nezroy

blender shouldnt be the problem, the model replaces another stock robe.Replacing the model inherits all of the target model's materials,tex..ect. Atleast thats how i understand it, i could be wrong. Does the robe you are replacing use transparent textures? Transparent textures only work when the default material semantic is set correctly in the MAO (I don't remember the exact setting, just look at the MAO for Morrigan's robe for the right value).

The imported character will be leveled to 18 or whatever the default starting level for Awakening is.

The quiver will automatically refill itself after it uses up those 99 arrows, unless there is a mod conflict with something that has hooked the unequip event without using the EventManager.

LOL!

Really? Your issue with an 11 yr old playing this game is the brief contextually appropriate nudity and consenting mature relationships between adults? I guess the decapitations and impalements and arterial blood spray are all perfectly acceptable then? ... Seriously, US social mores are f'd up. Unless you're just trolling, but anyway. All right, now that I've had a chance to vent, I unfortunately can't actually help you out. I've seen the same request before but, as far as I know, there are no mods that patch up the desire demon or lady of the forest for modesty. That said, it would not be particularly difficult to do, depending on your artistic skill level. Or even if you just wanted to slap some black censor bars on there. Just grab this mod to see exactly which DDS textures need to be changed, and then use the GIMP and the nVidia DDS tools to add more clothing or w/e to those textures, then toss them back into your override dir. This can be done without having to touch the toolset.

The DLC erfs are encrypted, which is why the toolset won't open them. (Well, it WOULD open them if you can provide the correct password/encryption key - it'll even prompt you for that :). The only non-encrypted DLC erfs are in Awakening, AFAIK. We haven't had a toolset DB update since Origins, but at least you can work around that with Awakening content because all of the necessary assets can be extracted from the erfs. EDIT: That said, it is possible to LIST the items in the encrypted ERFs, which is nice because you can usually deduce which resource names go with which DLC content for easy overrides.

You must change the default MAO semantic to "AlphaArmourSkinTint" (at LOD1) and "PunchthroughArmourSkinTintL2" (at LOD2) in order to support transparency on the diffuse map (this from looking at the MAOs for Morrigan's Robe, which is just about the only item I know of that uses diffuse map alpha channel).

If you are just looking to recolor an item for your own use (i.e. not as part of a mod or something else you're building), there's always the Universal Dye Kit.

trickster's gloves: gxa_im_glv_lgt_001.uti sentinel gloves: gxa_im_arm_glv_mas_002.uti

Sorry Tonkiesama, but it's not looking promising. The underwear do actually have tint maps, but there doesn't appear to be any way to SET the tint being used on a creature via scripting (it can be forced to a value in the toolset when setting up a creature, but that doesn't allow for any kind of dynamic use, and doesn't help when it comes to the PC and party members). You could at least get barbarian/leather undies through a simple retexture/override of the nude model skins (which contain the underwear texture). It wouldn't be dynamic but if you are looking for something specific it would work just fine. I'm positive there used to be a mod that added pretty (but not revealing) underwear somewhere around here which is basically doing the same kind of thing, though for the life of me I can't seem to find it again. EDIT: Ah, here it is. Pretty in Pink. Obviously not the barbarian look you are going for, but if you wanted to try your hand at doing textures then that mod would show you exactly which textures need to be changed to update the look of your underwear :)

My first clue was when I got to Ostagar :rolleyes: But in the human game I was playing it was directly added and in the CE origin I started it was added as well and that caused the wild goose chase I was on. Still can't explain why it did that or why in the origin it gave me a level up though. Yeah.. as the author of that thing, I can honestly say that's REALLY WEIRD. I can't even conceive of a way that it would add something to your inventory off the bat. There's not even any code that I could see doing that by accident somehow. And the level up thing... wow, neato. My best guess would be if some of the UDK files didnt get fully installed or if there was an issue with ID range conflicts, maybe the game was unable to figure out what special ability the item is supposed to be mapped to and defaulted back to one of the tome abilities (the ones that add talent points, etc.) So yeah... wery wery interwesting.

Luckily that's part of what I'm doing with the UDK; adding tint maps to all the vanilla items that don't have them. Slowly. As long as the undies use the standard MAO system so I can add a tint map to it, we'll be rocking in our skivvies soon enough...

My toolset does that too. I almost remember seeing a thread about this once but for the life of me I can't seem to track it down. Possibly something about where the .TNT files were located? Or maybe it was necessary to keep the tint GDA IDs in the 1-255 range? Not sure... Anyway, if you are just looking to change the color of something and aren't using this as a self-tutorial thing, may I suggest trying out the Universal Dye Kit. That would let you accomplish a basic tint recolor without having to muck about with the toolset.

I know on 360 there's a bug with it causing the Sentinel Armor Set to display incorrectly (which is a very cool armor set), but AFAIK that doesn't affect the PC version. I do vaguely remember disabling Warden's Keep for some other reason on PC... maybe it was conflicting with one of the early starter armors or a mod or something? I dunno, obviously it wasn't something important enough to even stick in my brain :) EDIT: Oh wait, now I remember. On the PC having Warden's Keep enabled makes the longsword Vigilance look like Starfang. Vigilance has a fairly cool mesh of its own so it just comes down to personal taste there...

Override files will win over .dazip files. I don't know where DAO-Modmanager puts its files specifically so I can't say regarding that one.

Well I can't promise anything, but I have been toying around with the idea of doing a mod to head back into Lothering for quite a while. It always bugged me that Lothering just vanished off the map and there's almost no in-game quest/story around that. My idea revolves more around the theme of returning to Lothering as a completely burned out town, and facing the few surviving refugees as a Grey Warden and having to explain to them why the Wardens "abandoned" them to the dark spawn. Maybe also as a chance to recruit Sten/Leliana if you skipped them the first time. Maybe even adding something to the epilogue about Lothering being rebuilt, etc. This all came about because I have always wanted to have the gear from Leliana's Item Set be attained by Leliana returning to Lothering to recover her personal effects, rather than just purchased off Bodahn. I have done some work on it but it's still kind of up in the air at the moment :)

Wings of Velvet is not using a custom mesh; it is just using the default hm_rob_app mesh from vanilla DAO. You said you did a retex, so whether you need permission there is based on whether you completely redid the texture from scratch or if you just did a recolor of the Wings of Velvet texture. Alternately you could just do a white recolor of the vanilla DAO hm_rob_appb_0 texture and probably get a nearly equivalent look. Also, while others could pack it up for you, no one will be as passionate about your work as you. The ideal scenario is taking on the task yourself. Lots of people here will help you through the process... assuming you can get the toolset installed :)

Hello fellow modders! I have just released a Universal Dye Kit which allows players to select custom dyes to tint their items. In conjunction with my online tint creator, this means the end-user now has complete control over the appearance of their gear. This kit works on ANY item that uses default materials (tier 1 thru 9) and provides a tint map. This post is to encourage authors of custom items to consider using default materials and tint maps for their works in the future so that their items can be dyed by the UDK. I know I have been hesitant to do this in the past on my own items because it means giving up some control over the final appearance. It has also meant that my items had goofy hues based on material scaling and no one could control that. However, now that this tool exists for players to control the tinting, I hope that mod authors will consider taking this route. I know that I will be updating both of my item mods (Warden Shields and Leliana Item Set) to use default materials and tint maps so that they can be tinted by the UDK. Just think, never again will you have to field a request for a darker, lighter, or different color version of your item. Never again will you have to compete with color retexture mods of your items that end up being more popular than your own! :) In support of mod authors I plan to update my online tint creator to allow "saved" tints to be linked (by query string parameters). This way you can design the perfect tint for your item and link to it from your mod page for users to use with the UDK. Or even provide several! The UDK also has an option already to set a "neutral" tint, so that even if you provide a tint map for compatibility, you don't have to provide a custom tint. You can simply encourage users to choose the built-in neutral option to see your texture without any of the scaled material tinting being added in, while still leaving it open to user customization. I'm also open to adding custom materials to the UDK's material table if you have a desire to provide a tint map/allow user tinting, but have a compelling reason that requires your item to use a custom material instead of one of the default materials. And I'd love to hear ideas and feedback from custom mod authors about anything else that might encourage them to support default mats/tint maps in their custom item mods (or even to hear about why you'll never build in support for this mod, as the case may be).

Companies like EA don't become big and rich by shelling out MORE money than the little studios. They do it by being ruthlessly cost effective and cutting out every possible expenditure that doesn't translate into the bottom line. EA looked at the game market and decided that the cost of adding voices for the PC was not going to pay back with sufficiently increased sales; all the BioWare RPG fans were going to buy this game regardless (not to mention the opportunity cost of missing whatever release window they were aiming for). Would it have made for a better game experience? Sure. Do you think EA actually cares about that if it means a smaller profit margin? Dream on.

From the wiki (though in your case I guess it would be the default_paladin.utc if going by the other tutorial) - something to try anyway if you haven't checked it already: MY MODEL IS NOT SHOWING UP WHEN I GOTO MALE ==> HUMAN ==> SHAMAN ==> MAGI * It is very likely you did not EXPORT your default_shaman.utc model * Double check the background file to make sure you are using default_shaman.utc for the template * Try rebooting your computer.

Heh, just glad I could help sort it out. Also, I meant to say this earlier, but your custom texture looks pretty sweet so far; can't wait to see the final version of your armor!

OK, there's definitely an issue with the way the DDS files are being generated. Because I'm not too familiar with Photoshop and its DDS plugin, I can't tell you exactly what to do to fix it for your specific case. However I will explain the issue as best I can and then hopefully you can figure out what you need to do with your textures to fix it. First I have to explain a bit about what the "mipmaps" are because the problem revolves around that. In a DDS texture, the full-size texture is not always the only thing stored in the file. The DDS file can also contain a bunch of mipmaps which are just reduced scale versions of the original texture. So if you have a 512x512 square texture, then the full 512x512 version will be stored in mipmap 1. Mipmap 2 will have a 256x256 version. Mipmap 3 will have a 128x128 version. And so on, cutting the size in half until the last mipmap which just has a 1x1 version. Normally you never see these mipmaps. When you save a DDS file and tell it to automatically generate the mipmaps, it is creating all of those smaller scale versions for you automatically based on the full size texture. The best way to see what I'm talking about is to grab the Windows Texture Viewer tool from NVidia. This tool will let you load and view the DDS files as close to the way the game and DATool sees them as possible. It will tell you what format it is in, how many mipmaps there are, and lets you view each mipmap separately. When you open a DDS in this tool, the status bar along the bottom will show you something like "MipMap: 1/8", which means it is displaying the first of 8 mipmaps in the DDS. You can use the left and right arrow keys to change which mipmap you are looking at within the DDS. (And you can use the up and down arrow keys to go to the previous/next DDS file in the directory). If you use this tool to open your diffuse textures you will see that they are very different. It looks like Photoshop has actually composited the original mipmaps from the DDS into the texture. Probably when you opened the DDS there was an option to "load mipmaps", which typically stores the additional mipmaps as separate layers (at least that's how it works with the GIMP). When you saved this, it looks like Photoshop merged all the layers together into one very wide texture. So instead of a square with just the largest texture, the texture is a big rectangle with progressively smaller versions of itself all laid out side by side (and in this case, the smaller versions are still showing the OLD textures). Further, the big custom texture is getting squished horizontally, which is part of why it shows up incorrectly. Then it's taking that huge rectangular texture and generating mipmaps out of it. It looks like this has happened at least once with the boot and glove diffuse texture and multiple times with the chest armor texture. If that's still confusing, I suggest opening up some of the original diffuse textures with that WTV tool and comparing them to the ones that Photoshop is generating in your case. It should be pretty obvious what is expected and what is going wrong. Now like I said I unfortunately can't say exactly how to fix it in Photoshop. Hopefully you can just get rid of all the extra layer data/loaded mipmaps, since you don't need any of that. And change the default not to load mipmaps when you load the DDS because you never really need them; all you ever want is the largest mipmap/texture to work on/look at, and then the DDS plugin always automatically re-generates the scaled down mipmaps when you save. One other thing I noticed is that the pf_arm_lgtv_0dl2.dds and pf_arm_lgtv_0dl3.dds textures don't actually have your new texture in them. So once you get the issues with the mipmaps etc. figured out for the pf_arm_lgtv_0d.dds texture, then you'll want to scale it down by 1/2 and save it to the _0dl2.dds, and then down by 1/2 again and save it to the _0dl3.dds (and you want the plugin to auto-generate the mipmaps for all of these). The MAO files for the l2 and l3 levels are pointing at the full size texture (pf_arm_lgtv_0d.dds), and you'll want to change these to point at the _0dl2.dds and _0dl3.dds versions. Hopefully that makes sense. If anything is unclear just let me know or PM me and I will try to explain it better.

Can you post the contents of the MAO files for your variants (all 3 LODs) and also could you upload the DDS' somewhere to check out? From what I see so far I can't think of anything else that would be causing issues. DATool doesn't show specular, tint, or normal maps as far as I recall so those shouldn't have any impact to how it looks in DATool. Those things can alter the toolset/game look so a good troubleshooting option for that is to create a blank 256x256 DDS texture that is 50% gray with 50% alpha, save it as something like "flat_normals.dds" (using DXT5). Then create another 256x256 DDS texture that is all black with 0% alpha (fully transparent) and save it as "blank.dds" (using DXT5). You can then set the specular and tint maps to use the blank.dds and the normal map to use the flat_normals.dds in the MAO files for all 3 LODs. That can be a good troubleshooting thing to start with as then you are seeing only the diffuse map in the toolset/in-game without any normal mapping, specular highlights, or skin/material tinting. As for nvdxt.exe, I added some info about using the nvdxt.exe tool to the wiki. It's definitely a bit more complicated (requires using the windows command prompt, which may be new territory) and it's a long shot that it would even help at all. The photoshop plugin should be able to generate correct DDS textures for this (people use it all the time) so I doubt it would really help for this specific problem. Plus if I can get a look at your DDS files I should be able to determine pretty quickly if there is something funky going on with the DDS files or if it is something else entirely.

Try saving the diffuse textures as DXT1. I don't know of any armor diffuse maps that require the alpha channel and it may be causing weirdness. Only the tint/specular maps require DXT3/5. The GDAs look fine, as long as you don't have any other mods that are also trying to use ID 17 for light armor variants that would conflict. It is typical for a mod to not get the high/medium directories created initially. I always have to make them myself. It kinda/sorta looks like it may be trying to use a different mesh (medium/heavy armor?) in your last screenshot, which is definitely odd. Are you sure the mmh/phy files for your variant are pointing at the correct meshes? Were you trying to make any mesh changes? Is that screenshot from DATool or from the toolset? As an aside, I tend to avoid the DDS plugins for photoshop/gimp. I much preferred to save to TGA and then use the command line nvdxt.exe tool to create the DDS maps. I typically got much better looking textures as a result, and it's easier to communicate the necessary options. The toolset comes with nvdxt.exe located in dragon age origins\tools\ResourceBuild\Processors\. For diffuse maps you run "nvdxt.exe -quality_highest -dxt1 -file input.tga -output output.dds". You can also use the "-prescale x y" option to automatically resize the output down to the smaller LOD versions from a single large TGA source. Tint/specular maps use -dxt5 typically instead of -dxt1, and icons require "-u8888 -nomipmap" instead of -dxt1. Ultimately I bundle all this away in a .BAT file, but anyway, total digression there.

You don't need to change any 2da files for a simple re-texture, except possibly item variation if you want to create an entirely new item variant. Just make sure you have copies of the textures in both the high and medium folders; the toolset tends to use medium, game tends to use high, so just keep up-to-date copies in both. Also make sure you have all 3 LODs ... typically the trail end looks like _0d.dds, _0dl2.dds, and _0dl3.dds (sounds like you do already, but make sure to double-check as it's easy to miss one).