Topic 3: Texturing - Clothing & Masking

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[This is post is part of a series of tutorials.]

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Topic 3: Texturing - Clothing & Masking

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This tutorial covers texturing the Turian clothing model, as it uses tinted diffuse maps and masks, which requires a specific setup in 3ds Max.

Naturally, the first thing you'll want to do is fire up the Max and load in your model. The Turian clothing model can be found in a number of places, such as the Citadel files and some of Garrus' files.

Perhaps the easiest place to find it is in the Garrus romance package: BioD_EndGm1_110ROMGarrus.

After you've extracted the assets, import the TUR_ARM_CTHc_MDL.psk into Max, and you'll see that it is indeed Garrus' lovely outfit. There's only one texture for this Turian clothing model, and many other Turians (like random NPC Turians and just background type Turians in the Citadel and whatnot) use this model, but it'd be boring if they all had just the same exact outfit on.

To solve this, there's a masking technique implemented allowing the graphics engine to simply change the colors of specific spots on a diffuse map through the use of a mask. Instead of wasting memory space making like forty different maps that only differ in color, the game can just use one main map and just dynamically change the colors in-game as needed. I'll show you how to do that in Max, so let's do this thing!

Open up the material editor with M and pick a blank spot.

• Name it "Garrus_Clothes" or something super great like that.
• Click on the large grey box next to Diffuse up near the top and make it completely black. (If you don't do this, your texture will look faded.)
• Then scroll down and expand the Maps section by clicking on it.

Okay, I'm only going to talk about how the diffuse map needs to be set up as it's the only one that requires anything special. The normal map and whatnot follows the same sort of thing that we've done before, and you're a pro by now, right? Right.

• Click on the None next to Diffuse and double click on Mask.
• In the second box labeled Mask, click on the None. 
• Double click Bitmap, find the file TUR_ARM_CTHc_Tnt_Diff.tga, and open it, make sure the Alpha Source is None. (If you look at the map, you'll see it's an unattractive pink/purple color.)

Then, go back up to the parent Mask menu.

• Click the None by Map and choose Mix.
• You'll get a new menu with three maps. Click on the first spot and choose RGB Tint.
• In that new window, click the None, find TUR_ARM_CTHc_Tnt_Mask.tga, open, and make sure the Alpha Source is None.

Go back up to the parent Mix menu, and then you can just copy that RGB Tint that you just made to the two spots below it. (Copy, not Instance or Swap.) To copy, just click the RGB Tint slot you just made and drag it to the next slot.

Then, you can go ahead and assign the texture to the material, if you haven't already, and make sure it's shown in the viewport.

You'll see that the clothes are just Red, Blue, and Green. Yup, that's what's supposed to happen. In order to change the colors, you just change the values of the first two RGB Tints of the Mix.

Also, there's an additional bit of detail that needs to be added in if you're interested in fully recreating Garrus' ensemble, since there's some additional coloration in places.

• Go into the second RGB Tint slot.
• Change the map to use TUR_ARM_CTHc_Tnt_Strp.tga instead.

From, there you just need to tinker with the colors until you get just about the right thing. Or do something completely different and give ol' Garrus a fashion makeover! Whatever you want! The power is now yours.

Don't forget to go back up to the main, very top parent menu and add in Bump mapping.

Garrus Vakarian's Outfit

Lorik Qui'in's Outfit

There are other textures, like the Salarians' and Krogans' civilian clothes, that require the use of the same procedure. The steps are the same, so you can totally do it! The coloration just depends on whatever you need it to be, and that just takes some playing around with to get used to what does what exactly.

So, that about wraps up things for texturing. (As far as I know, for now.) The next thing I'll be covering is just some basics on how to go about posing!

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