DAI Tools Missing Tattoos?

[QuenchedSteel]

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_m

tattoo_dwarf_01

tattoo_elf_01

tattoo_elf_02

tattoo_elf_03

tattoo_human_01

tattoo_human_02

tattoo_mp_lod

uhm_tattoo01_m

uhm_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.)

Edited April 9, 2016 by QuenchedSteel

[nightscrawl]

I can't be entirely sure from your post, but it seems you don't have a full understanding of how the tattoos in these games work.

 

They all work the same way for each DA game.

 

Let's just take tattoo_Elf_01 as an example. These images are DXT5 with an alpha channel, so they have 4 channels total: red, green, blue, and alpha. All of the different tattoos exist on the different channels of a single image and the game calls on each channel to show a particular tattoo. This tattoo file holds six of the tattoos, three "complete" (one for each rgb channel), and three partial (on the alpha channel, paired with each color). You can actually see this in the DAITools texture preview window if you tick/untick the boxes for each channel.

 

You can unlock native DA2 tattoos if you add these lines to the chargenmorphcfg.xml, which you should already have if you're using other CC mods.

    <tattoos>
        <resource name="art\characters\playercharacter\shared\heads\textures\mt_tat_h01_0t"/>
        <resource name="art\characters\playercharacter\shared\heads\textures\mt_tat_h02_0t"/>
        
        <!-- unlocked tattoos -->
        <resource name="art\characters\playercharacter\shared\heads\textures\mt_tat_d01_0t"/>
        <resource name="art\characters\playercharacter\shared\heads\textures\mt_tat_d03_0t"/>
        <resource name="art\characters\playercharacter\shared\heads\textures\mt_tat_d04_0t"/>
        <resource name="art\characters\playercharacter\shared\heads\textures\mt_tat_d05_0t"/>
        <resource name="art\characters\playercharacter\shared\heads\textures\mt_tat_e01_0t"/>
        <resource name="art\characters\playercharacter\shared\heads\textures\mt_tat_e02_0t"/>
        <resource name="art\characters\playercharacter\shared\heads\textures\mt_tat_e03_0t"/>
        <resource name="art\characters\playercharacter\shared\heads\textures\mt_tat_e04_0t"/>
        <resource name="art\characters\playercharacter\shared\heads\textures\mt_tat_pmta_0t"/>
        <resource name="art\characters\playercharacter\shared\heads\textures\mt_tat_pmtb_0t"/>
    </tattoos>

[QuenchedSteel]

.... 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.

[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!

Edited April 10, 2016 by QuenchedSteel