Adding vehicles to an existing Skin Mod?

So when I started my first mod, I added all of Ostheer's vehicles. Daunted by the StuG III's horribly messy source file and unsure if I was going to get anywhere, I decided to reduce compile times by removing all but the StuG III, and test my work only on that unit. Now that I have a much better handle on what I'm doing, I would like to add other vehicles as I complete them. I just completed the SdKfz 251 Half-Track and would like to check it in-game. But now I have a question: Is it possible to add vehicles to an existing mod, or do I have to remake it completely?

Side Questions:
1. The Panzer IV and Panther do not appear listed as one of Ostheer's units. Am I meant to select the OKW versions because they use the same model?
2. I notice there are layers for normal maps and bump maps, is there anything I need to do with these or are they just leftovers?

Yes, you can add missing vehicles to a skin mod after you have been working on it. You just have to do it by manually adding the directories, burn settings, etc. I recommend checking out eliw00d's tutorials since he covers all of those manual steps very clearly. Just pay special attention to the structure and naming of the directories. I generally open a second mod in the same session which has the full set of vehicles so I can double check the naming.

tutorial link: http://www.coh2.org/topic/35805/tutorial-setting-up-a-skin-pack

If I am making a skin mod and I know that my goal is to provide a skin for every vehicle, I create the entries for all the vehicles right from the beginning. The first build will take a while, but after that, each build only spends time compiling the specific maps which are newer than the previous build. So you can iterate on one or two maps or vehicles at a time and not incur any real hit in build times for the rest of the vehicles which you're not currently touching.

The two German factions use vehicles from each other. Yes, the same models. Some of the other factions (US, Soviet, Brit) also cross-reference one specific vehicle here and there, but the Germans use quite a few. If you only want to do a skin for one of the two German factions, then you will have to manually add those cross-referenced units from the other. On the builder tool, you need to put them under their own original "armies" directory structure. Many modders who make German skins have simply taken to always making the skin support both factions fully, since it's not that much more work.

The other map types (normal, spec, gloss, alpha) are optional. I believe if you don't explicitly provide them, the skin will use the default ones in the game. You can generally skip them if you're not trying to tweak details in those specific map types. One possible exception is the gloss maps. I find that the default gloss maps (if you don't provide them) are a very different value-wise between the various German vehicles. This means that diffuse maps with similar colors and values can look contrasty in some vehicles and washed out on others, making it difficult to get the same look across all the vehicles. Whether or not this is noticeable will depend on the specific color scheme you are trying to achieve.

Hope this helps.

My skin mod is only for Ostheer, because it would be redundant on OKW as it's too similar to one of theirs. It might be quicker to just build a new mod from scratch than to add every Ostheer unit back in, but I'll have to watch the video and see. Not sure what you mean by "not that much more work", unless I'm doing it wrong. I've been editing each texture individually, but that sentences makes me wonder if I'm doing it the hard way and there's an "apply to all" function?

I'm not an expert by any means, my only other experience with texture editing is on Source, where the bump map and texture (which has the alpha baked in) are separate files (.vtf) and are tied together by the .vmt, which also includes settings like phong. I haven't seen anything related to Alphas, and I'm not familiar with gloss maps nor do I recall seeing any layers labeled as such. I'll have to check out that tutorial and see if it explains any of that.

Thanks for the response.

When I looked at it back when the first new vehicles came out, eliw00d's tutorial did not cover adding new skins to an existing pack. Here's how I did it:

1) Create a new throw-away skin pack that includes the new vehicle(s), so you'll see what file names it uses.

2) Create new skins in your original skin pack's directory, using the filenames found above.

3) Close the mod tools and edit the .mod file with a text editor. Carefully identify the scope of the XML for the last vehicle in the list, copy it, and paste a second copy in. In that new copy, change the vehicle's name (2 places) from what the pasted copy says to what your vehicle's name acually is. (E.g., "hetzer" or "m26_pershing")

4) See below if adding the Pershing to an AEF skin pack.

5) Rebuild and test the skin.

If you added the Pershing, recall that there was no pack for AEF heavy vehicles, so you'll have to create the icon and open the mod in the attribute editor to add an option for heavy vehicles. (IIRC it detects the vehicle weight classes automagically, so I didn't have to add the Pershing there - just clone the ligh or medium info and change whatever is necessary to make it heavy.)

If you have technical questions, post them as a comment under one of my skin packs on Steam. This site is so slow that I very rarely check for new messages anymore, but if you post on Steam you'll probably get a prompt response.

@ F.X. - Whenever I change a skin and rebuild, it rebuilds everything. Very annoying. Am I doing something wrong?

@ F.X. - Whenever I change a skin and rebuild, it rebuilds everything. Very annoying. Am I doing something wrong?

There are two options:

Rebuild - rebuilds the entire mod from scratch, whether or not you changed individual items

Build - updates the mod by only compiling/rendering/baking the specific items you changed since the last build

So most of the time you want "Build". It's even more confusing because there are additional options called "Build All" and "Rebuild All", but those refer to cases when you have more than one mod open at the same time (in separate tabs). The "Build" option works on the current tab/mod, while "Build All" would update whatever was changed in each mod you had open at that time.

This was non-intuitive for me too.

Not sure what you mean by "not that much more work"

Sorry... no, there isn't an "apply all" shortcut or anything like that. I was speaking mainly from my initial impression that the two German factions use a lot of vehicles from each other. So I thought that if you end up having to skin a good number of vehicles from the borrowed faction, then it's not that many more to finish the complete set.

Having just looked at the list of vehicles and the numbers, my impression that each borrows "a lot" is actually way off. I retract that incorrect statement :-)

Cheers.