Profile of F.X.

Eliw00d has posted several great video tutorials for how to create various mods, including skins. Search here or google/youtube.

The skin PSD's can be downloaded from Steam, as the "Company of Heroes 2 Tools Data". It's about 20GB for the current set.

Is it possible to use alpha channels with .tga? Has anyone had any luck trying to make certain parts of vehicles invisible?

I have not tried it. However, the .psd files for all the vehicles have an ALPHA top layer group, just like they have one for DIFFUSE, SPECULAR, NORMAL, and GLOSS. The latter 4 are meant to be exported as a separate .tga file for each layer (*_dif.tga, *_spc.tga, etc). I would expect that a custom alpha would follow the same convention. Rather than an alpha channel in the *_dif.tga file, it's most likely going to be a separate *_alp.tga (or whatever 3-letter abbreviation they use) that must also be burned with specific settings.

If you figure it out, do share!

I am working on a Soviet skin mod. I ran into a problem with the IS-2 because whatever I paint looks a bit faded in the game. Far more than any of the other vehicles, so it's making it difficult to balance the maps to get similar results across all of them. So I did a quick test making the _dif.tga texture a solid black on the IS-2 and a couple of other vehicles. This is what I am seeing in the game:



The other vehicles came out as I expected - very close to pure black (not counting spec or the treads). But the IS-2 has an extra layer of detail that I cannot account for. The detail matches exactly what is in the gloss layer from relic's psd file. The range of values in the IS-2's gloss layer doesn't look significantly higher when compared to some of the other vehicles next to it.

So first question - does anyone know if there is some specific quirk to the IS-2 skin maps? And how to get around it?

If not, then does anyone know what the file needs to be named if I want to override the gloss map? _gloss.tga? _gls.tga? Something else? And what burn settings should be used? I see the dif and normal maps use different settings so I imagine it's possible that gloss uses some different setting too. I tried inverting the values in the gloss map, called it _gloss.tga and used the same burn settings as _dif.tga but did not see a difference in the game.

And just out of curiosity, are there any other map types besides diffuse, spec, gloss, and normal?

Thanks in advance.

It should create an icon.png when using the wizard, that you can then edit as you see fit.

Follow up question: can you make a single skin pack that contains both summer and winter skins and have it show two different icons to distinguish them when selecting them in the game? Or is it better to release the summer and winter skins as two separate packs? It doesn't appear to create the winter version automatically by adding the show and snowflake graphic.

Thanks.

Icons are 64x64 .png files.

Ok, got it now. So just for completeness in case anyone else has the same question, if you create a new skin pack with the Mod Builder and specify a path for the icons, then in that directory it expects the file "icon.png" which is 64x64.

Thanks.