To use this guide, you must have the following software:
· Paint Shop Pro, 7.04 or similar
· Winzip
This guide will lead you through modifying a player skin for medal of honor: allied assault.
PART ONE
First, an overview. The skins are made by modifying the existing skins and files. There are three parts to the player skins:
Textures - the actual graphics.
Shaders - the file that tells MOH where to find the graphics
TIKI files - The file that tells MOH which model to use, and which shader to use.
To make a player skin you need:
.tik file (player model, assigns gear)
.tik fps file (player's first-person view)
shader
head texture
hand (fps) texture
hand texture
upper body texture
lower body texture
helmet texture (if required)
gear texture (if required)
1. First, go to your moh:aa main, or if in spearhead (SH), mainta folders. Use winzip to open pak0.pk3 or pak1.pk3 (SH)
There you will find most of the important files. Click "TYPE" at the top of the winzip window, to sort your files into file types. Scroll down until you find all files with the type, "TIK". These are most of the items in the game. Weapons, furniture, vehicles etc. Its not the complete model, but the TIKI for the model (see above). We're interested in the player skins. For this example, we'll use the 6th Airborne Captain, the guy with the red beret.
2. Locate the files allied_british_6th_Airborne_Captain.tik and allied_british_6th_Airborne_Captain_fps.tik
3. Click the file allied_british_6th_Airborne_Captain.tik and hold CTRL, click allied_british_6th_Airborne_Captain_fps.tik so that both are selected.
4. Click the EXTRACT button.
5. Confirm that "Use Folder Names" is selected
6. Choose a location for your files.
This is vital. You must maintain the correct file structure for your files. When we've edited them, they need to return to the same place we got them from. Just placing them anywhere will cause problems. For this, I use a zip disk, my I: drive. You can use a floppy disk if you like, or your root C: folder. Do not place them in a sub-folder somewhere. Use the root folder.
7. Once you've chosen your location, hit EXTRACT again.
Now, scroll through the list of files until you find the SHADER files. For Spearhead, its easy.
8. Find the file called "mohta_Characters.shader" and extract it to your drive.
Most of the new Spearhead skins are in the same shader file, which is handy. For the original game, its a bit more challenging. Most of the shaders are the same name as the model, so have a browse and see what you can find. You'll pretty much be writing your own shader anyway.
Now, to find the textures. In MOH, you'll need to be in pak2.pk3. In SH, just remain in pak1.pk3 for now.
9. At the top of your winzip window, click PATH to change the sorting by file location, not type. Scroll down to find:
textures/models/player
In there you'll find the textures for the player models, and you'll see the paratrooper for our demo. This is interesting... You'll see that the file types are .jpg files. In the original game, all player textures were of a type, .tga. We'll see more about that later. Ignore the .dds files for now, just extract the .jpg files as you did with the tiks and shader.
10. Extract uk_air_pt_coat.jpg, uk_air_pt_pants.jpg, uk_air_pt_gear.jpg
Look around for the textures/models/human/faces location and-
11. Extract the uk_pt_capt.jpg
Have a look for-
12. pt_hands.jpg and extract that too.
Ok, thats about all we need for the moment.
13. Close Winzip.
PART TWO
Use Windows Explorer (or whatever) to go to the drive you selected to hold your extracted files. You'll see three folders:
o Models : contains your .tik files in a sub-folder called "Player", so, models/player
o Scripts : holds your .shader
o Textures : holds your images.
Open the one called Textures first. You'll see some sub-folders.
textures/models/human
Go into the faces folder, and you'll see the texture for the captain. Open it in Paint Shop Pro. Go back and open all of the files. The hands, the body, the gear. We will look at them all at once.
Use the magnifying tool to resize your images so that you can see them all together.
Now, there are a lot of ways you can go with this... It all depends on your skill with Paint Shop Pro. If you have never used it before, I suggest you stop now, and go search for all of the general tutorials you can find. Here's a few links:
http://www.pspug.org/tut/tut7eff.shtml
http://www.jasc.com
Once you're familiar with the tools, we can begin.
PART THREE
First we'll get rid of those patches on the arms.
10. To do most of the work you'll be using the clone tool. . On the tool options, select a size of about 16, opacity (density of the paint) of 100. Very carefully right click on a blank area, (see pic) and then brush over the edge of the pouch
1.
original mid-way complete bad example
2. All I can say about cloning is TAKE your time. The example on the right is what you'll get if you go to fast. Click, move a bit, click, move a bit.
3. ***
4. Layers. Yes. Layers. These are the entire key to making skins, or pretty much anything look decent. To stop us from totally buggering up our original skin, we're going to duplicate it.
1. Click on Layers, Duplicate.
If you look at your Layers toolbar, you'll see you now have two layers, the same. If you don't have a layers palette, click View > Toolbars and click the Layer Palette option.
Before we stick a patch on, we're going to colour the uniform. There's a million ways you can do this. Lets try a few.
***
2. EDIT > Copy.
3. EDIT > Paste.
This just gives us another texture, so we don't stuff the original.
3. On the colour selection menu, click Foreground Colour and the solid paint option. 4. Click on the current colour (Black, in the screenshot) and you'll open the colour pallete. 5. Choose a green. I picked #92C884 as mine, but use what you like. For the moment, we're just practicing.
6. Go to and from the options toolbar, choose "Colour to Target", Size 46, Opacity about 50. Brush onto your image, and you'll see you're changing the uniform green, but not totally wrecking the textures.7. Hammer UNDO until you've removed the colour, and go select another colour, say a grey, or a brown. Use something thats a "uniform". Try two colours at once. This is just messing around, but you get the point.8. Again, hammer UNDO until you're back to the original colours.
***
Another way to do this is to use a coloured layer.
9. Click LAYERS > NEW RASTER LAYER.
You'll see that on your Layer Pallette, you'll have a new, transparent layer.
2. Choose a colour, and choose the Fill tool.
Don't worry too much about settings, just click on your image and you'll get a big slab of our colour, over the entire uniform. Go to your Layer Pallete and on the right hand side, click the arrow next to normal. You'll see a few options, Screen, Multiply, etc. Click them all to try them. You'll see that you have some working well, others... don't.
3. Choose "Colour" and then drag the slider (100%) to the left, and you'll see the layer start to get less intense. Once you've seen the effect, put it back to 100%.
So... Your uniform is coloured. But, the undershirt is also coloured. So are the straps. Say you don't want that to happen. Well, again there's a few ways to fix this.
4. From the toolbar, select the freehand selection tool. Choose the options Point to Point, Feather 0, and turn on antialias. 5. Select, by clicking, moving, clicking, moving around the neck area on the shirt. 6. Press Delete, and the original texture colour will show through. Basically you delete that section of the green filled layer, letting the original show through. You can also do the same for the equipment straps if you wanted to. Here's an incomplete example.Anyway, thats about it.
***
There's a pretty funky file that might help you with camo, but it is a plug-in to PSP. Here is the link... http://www.v-d-l.com/adrenaline_camouflage.html
Download it, follow the instructions to set up, and go back into PSP.
Info on setting up Plug-Ins can be found here.
***
7. Undo everything so you have your original uniform texture.
8. Add a Layer > Duplicate Layer.
9. Go to Effects, Plug-Ins, VDL Adrenaline, Camouflage.
This opens up the camo options - you'll see there are a LOT of settings you can mess around with.
10. Choose something you like and click Ok.
Again, you'll get a large slab of camo. Play with your Layers Palette as you did above. The best seems to be "soft light" but "dodge" usually works ok too. It depends on the effect you're looking for.
***
So there you have it. Thats most of the texturing you'll need. Lets get serious and do it for real.
11. Open the texture you're using.
12. Clone out anything you don't want.
13. Colourise with the colour to target tool. (mine is mid-grey)
(50% of actual size)
14. Duplicate the Layer
15. Add some Camo (Mine is Common - Red, Scale 33, Blur 50, Fall off 15, Random 1)
16. Adjust Layer to depth (Mine is 54% Multiply)
17. Clean up Camo (removed camo from straps and under shirt)
...and thats about it. Just have to add the patch on the sleeve now.
***
Now, lets add a new patch. I've chosen a patch from the allied airborne. I just did a search on Google for "military patch".
Here's the original.
18. Right click, copy it, and paste it into PSP.
19. Use the magic want tool , and click in the white areas (not the writing).
20. Go to Selection > Inverse to select just the patch.
21. Edit > Copy it again, and click on your uniform.
22. Edit > Paste as New Layer. Your patch is now on your uniform.
23. Image > Resize... You'll have to guess here, but I'm doing Pixel Size, 125.
Make sure you don't have "ALL Layers". Its ok, but looks a little "hard".
24. Select the magic wand again, and change the "feather" to 2.
25. Click on the image NEAR the patch and it'll select it.
26. Press Delete twice, and your patch will have a slightly fuzzy edge.
27. SELECTIONS > Select None.
28. Now drop the layer's density a bit on the Layer Pallete, from 100% to whatever looks good.
The patch is probably upside down, so-
12. IMAGE > Flip, then IMAGE > Mirror.
13. Reposition it by dragging it with the moving tool.
Put it on the other sleeve, if you want. To save the completed picture-
14. click on SAVE AS, not SAVE.
15. Change the file type to a tga file.
16. Name it demo_coat.tga
17. Save it to your drive, in textures. Don't worry about any other subfolders.
The completed image looks like this:
demo_coat.tga
(the example here is a tad blurry... sorry)
***
Continue the texturing by yourself for the remaining textures. Seriously though, its not worth the effort messing around with hands, or faces just yet, unless you're REALLY good with the paint tools. Use the face off another model, and one of the standard hand sets. Here's what I have, after altering the other textures.
face - just arussian guy pants at 50% actual hands at 50% actual Gear at 50% actual
demo_face.tga demo_pants.tga demo_hands.tga demo_gear.tga
Save all the finished files in your textures folder, as .tga files.
***
PART FOUR.
Open your mohta_Characters.shader SHADER file in Notepad.
It looks complicated, but look at the individual parts;
usa_pt_top The name of the shader section. Must be unique.
{
qer_editorimage textures/models/human/usa_paratrooper/air_pt_coat.tga Where to get the textures...
{
map textures/models/human/usa_paratrooper/air_pt_coat.tga ...same.
rgbGen lightingSpherical Type of lighting
}
}
Basically, for each part of your skin, you need a part for in the shader.
So... Lets do our demo guy. In a new notepad document, type:
demo_coat
{
qer_editorimage textures/demo_coat.tga
{
map textures/demo_coat.tga
rgbGen lightingSpherical
}
}
demo_pants
{
qer_editorimage textures/demo_pants.tga
{
map textures/demo_pants.tga
rgbGen lightingSpherical
}
}
demo_face
{
qer_editorimage textures/demo_face.tga
{
map textures/demo_face.tga
rgbGen lightingSpherical
}
}
demo_hands
{
qer_editorimage textures/demo_hands.tga
{
map textures/demo_hands.tga
rgbGen lightingSpherical
}
}
demo_gear
{
qer_editorimage textures/demo_gear.tga
{
map textures/demo_gear.tga
rgbGen lightingSpherical
}
}
There's other ways to do it, but I find this is the easiest. The only thing you need to watch is that your shader names (demo_face etc) are different from any other skin. So don't go calling it "airborne_coat" or something, or you'll get conflicts. I probably should call mine wolf-man_demo_coat or something.
Once completed and checked-
18. click FILE > SAVE AS and go to your 'scripts' folder.
19. Name the file something suitable, I'm using demo_guy.shader
20. Close the shader file.
...if you're doing a president clinton skin, you'd call it something like, president_clinton.shader. You get the point.
***
Now for the .tik files... this is the hardest bit.
21. Open up, in notepad, the allied_british_6th_Airborne_Captain.tik file we extracted earlier.
It looks like this: My comments are in blue.
TIKI
setup
{
scale 0.52 This is the size of the file. Most things are this size. If you made it smaller, you'd have a little guy running around. So leave it.
path models/human/allied_airborne This is the model's (skeleton, without texture) location.
skelmodel airborne.skd This is the model. Manon, for example, has a different one.
surface shirt shader uk_pt_top This is pointing to the shader file we did a minute ago.
surface pants shader uk_pt_pants
surface sleeve shader uk_pt_top_cull
path models/human/heads
skelmodel head1.skd This is the model's head shape. There's a few different ones. Play with the numbers, head1, head3 etc.
surface head shader uk_head_pt_capt This is the shader for the head.
// HANDS
// =======================================================
path models/human/hands
skelmodel hand.skd
surface hand shader pt_hands ...shader for the hands.
// GEAR
// =======================================================
path models/equipment/USGear/airborne
skelmodel airborne_gear.skd
surface gear shader airborne_gear This is the gear's shader...
// HELMET
// =======================================================
path models/human/brit-beret
skelmodel brit-beret.skd
surface brit_beret shader brit_beret The headgear. In our case, we aren't having a headgear... YET.
}
init
{
server
{
voicetype british // set the voicetype to use for multiplayer instant messaging Voice type... SAS, Axis4 are examples. Study the games .tik files to find more.
}
}
$include models/player/base/include.txt
So now to make our own. Don't retype it, thats dumb. Change these bits:
surface shirt shader uk_pt_top to surface shirt shader demo_coat
surface pants shader uk_pt_pants to surface pants shader demo_pants
surface sleeve shader uk_pt_top_cull to surface sleeve shader demo_coat
skelmodel head1.skd to skelmodel head4.skd (or whatever)
surface head shader uk_head_pt_capt to surface head shader demo_face
surface hand shader pt_hands to surface hand shader demo_hands
surface gear shader airborne_gear to surface gear shader demo_gear
path models/human/brit-beretskelmodel brit-beret.skdsurface brit_beret shader brit_beret to //path models/human/brit-beret//skelmodel brit-beret.skd//surface brit_beret shader brit_beret (this removes the beret, temporarily. We might use it later.)
voicetype british // set the voicetype to use for multiplayer instant messaging voicetype axis4 // set the voicetype to use for multiplayer instant messaging
Once you've checked it, go to:
22. FILE > SAVE AS and put it in models/player
23. Name it german_demo_guy.tik
The 'german' part in the name is for team selection. Other choices are allied, russian or british. This also signifies weapon choice in Multiplayer.
***
The next part is the FPS TIKI.
Open, in notepad, the file allied_british_6th_Airborne_Captain_fps.tik from where you extracted it earlier.
Again, comments are in blue. It looks like this:
TIKI
setup
{
path models/player/US_Army
skelmodel USarmyplyr.skd Every skin is the same...
surface viewsleeves shader viewsleeves_dak This is the sleeve you see when you're holding a gun.
surface triggerhand shader handview The hand...
surface lefthand shader handview ...same
surface garandhand shader handview ...same.
}
$define pulloutdir sound/weapons/pullout
$include models/player/base/include_fps.txt
Basically, the only thing you need to change is the sleeve view to the right colour. Our guy is in a grey-black camo, so it'd probably take a custom sleeve. I'm not going to bother now, maybe in a later tutorial. Just leave it how it is for the time being.
24. SAVE AS > german_demo_guy_fps.tik in your models/player folder.
***
We're about done. All we have left is to compile the files and add them to the pk3.
25. Go into your models/player folder.
26. Right click on the file, german_demoguy.tik and choose winzip > add to german_demoguy.zip
This will create a zip icon.
27. Open it, and you'll see one of your file added.
But there's a problem. The file has not maintained its folder pathway, and won't work.
28. Delete the file german_demoguy.tik, we need to add it again with folder names.
29. Organise your windows so that you can see the opened zip file, and the .tik files.
30. Drag the german_demoguy.tik into the zip window. It will ask you some options.
You MUST make sure the option "Save Full Path Info" is selected.
31. Then hit ADD.
You'll see the file is added, WITH folder names.
32. Repeat this process of dragging files into the zip file. Remember to make sure the folder paths are added.
You need the two tik files, the shader, and all your textures.
The final zipped file should be:
9. Close the zip file, and go to where it is saved. Probably models/player.
10. Right click it and rename it "user-skin-demo_guy.pk3"
11. Now click EDIT > CUT
12. Move to your MOH:AA mainta folder.
13. EDIT > Paste and your pk3 will appear.
Now its ready, and in the game. Start Spearhead and go to your MP options. The skin should appear in the german selection of models.
...and here he is.
End... for now.
Here you can download the freeware and demo versions of all plug-ins released in the Adrenaline series. Please be sure to check the compatibility list to see if your graphics application will be able to use these plugins.
You can start downloading by clicking on the icon belonging to the plug-in or by clicking on any of the "Server #" links on the right. If you're using a tool such as GetRight to download, you can select multiple servers for the same file.
Camouflage v1.01Freeware, 456KB setup program.Only available for Windows. Free-ware Server 1Server 2
Halftone v1.05 demoDemo version, 590KB setup program.Only available for Windows. DemoOrderfor $14.95 Server 1Server 2
Harmonix v1.0.7dFreeware, 571KB setup program.Only available for Windows. Free-ware Server 1Server 2
NightVision v1.02Freeware, 476KB setup program.Only available for Windows. Free-ware Server 1Server 2
OldMovie v1.30n demoDemo version, 649KB setup program.Only available for Windows. DemoOrderfor $19.95 Server 1Server 2
Snowflakes 1.01Freeware, 570KB setup program.Only available for Windows. Free-ware Server 1Server 2
SnowScape v1.03Freeware, 543KB setup program.Only available for Windows. Free-ware Server 1Server 2
Installation instructions
· Each plug-in can be installed by starting the downloaded .exe file.
· You will first be presented with a description of the file downloaded.
· Press the "Install" button to start installation, the files will be temporarily stored in the "Temp" directory on your harddisk.
· Our own Plug-in Setup tool will automatically start.
· Click the "Yes..." button after agreeing to the legal agreement displayed, the "Next" button should now be available; click it.
· The setup tool will now scan your harddisk for compatible graphics applications, you can press the Escape key to stop the scanning and continue. Most applications (ie. PhotoShop, Paint Shop Pro) will be detected without having to scan the harddisk.
· You will now be presented with a list of all graphics applications detected, if yours is not in the list you can specify it's directory using the "Custom directory"
· If you've selected all the graphics applications for which you want to install, press "Install".
· After the setup tool has copied all files it will prompt you whether to continue installing the plug-in for other graphics applications or exit from the setup tool.
