Tutorial for Retexturing with Photoshop
By PrtyLizardJedi
Part One: The Tools
A Picture Editing Program
Now, to retexture, you need a program fit for this. I use Adobe Photoshop 6.0. You can Download it at
Search the site a little and you should find it.
The Kotor Tool by Fred Tetra
You also need the amazing Kotor Tool by Fred Tetra to find the files you retexture. Download it at You need Microsoft .NET Framework for the Kotor Tool to work. You can download it here. Place all the files within Kotor_tool zip to your KotOR Directory.
When you have these tools, go on to the next step.
Part Two: Extracting the desired tga
You should create a folder for Retexturing, as it may need some room. Now, open the Kotor_tool. Follow this path
ERFsTexturePacksswpc_tex_tpa.erf
Under the swpc_tex_tpa.erf you will find subtrees with letters in alphabetical
order. Open the “N” subtree. You should have a list like this:
Now, for this tutorial we are going to use the Darth Malak Texture. Scroll down until you see “N_DarthMalak01”. Double-click it. You should have a window like this open.If you don’t, MAKE SURE THAT THE ImageTools.dll IS IN THE KOTOR DIRECTORYWITH THE KOTOR TOOL!!! THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT!!!
Then, you see in the bottom of the page a button which has “Write File” on it. Click it, and you can choose where to save the tga. Save it where you want. Now we have a tga image to edit.
Part Three: Retexturing
Now we have a skin to edit. Open your Photoshop (note that in this tutorial the pictures are of Photoshop version 6.0). Press ctrl+o and browse for the Malak tga you retrieved earlier woth the Kotor Tool. Once you have it, we shall start texturing it.
First, we will color the armor green. Select the Paintbrush tool.
If there is a Pencil Tool icon instead of the Paintbrush tool, right-click it, then select the paintbrush. We must next select the size of the paintbrush.
This is a bit small, so click the brush icon and select a bigger brush. If there is a selection of squares click the arrow and you will receive a list, where select Drop Shadow Brushes.abr
Now, select a fitting brush. I shall use a 19 pixel brush. You can see what size the brush is in pixels trough many ways, to name one, select the Large list from the list potrayed in the picture above. There select a brush that befits you. Next part, the rextexturing itself.
To color the armor without obscuring details, we can use the modes Hue, Color and Normal with Opacity Setting of 80%.
That is the list where you choose modes. Normal is not so good, since it obscures details and leaves a touch of the normal color there. See an example.
The both areas are colored with the same color. The left one is colored in normal mode with the Opacity Setting of 80%, while the right one is colored with hue mode. See the difference. However, some colors do not portray with hue mode. At these occasions, use the Color mode. It works basically the same way as hue. Now to the retexturing.
Right on your computer screen, there should be some windows like this:
Instead of Color, we will use the Swatches to determine our color this time. Click it and you should have a window with many colored squares. These are swatches. Now, choose the dark green swatch on the second row.
From the Mode list select the mode Hue. Now, texture the chest area. When you are done, you should have something like this:
Now, we shall recolor the Cape and the other cloth parts. We shall now use instead of swatches the Color. Choose it. You should know how. When you have the Color window.
To achieve the desired color, we will change values of the colors. Change the Green and Blue values to zero, and the Red value to 255. Now you have a color we will use on the cloth areas. If you now start with this color using hue on the cape, you will not see the color very well. We shall change the mode from Hue to Color. Now start working on the cloth parts. The result should be this.
Next, I will allow you to choose your own area for the other armor areas. I will use blue. Next we will recolor his boots. We shall use brown on them.
Select the color which the arrow is pointing at. We must use Color mode on the boots. Your result should look like this.
Remember that I was using blue on the rest of the armor, you had a free choice. Now we have three skin areas left. After that our texture is ready. Malak IS the Dark Lord of the Sith, so we shall darken his skin. Choose a black color, and start coloring the skin areas, but note, that white, grey and black colors come out grey with the hue and color modes. But this is what we want right now, so use gray on the skin areas and the little area that the arrow points at is to be colored with the same color as the boots. Result should be like this.
If you want black, the only way in my knowledge is to first use hue on an area with black, resulting in gray. Then switch to normal mode and change the Opacity level to 80, then color over the gray areas.
Now our texture is ready. If you wish, you can color the metal areas with some color. Next thing to do is to save it. Click file, then Save As. Drop the file then into your override folder. Start kotor. Ingame, unless you have the holowancloakworks, open the cheat console and type in “warp sta_m45ad” to face Malak. You can also see him in the main menu.
Part Four: Txi. Extensions and Alpha Channels
And now about the lovable Alpha Channels. When you double-clicked the N_DarthMalak01 in the window where you clicked the Write File button, did you pay attention to the lower corner of the screen? If you didn’t this was there.
The envmaptexture CM_Baremetal. It is very important. We can give Malak now a metallic look somewhere. Maybe his boots? This is what we will do. Open the N_DarthMalak01 tga in your Photoshop. Look at the little windows in the right corner of the screen.
Select the Alpha Channel. You might not see nearly anything, so it would be hard to know where exactly the boots are. Click the small square next to the RGB Channel and you’ll see the Malak texture. Now, go to Normal mode and set opacity on 100. Then select the black color. Color the boots with it. It will look like red, but if you click again the small square next to the RGB Channel, you’ll see it black. This will in the game be JUST metal, not showing any of the brown, but if you just want the brown area of the boots ‘shiny’, use a light gray on the boots instead of black. You see, this is the CM_Baremetal texture. It is the most common ‘shiny’ texture used in the game. The level of ‘shinyness’ depends on how dark the color you are using is.
Now about txi extensions. Go to the kotor tool and find the Calo Nord texture, N_CaloNord01. Double-click it and the window displaying the texture opens. Check the small box. As you can see, it is empty. This means that Calo’s texture has no CM_Baremetal on it at all. So how are we going to give him a metal look? First of all, click the Write File button to save the tga. Next, open Notepad. Copy this into it:
envmaptexture CM_Baremetal
Then when you save it, make sure you choose All Files!
Save it under the exact name
N_CaloNord01.txi
MAKE SURE THE NAME IS CORRECT! Next, go to Photoshop and open the Calo texture. Choose the Alpha Channel. Click on the small square next to the RGB Channel to see the texture. Now, select black color.Color with it all the blue areas. This should be the result.
Switch to the RBG Channel and you see that nothing is changed. This is irrelevant. Save the N_CaloNord01 tga. Next, place it in the override folder. Place there also the N_CaloNord01 txi. This way, the blue areas will now be CM_Baremetal. If you don’t put the txi file there, the areas that would be otherwise blue, would be invisible. To test your skin, use the holowan cloakworks or type in the cheat console
“warp tar_08aa” to go to Davik’s base and check out the new Calo
That would do it. Congratulations. You are now a retexturer. Note that some textures have head in different files than their bodies. Some tgas however have the head parts included in same file as the body. For example, Malak and Calo have separate tgas for their heads, while Mandalorians have also their heads in the same tga file.Here are pics of my Calo and Malak
SPECIAL THANKS TO:
FRED TETRA -FOR MAKING THE KOTOR TOOL
ADOBE COMPANY –FOR MAKING THE PHOTOSHOP
AND EVERYBODY AT HOLOWAN LABORATORIES WHO HELPED ME ON MY CAREER AS A RETEXTURER