QuenchedSteel

Okay, if I can bug you guys for one more question- I've managed to successfully export the tattoos, but I have a problem; the .dds files from the DAI export don't match the face positioning when I import them as-is to DA2. This would seem easy enough to fix - import it into GIMP using the .dds importer, reposition, and export - except that importing it seems to strip any information from the RGB channels that doesn't overlap with the alpha channel, meaning that my tattoos are missing huge chunks. Short of hand-drawing the missing parts in, is there an alternate importer or another trick I could use to stop it from stripping this information? (Or is this something I should be hitting the GIMP forums about? I'd be willing to see about trying this in Photoshop if Photoshop is guaranteed to not result in this issue, but I've already used up my free Photoshop trial and I'd raaather not buy it unless I know for sure.) To show you what I'm talking about- The desired tattoo: The result after importing, repositioning and exporting into DA2: Edit: after some more playing around, I think I figured it out! It looks like they import fine, but when I resize, GIMP recreates the channels and wipes out anything not in the alpha that way. Creating duplicate channels before resizing and resizing/moving those seems to be working so far - I may just make separate tattoos from each one in white instead of doing the alpha layers, though, because it's a bit of a pain to merge the channels later. There's probably a more elegant way to deal with it, but as long as it works I'll deal with some clumsiness. Aside from that I think it should work well. I'm leaving this here in case anyone winds up needing to do this sort of thing, particularly because I imagine a DA2 tattoo -> DAI tattoo conversion may run into the same issue. Thanks again!

.... ohhhhh. Oh my god, I had absolutely no idea that the game was using the alpha channels that way - that makes so much more sense now. I'd only ever seen tattoos from painting my own in white and exporting it using the .dds exportation tool for GIMP. Thank you! I'll need to do some work on getting these repositioned to suit the DA2 face but that makes my life a lot easier.

So let's see if anyone's still lurking in these forums- I'm working on a mod to import all of the DAI tools into DA2 (and maybe DAO if anyone shows interest in that), and figured I'd much rather export them from DAI using DAI Tools than draw every single one by hand. I got DAITools installed fine and scanned the directories okay, but when I go to actors->baseheads->textures->tattoos, all I see are: qhm_tattoo01_mtattoo_dwarf_01tattoo_elf_01tattoo_elf_02tattoo_elf_03tattoo_human_01tattoo_human_02tattoo_mp_loduhm_tattoo01_muhm_tattoo02_m There are definitely more tattoos than this in the game. I was able to export tattoo_human_02 into my DA2 game with a bit of playing around (the exact mapping isn't quite the same) and rather liked the result; I'd very much like to find the rest, but I can't seem to hunt them down anywhere. I even tried completely rescanning my game to see if I could find it, with little luck. Is anyone able to tell me what the issue may be, or point me to an already made export of the tattoo .dds files? (I'd also very much like to find the Hawke blood streak/war paint options for import as well - obviously there's no separate slider, but I imagine I could slap them in as complexions pretty well - but I've yet to find any of those in my hunting either, so if you could help me track those down as well I'd love you forever.)

Aaaaa, success! Thank you both so much! I will need to get Tazpn working at some point, because I'm not sure how to get a character's face (.mor file) into a Blender-usable format except by the method I linked earlier, but that's a subject for more experimentation and another thread. You all rock!

Ah, sorry, I think I explained it poorly. As far as this thread is concerned, I'm not trying to do anything with XNA-Lara; I'm trying to make a hair mod. I made the new hair mesh I wanted and exported it as a .fbx, but I can't get it into the game. When I try to use Tazpn's "FBX->MMH.xml/MSH.xml" option, it doesn't give me a .mao file, just two XML files (the msh.xml one and the mmh.xml one), and when I try to use the XML compiling tools Tazpn has, it doesn't make the .msh file I need at all. I'm saying I think the problem is with Tazpn rather than with my .fbx itself, because when I tried a completely separate thing that also involved using the .msh XML compiler, it also didn't work. I'm not sure where you got DA2 from - I want this for DAO. Basically I have a hair mesh I'm trying to get into DAO and I think it's breaking at the stage where I compile my XML files. I'm trying to figure out how to get the files I need in order to get it into the game, starting with a .fbx McGoy, I'll check out your video when I have more time - I'm just squeaking on after work and before dinner right now. Thanks!

So I couldn't be later to this party if I tried, but I wanted to start poking around with 3d modeling stuff, both in the sense of "exporting models to play around with in XNALara" and in the more immediately relevant sense of "creating that custom hairstyle I'd always kinda wanted for my Tabris Warden" I poked around and found a bunch of tools and eventually managed to export my hairstyle into Blender. I made the changes I wanted, exported it to a .FBX, and pulled up the Tazpn command line tools GUI (which I'm told does have some issues compared to the command line version, but I can't seem to find a single tutorial for the command line version that doesn't just point me back to the GUI, so I'm hoping I can make it work), and... here begins my problems. First off, whenever I use the "FBX->MMH.xml/MSH.xml" option, I don't get any sort of .mao files, which I am getting the impression from some of the other tutorials I've poked around should be a thing. Second of all, whenever I blatantly ignore that warning sign and attempt to compile my .xml files into their relevant game forms, the MMH.xml->MMH conversion seems to go off without a hitch, but the MSH.xml->MSH conversion gives me absolutely nothing. It says at the bottom that it's been successfully exported, but when I go to the appropriate folder, nada, not even junk. And if I blithely ignore THAT, and also decide that .dds files are for losers and I just want to test out my basic model without any of those fancy textures, and try to add it to my Tabris in-game, it, fairly predictably, just completely erases my hair. And since it looks like this forum isn't a total ghost town, I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction here, or at least help me figure out at what step I'm messing up? I have a strong feeling I'm doing something wrong with the GUI, since my attempt to convert my Warden's face for that aforementioned XNALara usage also failed on the .msh creation step when I tried to use this tutorial, but I can try to upload the .fbx file in case some dear and kindhearted soul wouldn't mind taking a look to see if the problem's in the .fbx file itself rather than in the Tazpn GUI. It's over 250kb, though, so I'd rather not upload it if it's not needed. Any help would be sorely, SORELY appreciated.

So I'm a total mod newbie and I'm trying to figure out a way to import the DAI tattoos into DA2. I've found a good mod tutorial for that, but redrawing all the DAI tattoos by hand sounds... unpleasant. Is there a way to just grab the relevant tattoo files and export them as an image to be easy to work with? I'm trying to poke around the various game files on my computer and it's honestly just all greek to me, and I'm not finding a good tutorial.