[Tutorial] How to make a Texture Mod (Prelude)

How to make a Texture Mod (Prelude)

Welcome to the tutorial on how to make a texture mod for The Walking Dead Definitive Edition! This is the prelude to the tutorial before we begin, and it's a lot to read but it's not hard, trust me. I just detailed a lot of information in here just to answer and hopefully answer any common questions one might have.

This first part of the tutorial is for using the application and extracting/editing/converting the textures. The second part of this tutorial is getting these textures working in-game and getting a mod file ready for distribution. It's worth noting that before we begin, you must have your extracted .d3dtx textures ready. (NOT .dds textures, .d3dtx textures)

The reason for this is that when exporting a texture from applications such as Telltale Explorer or even ttarchext as a .dds or a different image format (like .png or even .jpeg) is that the original header data from the d3dtx is discarded.

When converting with this tool (versus the other tools), the original .d3dtx header data is kept in a .header file. So when converting the .dds back to the original .d3dtx format this .header file that the tool generates is used/modified and merged back with the .dds texture to create the native .d3dtx format that the engine uses.

With that said, you can still extract the textures using Telltale Explorer or ttarchext but the RAW .d3dtx must be extracted, do not convert/save as a different image format.

It's also worth mentioning that you need to be mindful of the textures you select. Typically (unless you are an experienced texture artist) you would only really need to be modifying the diffuse textures. Diffuse textures are just the raw material/model colors and these textures typically have no suffix after them in their file names like _spec, _ink, _detail, _nm, etc. For example, sk54_lee_head.d3dtx is a diffuse texture, however sk54_lee_head_spec.d3dtx is a specular texture. These suffixes indicate and deal with other material properties like the specularity of a material, the normal/bump map of the material, or the ink/black lines on a material.

In addition to extraction, occasionally you may not find the texture you are looking for in the episode _texmesh archive. In the case of the definitive edition, the other place to look for these textures would be the main project archives. For season 1 for example, most of the common textures used are stored in ProjectSeason1_texmesh.ttarch2 archive.

It's also recommended that you have an image editor ready to use. If you are using Photoshop (which I use), you need to install this DDS plugin to read/edit/save .dds textures. If you don't have Photoshop you can use Paint.NET which is a free image editing software with DDS support. I don't recommend GIMP as the built-in DDS plugin doesn't support the newer DDS files that this converter spits out and seems to break very easily. Paint.NET is a great alternative.

Critical Note: Once again it's very important to mention that a lot of .d3dtx textures have Mip Maps, mipmaps are basically lower resolution textures that are embedded in the file and are used at a distance in the game engine to prevent aliasing and artifacts. This is critical and important to keep in mind when saving these textures. The formats as well must be the same and cannot change. Luckily this information is revealed to the user when extracting/converting the textures using this tool so you'll know when a specific texture needs to be in a specific format or requires mipmaps.

Click here to Proceed to Part 1 of Making a Texture Mod