How do paint job mods work?

[inawe]

Could anyone point me to information on how the paint mod system for power armor works? Not from an in-game perspective, but from the perspective of how it works internally and how to make changes to it. Are the paint jobs just overlays on top of the existing textures, or do they replace the textures? Also, could the paint mods be randomly spawned on armors like mods for other armors are (braced, studded, shadowed, etc.)?

 

I would like to extend the paint mods to other armors. I see that something like this has been done already for combat armor, so I'm assuming it is possible for other armors too. I've tried tracing everything through in the CK and in FO4Edit (the keywords, armor addons, mod objects, etc.), but it's not clicking for me, so I must be missing something. If anyone out there has knowledge on this, I would really appreciate discussing it with you so that I can get my head wrapped around it.

 

Thanks,

 

- inawe

[damanding]

You can do it one of two ways, either replace the existing textures, or do standalone paint jobs with new textures and objects in the CK. If you do standalone textures you can always add your new objects to the leveled lists that affect spawns. I suggest using a script to inject into those leveled lists to prevent conflicts with other mods. If you do texture replacers, then whatever leveled lists those items are already in will automatically spawn with your new paint variant.

[inawe]

You can do it one of two ways, either replace the existing textures, or do standalone paint jobs with new textures and objects in the CK. If you do standalone textures you can always add your new objects to the leveled lists that affect spawns. I suggest using a script to inject into those leveled lists to prevent conflicts with other mods. If you do texture replacers, then whatever leveled lists those items are already in will automatically spawn with your new paint variant.

 

You are talking about creating a copy of the armor in the CK using the new texture, correct? I've done that before, but it has limitations, such as not easily being able to remove the paint job to get back to the standard color. What I would actually like to do is have the different paint jobs be mods that you can add and remove from the armor, like the paint jobs for power armors.

[damanding]

I've never really looked at the power armor but I assume the paints are handled as mods. The mods are their own objects in CK, so you don't have to copy the armor, only an existing paint mod to make sure you get the right settings from it.

[xgamer468]

I am not one hundret percent sure if i understand your question correct, do you want to add powerarmor paintjobs (for example military, vaulttec, winter and so on) to normal armors or do you want to seperate the colors from the shaded, BoS and so on mod options from the material section and make them act just as paint?

Neither should be too hard though.