Solved: The Quest for a Skirt-less Female PC!

[lufe]

Alsafysh, I can't do it today, but I promise to make a understandable explanation about it tomorrow In the meantime, I'm finishing a beta release of the AllSkins with your skins and the skirtless mesh for you to try it on.

[lufe]

I'm confused as to how the files know which mesh to choose.

On older skins there are several variants of skirts -ripped, long, short, etc.- how does it know which mesh(? is that right?) to choose?

The mesh to be chosen for the female is a directive written on a .dbr file called femalepc01.dbr. There, we see the following line in the standard TQIT database:

Figure 1 - Standard database record of the female player

On the figure above, it's clear that the game makes a fix reference to a mesh called FemalePCSkirt01.msh. That is the mesh that everybody uses to play the female player. The mesh is a set of directives to draw a 3D Object. A Mesh of the standardTQIT female without any texture applied on it looks like this:

Figure 2 - Female Skirt Mesh without texture applied

while the skirtless mesh looks like this:

Figure 3 - Female Skirtless Mesh without texture applied

Once TQIT starts, the record from the database is read and it becomes fixed during the time that the game is on. There's no possibility to change the mesh in the middle of the game by using a bottle or any other trick inside the game. But, since the database record (on figure 1) can be changed in a mod, it's possible to start a mod where the mesh referred on the figure 1 points to the skirtless mesh, instead of the standard mesh. That's what version 0.8 of AllSkins does. It is not one, but 3 mods. One points to the "Skirt" mesh (the standard), other points to the "Skirtless" mesh, the one without skirt, and the third mod points to the "Dress" mesh. Since a mod can change the database record, once the mod is applied, the skirtless mesh (for example) can be used during the time that the mod is on.

By choosing the right mod, the database record points to the right mesh and you play with the respective mesh. On each version of the mod, only the bottles that are correct for that mod are sold. So, on the standard mod, only bottles with skins for the standard mesh are sold, on the skirtless mod only the bottles for the skirtless mesh are sold, and so on.

Figure 4 - AllSkins 0.8 menu

On the figure above, it's possible to see the 3 options of AllSkins 0.8, the normal, Dress and Skirtless. The differences between them Note: during the time that the mod is active, the female player characters that don't have skins for the mesh which is active will look weird; that goes away, though, as soon as we go out of Titan Quest and enter again. No harm is done to any player character.

If I wanted to make a girl with a ripped skirt, I would simply start with one of Zax's skins, but if I changed my mind later I would need to copy it over to another skin that had the type skirt I wanted.

It's interesting that you mention Zax's skins. p0a has made a proof of concept exactly with Zax's skins (the tattooed series). This is his post of 2008/06/17 on the Conversions to the Skirtless Mesh thread:

I have just realized that, since the original skirt area and the new bikini area do not overlap, it should be possible to create skins that are compatible with BOTH the original mesh and the skirtless mesh. As a proof of concept, I have converted Zax's Topless Tattooed skins to do exactly that.

Here are the skins in texture format as well as the uncompressed .tga files.

The result from this "proof of concept" by p0a is that with the same .tex file, the skin works both for the skirt mesh and the skirtless mesh. Here's the photo of the result of his work using AllSkins. To get the first female photo, I chose the standard AllSkins 0.8 mod (the same result happens by not loading the mod at all, since this is the standard mesh):

Figure 6 - Zax's Skin changed by p0a using Standard (skirt) mesh

Here's the same tex file, all I did was to choose the "AllSkins 0.8 Skirtless" mod:

Figure 7 - Zax's Skin changed by p0a using Skirtless mesh

So skirtless cannot be read the same way as these the older skins? I understand the new area that needs to be added in the psd, but why can't they work together without having to replace the file everytime you wanted to switch back and forth? or maybe you don't have to and I'm just confused?>.<

I hope I answered this question, but let me know if I didn't. Anyway, here I show 3 more pictures. One I believe you've seen already in this thread, on Maul's Post:

Tried to figure out if theres' a quick fix to convert any existing skirtless skins but seems there's none. Comparing the textures, Left is the existing texture format for the old mesh and right is new texture for Poa's mesh.

A (painted white) used to cover the (stretched) gray area of B and the white of B is the new portion needed to be painted with the new mesh. Its not as simple as copy and paste, you need to transform, warp, liquify, clone..etc and its not easy. I personally prefer starting from scratch w/ new designs if I have to make skins again.

Now, the original .tex from Zax (which wasn't used to take pictures 6 or 7) is:

Figure 8 - Zax's original tex file (boob taken off to post in forum)

and P0a's adaptation of it, used to take both pictures 6 and 7:

Figure 9 - Poa's adaptation on Zax's original tex file (boob taken off to post in forum)

It's still possible to make things in a way that p0a's mesh becomes the standard one, but it has to be made manually (just once, though). By copying the .msh file provided by P0a to ...\THQ\Titan Quest - Immortal Throne\Database\Creatures\pc\female and renaming it to femalepcskirt01.msh, you're basically overriding the game's default .msh file and then the standard mesh will become P0a's mesh. AllSkins is not affected by it, since the standard mod will use still the standard mesh when active.

[lufe]

What AllSkins does is to change the .tex file of the player (the last pic from the post above). By using a bottle, you can change the player's tex file, but you can't change the bumpmap file OR the mesh, unfortunately. To change the mesh, you have to start the correspondent AllSkins mod (out of the 3 provided on 0.8) and to change the bumpmap file, it's even more complicated.

While there's only 3 mesh files for the female player, there's 1 bumpmap for each separate skin that changes the female's appearance. It's not possible or viable to make one AllSkins mod for each bumpmap like there's a mod for each mesh. Also, by loading a bumpmap, you make surely the correct skin look fantasticly better, there's no doubt, but all other skins will look weird. The approach made by AllSkins on this matter is to use Shark's all-purpose bumpmap, which doesn't screw up any skin, but doesn't enhance them like it should either.

Here's Shark's all-purpose bumpmap:

Fig. 1 - Shark's All Purpose bumpmap

Shark's all-purpose bumpmap was developed to answer the need of not screwing up any skin. It doesn't enhance any part of the texture, it's very light, and as a result, it doesn't create problems when loading a variety of different skins. On the other hand, it doesn't enhance them either. The original bumpmap from Ironlore used to create problems with almost any skin, because it was developed to the standard ironlore skirts. Here's the standard ironlore bumpmap.

Fig. 2 - Ironlore's Original bumpmap

As it can be seen from the pic, it's perfectly adapted for the standard ironlore skins, but it will create troubles with any other skin developed by the skinners.

One important aspect to take into consideration using bumpmaps is, changing them for each skin is not really necessary. If you want to play the skirtless mesh player, you have to change to the skirtless mesh, but you don't have to change to the correct bumpmap for any of the skins or any of the meshes of the game. The all-purpose bumpmap from Shark and the all-purpose bumpmap for skirtless mesh from p0a's are enough, if you're not very picky. On the other hand, if you want to see all the glory of a skin, using the bumpmap specifically done for that skin is very nice. To see the bumpmap effects you have to play the game with the option "Texture Quality" set to high, though. Otherwise it's doesn't even make sense to think about bumpmaps.

Here's a comparison of Poa's Shark's Netoweb recolored to black with bikini, first using the correct bumpmap for it:

Fig. 3 - Lufe's/Poa's Shark Netoweb Recolor Black Bikini with correct bumpmap

and using shark's all purpose bumpmap:

Fig. 4 - Lufe's/Poa's Shark Netoweb Recolor Black Bikini with all-purpose bumpmap

So, it's nice to have the correct bumpmap, but it's not very practical to change it every time that we have to use a skin. That would mean to replace the femalepcskirt01bmp.tex file manually each time we have to use a skin.

There's a program that could do it easily, though. Since I've used a standard naming of all the bmp files to match with their original skin files, it's very easy to get the bmp file name from the original skin name. A candidate to do that easily is the SoulSeekor's Defiler. When you open a character with the defiler, you could have a button saying "Fix Bumpmap" which would do nothing else than copying the correct bumpmap file from the bumpmap resources file to the creatures resources file. That would ensure that the correct bumpmap for that skin is loaded on the Titan Quest program when we entered it. Of course all other characters would look slightly weird; but there's no way to avoid it. If we then want to play or see another character with its correct bumpmap, just run the defiler again and press the button for that character.

All this trouble could be avoided if the original programmer from Titan Quest had foreseen that using a dye bottle could change not only the skin file, but also the bmp file and the mesh file for a character. That would have been the correct solution, and no workaround would have to be found. But they did only some simple skins, all of them using the same bumpmap file (because the simple skins look the same only with a differect color for the skirt) and completely neglected the necessity of changing a mesh or bumpmap file when using a dye bottle. Surely, they wouldn't have imagined that the skinners would have created so many different skins, or that some crazy genious like P0a would have fixed their unusable skirtless mesh and made so much options for this game.

Now, personally, I would not be very much preoccupied with cases like Zax's Tatooed and Untatooed series to change them to the skirtless mesh. On the figures 6 and 7 of the post above, it's clear that the skirt mesh does very well, and while the skirtless mesh adds some flavor to it, it wouldn't have been necessary to create the .tex file that uses both at the same time, since one can't say there's really a flaw with the skirt mesh's drawing. Other skins suffer much more from the skirt mesh, though. All female nude skins look bad with the skirt mesh, and skins that don't include a skirt have the same problem. One good example is this one:

Fig. 5 - OoAlejooO's Red Suit

This "break" on the middle of the skin (exactly where the skirt should be) has its origins on the structures of the skirt mesh. the same skin on the viewer can show it better:

Fig. 5 - OoAlejooO's Red Suit on the Viewer program

It's easy to see that the skirt mesh "breaks" any attempt to draw skins not based on a skirt. To fix this, it's necessary to fix the skin and use it exclusively with the skirtless mesh, since there's no point of using in the skirt mesh other than the fact that it doesn't work well on the skirtless mesh yet, since no one fixed it.

So basically, I would like to have the nude models and the models that have no skirt fixed, so I could make a release AllSkins with the skirtless mesh for the skins that are correct for the skirtless mesh, and if time was enough, fix the other skins too (the ones with skirts) so that they could be used on both. But the main target would be the ones that don't work with the original mesh.

[Alsafysh]

Lufe,
thanks for the reply! that really clears things up for me! I'm rather excited about the idea of creating my own bmp and am going to go looking up how to do that. Not that it matters but it would be cool to do sometimes me thinks.

I agree, all the non-skirt skins -nude and otherwise- need the new area added and I'd be happy to give it a go, and the ones with skirts (that make sense) would just be gravy. I'll start working on doing that once I get 0.8 or a beta of it. Your set up of choosing the mod at get-go is really cool and i'd like to use it cause i'm lazy.

One question with 0.8 - if i load skirtless and another player is not using skirtless mod at the time, what do we see each other like?

[lufe]

Lufe,
thanks for the reply! that really clears things up for me! I'm rather excited about the idea of creating my own bmp and am going to go looking up how to do that. Not that it matters but it would be cool to do sometimes me thinks.

If you have Gimp, I could give you the normalmap plugin, which helps doing the bumpmaps.

I agree, all the non-skirt skins -nude and otherwise- need the new area added and I'd be happy to give it a go, and the ones with skirts (that make sense) would just be gravy. I'll start working on doing that once I get 0.8 or a beta of it. Your set up of choosing the mod at get-go is really cool and i'd like to use it cause i'm lazy.

I'm working as fast as I can to have the 3rd beta ready, I'll pm you as soon as I have it The other ones are not good for testing since lots of stuff was changed in between.

One question with 0.8 - if i load skirtless and another player is not using skirtless mod at the time, what do we see each other like?

Depends. If they have the same version of AllSkins, but they're not using the skirtless mod while you are using it, they'll see something like this:

Fig. 1 - Skirtless tex file with wrong mesh

while you'll see something like this:

Fig. 2 - Skirtless tex file with correct mesh

If they don't have any allskins mod installed, they'll see only the mesh. Probably they will see it with blue and yellow squares all over, like you've seen in my post above.





.
Note: If the tex file was worked to be compatible with both mesh versions, then they would see something like the skirt version of Zax's Tatooed (the one I posted some posts above) while you would have seen the Skirtless version of it. Then it would all be good, but you'd still see different versions of the female player.

[Alsafysh]

If you have Gimp, I could give you the normalmap plugin, which helps doing the bumpmaps.

I do have gimp and CS4 and most programs of the like.

I'm working as fast as I can to have the 3rd beta ready, I'll pm you as soon as I have it The other ones are not good for testing since lots of stuff was changed in between.

groovy thanks

Note: If the tex file was worked to be compatible with both mesh versions, then they would see something like the skirt version of Zax's Tatooed (the one I posted some posts above) while you would have seen the Skirtless version of it. Then it would all be good, but you'd still see different versions of the female player.

that's still cool though. very nice work!

[Avatar2b]

Haven't been here in a while and all these last posts are looking great. I'm itchin' to play again but waiting for skirtless mesh skins. Can anyone tell me if there are many yet? I had the TQMM to change skins and hope to use it again before I forget too much how to use it!
Wish I had time to help everyone here and, in so doing, help myself!

[lufe]

Haven't been here in a while and all these last posts are looking great. I'm itchin' to play again but waiting for skirtless mesh skins. Can anyone tell me if there are many yet? I had the TQMM to change skins and hope to use it again before I forget too much how to use it!
Wish I had time to help everyone here and, in so doing, help myself!

There's not many, Avatar2b, but there's some, I'd say, 10 of them already. Hopefully Alsafysh will find some time and do some rework on some of them. I'd say with version 0.9 of AllSkins we could count with 20 of them.

You don't need TQMM to use the skins, and with TQMM you surely won't be able to use the skirtless mesh so easily. Wait a week, maybe, and you'll have AllSkins 0.8c version ready. With this mod, you'll see how easy it will be to use the skirtless mesh

[Avatar2b]

Just a patch to install, huh? Wow, sounds great! I don't think I'll need all those different skins but it'll be fun to see all the art. I made a post in the grown-ups section too, and am hoping for some interest there as well. A couple skins available on Game Vixen Zone but not enough!

[sleger]

Does someone have the Tex and bmp and mesh files still available. i want to work on new skins. So i need some files that i can work with, Any help would be greatly appreciated. And I am looking for the skirtless version of the mesh. : )