ElysiumFic

Maybe the answer is to do both. Like, if you download a mod for one hair, there will be two versions inside, one DTX5 (more transparency but better quality when not transparent) and DTX1 (less transparency but poorer quality.) I've already got the DTX5 versions done. I suppose it doesn't matter if I replace them or add to them with DTX1 versions, the effort is going to be the same either way.

I agree. The transparency issue means also a lot of time I'm seeing stuff like this: http://i.imgur.com/UQUqESw.png Ugh! You can see the outline of her scalp INSIDE the hair. *headdesk*

I'm debating whether or not to gradually work on changing my hair mod DLCs in such a way that would eliminate a lot of the transparency issues but would result in a slightly poorer texture quality. This for comparison: http://i.imgur.com/ol9C4zh.jpg One is much more transparent than the other, but if you look carefully around the ends of the hair strands and at the hairline/wispy bit on the forehead, the quality of the the one WITHOUT the transparency issues is more...sketchy? Like looking at something drawn with a ballpoint pen vs. something painted with a high-quality brush. Despite discussing this with some very brilliant modders who know far more about textures than I ever will, it doesn't appear to be an issue that can be fixed. We're going to have to sacrifice quality or put up with intermittent transparency. Here's another view, closeup: http://i.imgur.com/ugYPiAS.jpg And with almost 200 hair mods to redo, it's going to be quite an undertaking. But if there's enough of a demand, I will work on it in my spare time. So, I put the poll before you. Take a moment to answer this quick, one-question poll please.

Trying to put together my Intro outfit replacer DLC for a few popular intro outfits, and I'm getting this glitch on every one: http://i.imgur.com/huRrvks.png Basically when the outfit transitions from "clean" to "dirty" after the explosion, it has this sort of problem until you get control of Shepard and can do a quicksave/quickload. I have seen people mention having this problem. Does anyone know if anyone ever found a cause or solution for it? My Google-Fu is failing me.

Yes, your summation of what I'm going for is pretty accurate, but the character creation thing is just sort of my pie-in-the-sky aspiration that I don't expect to ever happen. I'd be satisfied with one or both of the following goals: 1) eliminate the issue I keep having of hair mods working and then...just not working anymore -- see #2 2) package the hair mods in a more plug-and-play way (put them in a DLC, probably) -- I think this would be an excellent way to eliminate that annoyance the modders over there have with hair mods not working for people 3) eliminate the conflict where the majority of hair mods use Allers' mesh and thus mess up her hair (using the cloning technique) -- this is just a personal pet peeve I will definitely hit up kinkojiro because right now I can't get their custom-textures-in-DLC method to work for me . The textures just aren't applying to the mesh, even though I've done every step on their tutorial. I just have to tamp down my social anxiety again. :/ (Hey, look, a short post!)

Answer me honestly: am I having trouble expressing myself? Sometimes I do. I apparently can't communicate things as clearly as I would like. I've tried to be very clear that this is an issue beyond the usual stuff that can be fixed if someone just reads the instructions and follows them, and that it's not a problem with a specific mod, but that doesn't seem to be getting across, because several people now have assumed the problem is something I've already stated it's not. Am I being unclear on that?

Yeah, the hex coding is likely where I'll fall down. I've come quite a ways teaching myself stuff this past week, but hex coding is not something I click with intuitively the way I do other things The problem with hair modding is that unless there's a way to put it in the character creator or closet for people to select in-game, we're never going to be able to get rid of the step of editing the savegame to change their hair mesh, diff and mask. Definitely, we could swap out the DLC folders for any number of hairstyles, and sometimes not even need to edit the savegame in between (if the hair mods use the same mesh, i.e. ProJessica or CustomCute.) It would be easy, though first I have to just get a DLC hair with texture to work. I haven't yet, the DLC works, because the mesh is there, but the texture isn't no matter how many times I follow the tutorials by AVPen and kinkojiro to put custom textures in a mod. Hell the kinkojiro one is specifically ABOUT hair, so obviously it can be done, I just haven't quite accomplished it yet. I'm sure I'm doing something wrong pointing the .pcc to the .tfc. The problem with that is that it doesn't fix the issue of conflicts with the hundred-some hair mods using the ProJessica mesh. Any time that mesh is used, it's going to mess up Allers hair if she's around in your PT, and conflict with any mods that alter Allers' hairstyle. That's why I really want to figure out how to add new meshes to the PCC. Even if I never figure anything else out with getting it into the character creator or closet or even making it a DLC mod (you did say DLC isn't great for changing stuff relating to Shepard) if I can do that one thing, I could have multiple--maybe even all?--the hair mod meshes in a single PCC file, apply all the textures with a single .tpf, and from that point on, all the user would have to do would be to edit their savegame to switch hairs. Everything else is already there. And it wouldn't mess with Allers hairstyle or anyone elses. I'm almost there. Hell, I've DONE it, I just haven't done it successfully yet. :D

I feel like I'm talking to myself here, but I've been experimenting with this this week and I feel like I'm on the cusp of making a mod that would work and make hair modding in general more plug-and-play and thus idiot-proof for everyone. But I've gone as far as I can without asking for help, and after the way I got shut down last week I'm not feeling like I'd be welcome asking in the ME3Explorer forums. At best, I'd be somewhat-kindly told "go back to the sandbox, kid-modder, this is grown up-modder stuff you can't possibly understand" rather than "okay, you're trying to understand and you've come a long way teaching yourself, let's help you make it that last couple steps." So I guess I'm stuck. :/ ETA: Eh, beat my social anxiety down and went for it.

Okay, so I succeeded in adding custom armors and clothes to a DLC the way you described. Didn't work for hair. The mesh came through but the texture didn't. Might try again in the near future but it was a good first step. Then for shits and giggles I spent the rest of the night trying to use this tutorial to make a PCC with custom hair meshes and textures in it that don't cannibalize other meshes/textures. It was pretty easy and straightforward until I got to Step 5. All I had to do was clone both the mesh and the texture I needed (In other words, do Step 2 twice, once for the mesh and once for the texture.) In theory, if I could get it to work, it would mean all anyone wanting to do to change their hair is tweak the savegame file. But around just before Step 5 is where my understanding of how to do things fell apart. Up until then, it was astonishingly easy. Basically, trying to use one of the disheveled hairs I was trying to get to work originally in this thread: 1) I cloned the HMF_HIR_PROCustom_Cute_MDL mesh and named it HMF_HIR_PROCustom_Frizzy_MDL (because I like naming consistency.) 2) I cloned the HMF_HIR_PROShort_Diff texture (which is what the tpf replaces when you run it through TPF/DSS tools) and named it HMF_HIR_Frizzy_Diff 3) I went into Meshplorer and used the upk from the resource files to apply the proper mesh to HMF_HIR_PROCustom_Frizzy_MDL 4) I went into texplorer and used the dds to try to apply the textures. That's where I ran into my first problem. I got an error saying the texture I was using was in DDS_DXT5 when it needed to be in DXT1. Not sure what the proper process for converting that is; will have to research it some but I haven't had a chance to look it up yet. I tried converting it with Image Engine but that was just a stab in the dark and I'm sure it was the wrong thing to do. But the possibilities with this are lots of fun. The ability to have multiple hairstyles on a pcc and swap them out by just tweaking the savegame file. In my case, if it had worked, the changes would have been BIOG_HMF_HIR_PRO.HMF_HIR_PROCustom_Frizzy_MDL for the hair mesh and BIOG_HMF_HIR_PRO.HMF_HIR_Frizzy_Diff in the texture parameters for Hair_Diff and Hair_Mask. I just don't have quite a firm enough grasp of the process to pull it off, especially since I can't code beyond some very basic xml, my understanding of how to work with all things hex-related is limited to what I can easily mimic reading a tutorial, and I can't edit images. But it's been fun playing with it and hopefully once my brain has had a day or two to process everything I've worked on teaching myself tonight, I'll make some connections or grasp some concepts I'm missing right now. Meanwhile, if anyone wants to play with the file I made, I'll be happy to share it.

LOL Of course, rather than carrying on trying to mod my game I instead sidetracked myself trying to figure out how to make DLC. Yes, I do crack myself up. I don't need to do this but I'm just curious enough to want to try to see if I CAN. Anyway, most of what is on that tutorial you linked makes sense to me, except for the TLK stuff. Which I see from the comments you struggled with yourself at first. I can use the ME3ModManager's Mount.dlc creator to make the mount.dlc file, but in order to do that I need to have the tlk ID which it appears means I need the TLK. Okay, great, there's a tool for that and it's pretty easy to monkey-see/monkey-do with the tlk from other people's mods. YAY! I'm using the Liara Casual Wear (DLC_CON_LIAC) mod because it's nice and tiny. Except...I'm a little fuzzy on how to find the unique number for the ID. Once I get that figured out, assuming I haven't catastrophically screwed anything up, things are going to get FUN!

Hmm okay. I will play and let you know how it works out. :) Thanks so much. While I don't have the skillset to actually make this stuff happen, I always love figuring it out enough to get myself into trouble. :D

Oooh nifty! I will play with this. Thank you! Using gibbed to switch things up was actually something I was thinking of playing with, having one mod installed on CustomCute and another installed on ProJessica. God, life would be so much easier if Ash's hair had the same number of bones as these meshes, because she's dead in my game so no one is using her hair--ugh, that sounded a little grave-robbery and creepy, but you get what I mean. I could use the .upk to change her mesh and apply the texture there and then make the appropriate alteration in Gibbed. Okay, let me stretch my understanding of the process here, pose a few hypotheticals, and you can tell me if I'm completely misunderstanding how things work. Hypothetical #1--Is it possible to plug the already-meshed BIOG_HMF_HIR_PRO.pcc into the basegame CookedPCConsole folder, apply the texture to it, then swap it out for vanilla (not over-writing it, of course) and drop the modded .pcc into the DLC folder and run the AutoTOC? That would prevent having to run the treescan again, right? (Alternatively, if running the treescan was necessary, could I use something like this process to circumvent having to scan the whole darn shebang? I'm assuming if scanning is necessary, it's to build the .tfc file, right?) Hypothetical #2--If I wanted to, say, have four hair mods like I showed you above, two on CustomCute and two on ProJessica, I could mod CustomCute and ProJessica on the same .pcc file, then make two copies of the DLC, one with each version of the file. I'm very interested in the possibilities this presents for doing these hair mods without bodysnatching anyone else's hair, whether permanently via texture edits to the basegame or temporarily via DLC. What would really rock is if one could figure out how to give the casual outfits closet a "choose helmet" option where the selection is a whole array of these hairstyles. If I can figure out how to put just a hair mod in a DLC, I might make DLCs of all these other hair mods floating around (giving the appropriate credit to the authors, of course) and post them here on Nexus to save other souls the issues I've had. What does a DLC require besides the changed files in the CookedPCConsole folder and a TOC.bin? Is it possible to scavenge those elements out of another DLC mod and tweak them? (LOL I tend to jump in with both feet and try to figure out the most elaborate way of doing things--I would never have waited ten months if I knew there was a different way. Of course, this means I spend 5X more time figuring out the learning curve for elaborately modding the game than I do actually playing the game.)

*sigh* After having spent all day at this and having to roll it back again (thankfully not all the way to it's unscanned state) and having spent a week getting to this point, the idea of being able to save most of what I want to do as a DLC is very appealing. Please share your process with me? I'm looking for tutorials now but haven't found any yet. The ones I'm looking at all seem to be "you already know how to make DLC so now let's make them better" type things.

I guess that's probably part of my problem. I want to use the ALOT textures, but only because I'm sort of obsessive and have to have it once I know it's there. I don't actually pay close enough attention to all the scenery and detail to really require them. I should get rid of them and stick with things like HD mods for complexions and clothing. That problem in my last post, with getting the error? I seem to be getting that with most things I install now. I didn't notice it happening until I was in the process of installing the ALOT textures for Shepard and the squad, which is when my computer froze and I had to manually reboot. After that, maybe 1/3-1/2 of textures I tried to install actually were installed. The rest got that error. :/ So I'm reverting to a backup I made after I'd applied the bulk of the ALOT textures and seeing if it will go better. Might end up having to revert to my post-scan backup. If I have to do that, I'm saying f*#@ it and going with the bare minimum of mods I need to make the game what I want it to be. Forget the HD textures for most things.

Hmm this is weird. Watching the debug window as I install a bunch of textures and I'm seeing a lot of (Error: Export object has wrong class or name,) Usually this is after it's saved to a lot of the PCCs it's supposed to save to. Oh well. Not going to worry about it for now. If it turns out I start the game and everyone is a mutant weird thing then I'll worry. ETA: Okay, so since my paragon shep should definitely not have glowing red eyes after installing skin/eye textures, Imma go out on a limb and consider this a problem.