Wig Texture Request: Hair 39 from the Wig Pack

[Trapp]

You know them. You love them. Wigs. The one item that was never cool enough to port as regular ass hair can be downloaded here:

And thanks to @Codename-74, we have H5 retextures of some of them, right here:

 

H O W E V E R.

There is one wig that has gotten no love at all. One that looks so damn good on Vanilla and H4 graphics... But looks like translucent garbage on H5:

Is it possible for someone to optimize this wig for H5 so it looks halfway decent, please? Thanks in advance!

[Trapp]

Bumping until somebody actually reads this!

[demonv1]

The activemod textures don't show up for me ingame. I downloaded that wigs retexture and put them in activemod folder but nothing in-game. Only the addon wigs.

Anyone else having this problem or just me?

[aardy]

1 hour ago, demonv1 said:

The activemod textures don't show up for me ingame. I downloaded that wigs retexture and put them in activemod folder but nothing in-game. Only the addon wigs.

Anyone else having this problem or just me?

Yeah... the wigs sets I posted are the original packages and many of the wigs are not Activemod enabled in VX.

In my setup I've combined the 2 sets (and removed many unwanted ones), so I can't give you a universal solution - BUT if you add the attached file to your wigs Scripts folder you will see the entries I've created to enable Activemod.  You will need to add your own entries to enable your complete set to work, but that shouldn't be too difficult if you follow the format in the file.

 

Scripts.zip

[Trapp]

1 hour ago, aardy said:

Yeah... the wigs sets I posted are the original packages and many of the wigs are not Activemod enabled in VX.

In my setup I've combined the 2 sets (and removed many unwanted ones), so I can't give you a universal solution - BUT if you add the attached file to your wigs Scripts folder you will see the entries I've created to enable Activemod.  You will need to add your own entries to enable your complete set to work, but that shouldn't be too difficult if you follow the format in the file.

 

Scripts.zip 669 B · 1 download

You mean this file? What do I do after I put this in my Scripts folder?

[aardy]

17 minutes ago, Trapp said:

You mean this file? What do I do after I put this in my Scripts folder?

Go crazy with your Activemod retextures  

You just need to create an activemod version of any wig you want to retexture - and make sure it's named appropriately.

eg. Wig39 - the one you've posted about has an addon texture name of zhair039.  This entry is already present in the file I've provided - and you will see that the necessary activemod name would be F_Wigs39.

This naming format is based on already established (and available) retextures that obviously did work in earlier versions of the game without the need for this file.  I've maintained this formatting in the file here so that any older retextures will still work with the addon in VX.

 

[Trapp]

1 minute ago, aardy said:

Go crazy with your Activemod retextures  

You just need to create an activemod version of any wig you want to retexture - and make sure it's named appropriately.

eg. Wig39 - the one you've posted about has an addon texture name of zhair039.  This entry is already present in the file I've provided - and you will see that the necessary activemod name would be F_Wigs39.

This naming format is based on already established (and available) retextures that obviously did work in earlier versions of the game without the need for this file.  I've maintained this formatting in the file here so that any older retextures will still work with the addon in VX.

 

Now, how do I go on about making the rextextures? Are there any tutorials for it here?

[aardy]

1 minute ago, Trapp said:

Now, how do I go on about making the rextextures? Are there any tutorials for it here?

That one I can't really help with.  Must admit I haven't looked for tutorials - my own hair retexturing is a little rudimentary  

[Trapp]

Okay, so I think I have some progress... Not much, but we move.

So I managed to make a texture based on the files from @Codename-74. The textures look okay, except for one thing.

There are TONS of transparencies in the textures that I don't know how to fix. This problem is also quite common on certain hair addons. Now, here are the contents of my texture folder:

I used this file to generate the maps for the textures and I have a couple of questions to use this for H5. So, I'm meant to have normal, specular and subsurface textures for these files, correct? What should I take off the folder and what should I add to fix this?

Noteworthy is that I just copied the texture from the original wig and didn't create a new one, sooooo...

@Driver, @Sexvision, @cr532, I summon thee since you have more experience with hair textures than anyone currently in the community. Any tips?

[Sexvision]

I would make sure the texture is actualy working by adding some colors to the texture. This will make sure you can see the Activemod texture works.

 

Try some different options in the txf file. that is the place where transparancy is handled.

"RGB_888" "Opaque"   Straight texture. No blending.
"RGBA_8888" "AlphaBlend"   This image requires an Alpha channel that will be used for transparency. Textures can be partially transparent. Good if you want to make some fancy stained glass windows
"RGBA_8888" "AlphaMask"   This image requires an Alpha channel that will be used for transparency. This is for objects that have a hard cut-out edge where it is either transparent or not-transparent
"RGB_888" "Add"   pixels in the image will be added to anything they are in front of. This will typically make things brighter.
"RGB_888" "Multiply"   pixels in the image will multiply with anything they are in front of. Dark pixels will make things darker. White pixels will have no effect
"RGB_888" "Subtract"   pixels in the image will subtract from anything they are in front of. This will typically make things darker

Most used for hair shoud be this:

"RGBA_8888" "AlphaMask" or maybe AlphaMask/WriteZ (this when there is a hard cutout line, otherwise AlphaBlend if there is a transition in transparency.)

[Trapp]

The original file showed "RGBA_8888" "AlphaBlend/AlphaMask/WriteZ" when I first opened it. After editing the .txf file, this is the result (with saturation nearly all the way up):

SUCCESS!!  Uploading in a bit.

[Driver]

That hair mesh isn't expected to be used with Alpha Blend rendering. In order to create alphablend hair you need to take care about the sort order (priority of rendering) but the wig doesn't have proper sort order in its mesh so can't be used with

"RGBA_8888" "AlphaBlend/WriteZ"

like a normal alphablend hair addon. When you find visual glitches like the wig, you always need to edit txf file to:

"RGBA_8888" "AlphaMask"

with this option those visual glitch won't be seen. (By the way you don't have to add "WriteZ" to alphamask because you don't need depth information in alphamask, I think.) When you use alphamask option with semi-transparent textures, it is also possible to change alpha threshold (determines which degree of transparency will be omitted) in the pass file. See the sample below

[pass]
name = CustomModel
stage2 = n.dds
stage3 = s.dds
stage4 =
alpha_threshold = 35

[Trapp]

Understood! So I just copy that code into the pass file and change the names and formats of the normal and specular to match?

[Driver]

2 hours ago, Trapp said:

Understood! So I just copy that code into the pass file and change the names and formats of the normal and specular to match?

I think so, but I'm not sure if the value of alpha threshold matches your texture well.

[demonv1]

So this is what I came up with. I darkened the tips a tiny bit and smoothed them a little to make it softer. I brightened the hair so you don't have to jam the saturation all the way up. Also I didn't know about the alpha_threshold and it really helps.

[Joots]

I had no idea what the txf files actually did until reading this thread, so thanks. This will definitely help with JU's hairs as well.

[Driver]

10 minutes ago, Joots said:

I had no idea what the txf files actually did until reading this thread, so thanks. This will definitely help with JU's hairs as well.

JU is the person who wrote tutorial on how to edit sort order of addon hair, so his all (most?) hair addons are alphablended. Ironically from many hair addons which was created in that period, alphablend effect was intentionally removed. I don't know why this happened but I heard this from neatmcgee who was bit regretted to have removed alphablend from his addons in the early days. After NC started to create series of alphablend hairs, it gradually became standard in modsgarden.

[demonv1]

Here is my version.

 

[Trapp]

4 minutes ago, demonv1 said:

Here is my version.

 

Oh shit! Beat me to it! LOL! Thank you very much, good sir!

[Trapp]

Going to leave this here for future reference, hoping that it may help somebody in the future.

When copying the code @Driver posted here and converting my normal and specular maps to .dds format, this happened:

The edges on the wig still looked white, and when lowering the brightness on the wig, it lost all definition. When saturating it, the white edges remained, gaining a separate coloration from the intended one.

So, I reverted to just adding the normal path (PNG version) without the specular, and this is the result without, and with saturation:

The code on the pass file for my version reads:

[pass]
name = CustomModel
stage2 = F_Wigs39_N.png
stage3 = hair_s2.png

I'm sure the version uploaded by @demonv1 solves the issues I had since he did some more work on Photoshop, so as of now, that will be the version I will put up. Expect the model for this test, Aya Ramos, to be uploaded later today!

Many thanks to @Sexvision, @aardy, @Driver and @demonv1 for their assistance with this! Now I can try retextures on many other hairs that I'm interested in!

[demonv1]

16 minutes ago, Trapp said:

The edges on the wig still looked white, and when lowering the brightness on the wig, it lost all definition. When saturating it, the white edges remained, gaining a separate coloration from the intended one.

I'm sure the version uploaded by @demonv1 solves the issues I had since he did some more work on Photoshop

Yep I had that too. I fixed it in photoshop by darkening and smoothing the edges of the hair texture.