Appearance Mods

My wife approves of this post as she HATES the faces  .

Haha, i'm glad she approves.

Hopefully this thread will attract the attention of a modding genius who can answer said question

None of the game's current modders have any plans for this. If anyone new comes by and wants to do some aesthetic modding, Heavenfall is the one to talk to. He has been working with the models for months. While I don't personally want a mod that focuses on something like this, I encourage anyone who does to mod away. I tend to stick to mods that have a more gameplay focused value.

Aye, the faces could be a little better and while we're talking aesthetics - could some kind modder make additional clothing meshes for the models? I'm particularly thinking of feminine haberdashery that is economic with the amount of cloth used.

But yeh, perving apart, gameplay mods are more important.

Thanks for the response, that certainly puts my question to rest, unfortunately.

However, Seanw3, do the in game character models not affect your opinion of the game? I mean I certainly believe gameplay > graphics, but I can't help but wonder how, as an artist / 3d modeller, you could take pride in such creations.  I think the actual creatures themselves look great, but the humanoids look really really average. 

Normally i'd just shrug it off, since in most 4x games you're not there to look at individual units.  But in this game, they specifically create a feature that allows you to define the appearance for your Sov and Units, and then give you really half assed options. I wasn't expecting guild wars 2 level of hair and face etc options, but at least make the few that are available look like they were modelled by a professional, and not an undergrad.

/End rant,    just wanted to explain why I would bring up such a question in relation to a 4x game

Heads are very tricky to alter, I haven't managed it myself. The reason is they contain an animated texture container for the blinking eyes. Using that container requires a .ddl from Stardock's kumquat engine that I haven't managed to get to work on 64-bit win7.

Anyway I have no interest in doing any of this purely cosmetic stuff, but if anyone wants to try it out I'll be here to help.

Thanks for your response Heavenfall,  it's appreciated.

If I had the expertise myself to do it, I certainly would, but my skills with maya and 3ds max are limited at best.

Thanks for the heads up regarding the heads,  however on a side note, I assume that something such as hair wouldn't be affected by this? (im just assuming its a seperate model to the head itself)

Cheers all.

Correct, hair is different.

Evilsince84,

Would you be happy with changing the face textures without altering the models? If so, that is actually much easier to do. I was able to slap some celtic looking woad paint on one of the faces and see it in game within 10 minutes. 

I can give you a brief walk through of how I did it if you like.

To me, it would be like looking into the face of an ant and deciding they aren't pretty enough. A godking doth not care the look of his subjects. What I would like is a more intense cell shaded effect or some discoloration to make each battle look like stained glass. But none of it matters. What matters is the numbers. So many numbers.

Yeah, modifying the textures isn't too difficult. We just need a skilled artist or graphical person to sit down and make a variety of faces or something. Frankly, I'd love to see more faces; right now there is too little variety and not enough to really distinguish each character from one another.

EDIT: More clothing, armor, and weapon variety is also always a win.

Just do like me, play with your eyes closed!

Oh on with Sean's Megalomania again >_<

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

@Jshores

Thanks for your reply, and sorry for the delay in response.

Mate yeah, even changing the textures would certainly be a start.  I'd love to hear how you did it if you have the time to post

Cheers

I can only do xml stuff.  Modding graphics, have absolutely no clue.  I'd have Chocobos instead of horses if I could. 

First, 

Start here if you are in the same boat as I am, meaning little to no knowledge of textures etc.

https://forums.elementalgame.com/433244

Ok, with that out of the way, I took an easier route to modify one of the skins.

I grabbed a skin out of the Elemental: War of Magic gfx directory that was already saved as a PNG. I opened the PNG in Photoshop, made sure all layers were selected and started drawing. Then I saved the file as a PNG. 

Then I copied one of the skin objects from CoreSkins into a new XML document, changing the name, internal name and the filename. Saved the file. Went to the sovereign creation screen in Fallen Enchantress, and I could see my new skin.

The thread I linked above has ways of doing it that are only slightly more time consuming, but yield better results. If I was doing more than just trying to see if it worked, I would have used those methods instead.

Awesome, thanks for the instructions.

I'll give this a go later tonight and see what I can do

Cheers mate.

Just a small follow-up, I was able to figure out how to export the animated eye texture correctly. Actually the problem was that I was overthinking it, the game handled all the animation itself I just needed to give it the right texture type.

Anyways, the point being, if anyone's interested in that sort of stuff, it is certainly doable.