Various Issues [1.12.1] Blood Elf conversion.

[Method]

I'm converting a Blood Elf to vanilla to as a Gnome replacement, going to turn it into a High Elf.

Have four major problems I'd like to resolve if possible. These are probelms I can't really find any solutions for despite searching for solutions.

First problem is this:[RESOLVED]

1) I edited the blood elf eye by converting the BLP to a PNG (BLP2PNG)
2) when I converted it back to a BLP file, it looks like this, really weird. Obviously shows up like this in-game.



No idea how to stop the conversion process from doing this. I think the problem boils down to the compression of the PNG file. and sadly I don't really know how to stop the file from being compressed.

[Solution] Turns out editors like paint.net and Gimp save png's in a strange way, Photoshop was much more effective, especially when I found the BLP plugin.

Second problem is this:

1) I have blood elf textures, but the gnome textures show up in game, they're directly linked to facial hairstyles and hairstyles. where a hairstyle has a specific facialupper, and facial hair has a specific faciallower, no idea how to turn these off, no idea what dbc file they're contained in (if any)



2) The most obvious solution is, remove the offending textures -- when I edit these textures to remove the texture (thus it won't show up) this happens, this is also what happens if I remove the link to the texture in the DBC file.



Seems like the game uses a default texture or something. Don't know how to solve this.

Third problem is this: [RESOLVED]

1) Gnome Male and Gnome Female share hair files, this means I get stuff like THIS



Wouldn't be a huge issue, but since gnomes run around and stuff all the time, yeah, problem. Also the gnome hair files are still coming from somewhere.

[solution] simple fix, duplicated the hair texture files and edited all female entries in the DBC file to the new file, then I replaced the old one. This means they no longer use the same files.

Fourth problem is this:[RESOLVED]

Gnome NPC's still use default gnome textures, instead of blood elf ones, no idea how to fix this one. Technically it makes no sense for the model to change and the texture to remain the same.

[solution] after countless man-hours, organised all the BakedNPCtexture files and consolodated them into easy to manage race sections, then I could just duplicate all of the gnome textures, find a suitable replacement file in my Burning Crusade client and there we go, resolved. Not absolutely perfect, but almost perfect.



If anyone could help with any of these issues, I'd be grateful, I'd also learn a lot for future swaps.

[fakepanda]

Fixing hair is easy, just make female or male use diffrent hair files in charsections.dbc.

Fourth problem is happening because you changed the default gnome model to blood elf. In order to make all gnome NPCs look like blood elves you would have to edit every gnome backednpctexture

[Method]

Fixing hair is easy, just make female or male use diffrent hair files in charsections.dbc.

Uh, where is the DBC file?

and how do I edit the path?

[schlumpf]

Fixing hair is easy, just make female or male use diffrent hair files in charsections.dbc.

Uh, where is the DBC file?

All DBC files are in the exact same location, DBFilesClient?

[Method]

Fixing hair is easy, just make female or male use diffrent hair files in charsections.dbc.

Uh, where is the DBC file?

All DBC files are in the exact same location, DBFilesClient?

Sorry, I meant the lines for gnome females, I have the file open.

Is this just trail and error? how do I know which ones are male and which are female?



[edit]

did some trial and error, think I get it, fixing up the gnome females hair as we speak.

[edit2]

awesome, this seems to be working.

[fakepanda]

Fixing hair is easy, just make female or male use diffrent hair files in charsections.dbc.

Uh, where is the DBC file?

All DBC files are in the exact same location, DBFilesClient?

Sorry, I meant the lines for gnome females, I have the file open.

Is this just trail and error? how do I know which ones are male and which are female?

read wiki
http://www.wowdev.wiki/index.php ... ctions.dbc

[Method]

Fixing hair is easy, just make female or male use diffrent hair files in charsections.dbc.

Uh, where is the DBC file?

All DBC files are in the exact same location, DBFilesClient?

Sorry, I meant the lines for gnome females, I have the file open.

Is this just trail and error? how do I know which ones are male and which are female?

read wiki
http://www.wowdev.wiki/index.php ... ctions.dbc

Nice, managd to fully fix all gnome female hairstyles! can take that one off the list!

thanks for the help.

Moving on to the BakedTextures now, seems like a lot of work to segregate and update the textures, but I'll get it done, hopefully.

[edit] Literally spent all this time getting the specifc gnome baked textures (i found all of them), and I modified them, and it literally made no difference in game.

[Method]

[update]

Think I managed to fix my first issue, the progress of compression is slightly more complex than I had anticipated, and the game won't read blp's unless they are blp 2 with dxt compression.

Look like I finally got a high elf in game though.
So, first problem is solved, so is third.

Still need help with 2 and 4.

[Psojed]

Hi, I'm quite the noob with modeledits myself, but I will try to help.

Fourth problem is this:

Gnome NPC's still use default gnome textures, instead of blood elf ones, no idea how to fix this one. Technically it makes no sense for the model to change and the texture to remain the same.

[update] I found ALL of the BakedNpcTextures and edited ALL of them to a default blood elf texture, but this made NO difference in game.

If anyone could help with any of these issues, I'd be grateful, I'd also learn a lot for future swaps.

I read somewhere that every NPC uses its own textures. If that is true, you would probably have to find the corresponding texture set for every single NPC instead of the default one.

But I also found a guide on how to make a race swap that does not affect NPCs. Theoretically you could be a blood elf and all the NPCs could still be gnomes. Since your player model looks fine, this would solve the issue.

edit: forum didn't let me post the link to the guide, so I used shortener: http://goo.gl/VhDH8o

[Method]

1) Those textures you're talking about are the BakedNpcTextures, they're static texture sets for NPC's, complete with the NPC clothing, skin colour, everything. The problem is, even though I found all of the Gnome textures through a process of eliminating all other race textures (lengthy process), and I edited those gnome textures to look like Blood Elves, it made ZERO difference in game when I replaced those texture files in both the patch.mpq and the main mpq.

2) I don't really want to have gnome npcs in the game though, I kinda wanted to do a full conversion, already removed most mentions of Gnome in-game, and got rid of the majority of gnome sounds. I'd rather go through the process of transforming each gnome texture into a similar Blood Elf texture, I want to turn gnome mage textures into the blood elf male textures for example. Basically, I'm going for a full conversion, having gnomes in-game will detract from this.


The only thing I can think about is, either my blp files are in the incorrect format (not likely)

or my blp files are getting overwritten by an mpq (somewhat likely)

or some npc's aren't using baked textures (kinda unlikely)

[edit] I was just playing on Nostralius and I came across a gnome with the correct face!



his old equipment is taking on the new textures. This is still a problem, but meh. not much I can do about this one right now. I'll replace as many gnomes as I find with matching textures.

Some, if not the majority of gnomes I encounter are still broken, but at least this is a sign of progress.

[edit]

Just realized, actually, I could've edited every gnome and just gave it  a blood elf face, because that would've meant every npc would keep their armor, but have the correct faces, that seems more straightforward than my first plan, Going to do this today.

[edit2]

Wow, you can automate the entire process in Photoshop. Imagine singlehandedly editing all of these files?



[edit3]

Ah, much better. So most gnome textures in the game are fixed now I suppose, just need to repeat this process for any new gnome models I find.



Still need help with 2.

[Gurluas]

Number two is clearly a DBC issue in facialhairstyles I think.

[Method]

Can't even find that dbc file in my MPQ's

Only issue I still have is 2 for anythone reading this thread..

The rest of the issues are now resolved.

If I ever get 2 fixed, I'll repay back the help by making a modelling guide.

[Method]

Found "A" facialhairstyle dbc file, however, i have no idea how to even begin deciphering this.

[sshroud]

Found "A" facialhairstyle dbc file, however, i have no idea how to even begin deciphering this.

Visit pxr.dk for documentation of the DBC files.

[Method]

I alreadylooked at the documentation for that dbc. It isn't very complete for vanilla.

There is still no way to determine which race is which.