a few units are done.

http://imgur.com/a/qP9jI

For those of you not familiar with Photoshop, the graphics work is simple:

• Open up the Previewer window in the editor and have it floating above your 2D Diffuse texture in Photoshop. Looking at the 3D image preview, select which parts of the model you want to recolour and find them on the texture image.

• As you work out which part of texture is applied to the parts you want to alter, scribble with a paintbrush on a new layer in the texture image to remind you which areas you are editing. With my textures I used a bright blue brush for parts I wanted to make blue, and red for parts I wanted to exclude from my overall black mask. This is purely for reference.

• I applied three different techniques to actually re-colour my textures. This is a somewhat slap-dash, but fast and effective method.

1. For parts that were just plain metal and I wanted to colour: (one layer for all)

- Make a new layer.

- Select the area(s) in question (polygonal lasso FTW) and fill with the colour of your choice.

- In the layers window, change the blend mode from Normal to Overlay, this will make your ugly blocks of colour take on the shading below them, colouring your metal.

2. For Parts that were already coloured but I wanted a different colour. (e.g. yellow paint on Terran buildings, Marine visor)

- Go to the background layer (our texture image) and select whichever areas you wish to alter the colour of, copy and paste all of them as you go.

- You should end up with all of your areas as separate layers. Merge the layers that have the same original colours (this will probably be all of them).

- At the top of the screen select Image - Adjustments - Hue/saturation. We want to alter the Hue. Keeping your eye on the live preview of your image, adjust your chosen colour.

((this part can also be done with overlays but I think this technique is better))

Note: Editing emissive textures can also be done very easily with technique 2. Just alter the hue/saturation of the emissive.dds background image or a selected part of it. Making all of the Command Center's lights blue took all of 25 seconds.

3. The black mask.

- Make a new layer, select the whole image and fill with black, giving you a big black square.

- Adjust the opacity in the Layers window to reveal the image below (I recommend 60%). Everything will look a bit too dark bit I'm not finished yet.

- Select the layer used in part 1, the colour overlay. There is a tiny preview image on the left and the Layer name on the right. Right-click on the preview image and select 'Select Pixels'. Now you have a selection of all the bits you coloured with the overlay.

- Keeping you selection open, click on your black mask layer and press delete. Now you will see your coloured areas shine through the black mask.

- Repeat the last two steps with your Layer from part 1, releasing it from the black mask as well.

- You can select other areas that you think shouldn't be masked as well (i.e. the SCV's drill, the Reapers face mask and tubes) and delete them on your black mask layer.

- Don't worry if things look too dark and you can't make out details properly, the Normal and Specular maps will add definition to the texture in-game. Although if you really don't want that matt look, try a black overlay mask with adjusted opacity.

Can you post a map of these? This would be great to preview, maybe even make a melee with it, to make it look cooler

And I thought no-one cared about my humble texture mods, thanks for showing me love. I updated the post because most of it was to do with a data editor issue when duplicating units with reversible morph abilities. I made something resembling a tutorial for this particular method. Maybe I'll make a decent tutorial once I've explored custom textures a bit more. I like the idea of applying custom textures to a melee map, that would be fun. Unfortunately I spend all my time shouting at the Data Editor and crying at the moment. I'm only making custom textures as a break from it's icy, unforgiving grasp. I'll keep updating the gallery and the thread as new textures are made.

Added Barracks and Terran Drop Pod images to the album, nothing too exiting. I'm going to experiment with making ghost Protoss now (they will probably be red). Any advice on making Protoss units seem 'ghostly' ? UPDATE: I played around with Protoss 'Ghosts' and got quite far using tint and opacity actor events. Along with slightly altered textures. I decreased the contrast on the diffuse texture and used the 'dodge' tool on the shadow areas. I then blurred the whole image slightly and added a light pinky-red colour overlay. I'm not happy with the results to be honest. They are permanently cloaked units and the blue cloak texture is making the unit lighter and far less opaque. Consequently I can't balance the HDR multiplier and the opacity to get a nice, shiny but see-through look. Anybody know if I can apply permanent cloak to a unit without the blue cloak texture? (like low graphics in-game) the same diffuse texture, just made opaque. I'll look into it tomowwow http://imgur.com/a/t7lxg