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Using the 'Void' skins for customising

Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2022 11:11 pm
by Will T
Hi guys! Love the idea for the new Guides section, I think it's going to be a huge help.

One thing that I've been pondering ever since the first one came out, and something I'd love to see one of the model makers put up a quick guide for: how should we use the Void skins that are increasingly being included with new releases?

The intention seems to be to let members of the community come up with their own flightgroup colours without having to learn how to do a full texturing job of building up layers and layers, and also so that they can be kept consistent with the skins you guys have already created, eg. so that the greebling behind the astromech on the X-Wing stays the same.

But what do I need to use that?

If I wanted to add a hot pink Alliance starbird to the wings of an X-Wing, or the 181st's bloodstripes to the TIE Interceptor, can I do that? It seems to me like this would be easily done if we had access to the original project files for the textures, with the layers still delineated. That way you just find the layer for the colour of an FG stripe and change the palette, while leaving the layers that sit above that with all the detail (panel lines etc.) intact.

Can these void textures be loaded into an image editing program with the layers extracted? Or is the intention that we add new layers on top with whatever colours we want and set a transparency value so that the details in the texture image come through?

If there's a quick and easy way to make use of these textures, I feel like a guide to using them could spark a huge amount of community created content.

Re: Using the 'Void' skins for customising

Posted: Wed Jun 22, 2022 8:18 am
by Vince T
There is no one way to using skins and FG colors. You could bake them into the Void textures or you can simply use the void texture as canvas, create your custom skin texture, then delete canvas and save your custom markings as the new skin.

I'll give you an example for both variants:
First we have the XQ-2 Platform.
For the AllianceTFTC skin I baked the flightgroup colors right into the texture.
TEX00002.png

Next, there is the XQ-6 Platform:
For this one, I saved the various markings as transparent PNGs so you will only see the actual markings without the background:

Here's the blank texture:
TEX00012.png

And here's the accompanying markings
TEX00012.png

Now how to use them? Well there's two ways to do this
For the first variant, you simply apply the yellow markings skin via the mission ini, following Ace Antilles' Guide, which is also available as a PDF within your game folder under ..\X-Wing Alliance\Readme\Editing

If your skin uses transparency, even on the markings themselves, you can either do the same OR combine it with the void skin to make sure any original features from the base OPT are painted over.

Re: Using the 'Void' skins for customising

Posted: Wed Jun 22, 2022 12:27 pm
by Ace Antilles
Will T wrote:
Tue Jun 21, 2022 11:11 pm
Hi guys! Love the idea for the new Guides section, I think it's going to be a huge help.

One thing that I've been pondering ever since the first one came out, and something I'd love to see one of the model makers put up a quick guide for: how should we use the Void skins that are increasingly being included with new releases?

The intention seems to be to let members of the community come up with their own flightgroup colours without having to learn how to do a full texturing job of building up layers and layers, and also so that they can be kept consistent with the skins you guys have already created, eg. so that the greebling behind the astromech on the X-Wing stays the same.

But what do I need to use that?

If I wanted to add a hot pink Alliance starbird to the wings of an X-Wing, or the 181st's bloodstripes to the TIE Interceptor, can I do that? It seems to me like this would be easily done if we had access to the original project files for the textures, with the layers still delineated. That way you just find the layer for the colour of an FG stripe and change the palette, while leaving the layers that sit above that with all the detail (panel lines etc.) intact.

Can these void textures be loaded into an image editing program with the layers extracted? Or is the intention that we add new layers on top with whatever colours we want and set a transparency value so that the details in the texture image come through?

If there's a quick and easy way to make use of these textures, I feel like a guide to using them could spark a huge amount of community created content.
I get what you mean, I've recently asked about this myself. There's already something added to XWAU to kind of help with that.

In the FlightModels\Skins\Xwing folders there are Template folders. In those are lots of the main textures that would need to be edited for new options.
These skins are going to be need to be updated in the future to reflect multiple X-wing changes but it's a start.

Sadly @Spyder had a big Hard Drive crash a while back and lost a lot of files. :( He had to rebuild a lot of the A-wing.
So I don't think we have layer files for a lot but @DTM maybe able to help with some information or future options.

A lot has happened in the last 2 years with more on the way. There are more experiments going on right now with Skins that could be good too!
So yeah there's areas that can be improved on which is why we are making the guides and trying to get guys like you involved more :)