Inglorious Adventures of S3DSpy Texture Modding

[knowom]

I'm trying to make things more natural so I used the same texture for the floor both inside and outside the buildings overall it's a good improvement in my eyes looks much better and also corrects or mask some of texture problems the zone originally had.













I'm curious in case any EQemu developers with knowledge on the subjects could tell is it possible to change the Tree's and substitute them with other objects from other zones like Grimling Forest mushrooms? Either client side or server side or both and they can be deleted like doors correct?

[knowom]

A bunch of new updated screenshots. I think I have the zone basically done at least other than the lava and water and tweaking the environmental clutter on wall textures like signs none of which is all that vital or important frankly. The size of the .s3d file is enormous compared to the default file 2.55MB to 138MB and that's without redoing the water or lava textures which probably would have bumped the size up to about 175-200MB range. The textures are all 2048x2048 however and could defiantly be dialed back to a more conservatively texture size resolution of 1024x1024, 768x768, or even 640x640 and they'd still be bigger than Luclin's 512x512.

It seemed like a few textures within the .s3d weren't used at all. I'm guessing developers had them in a texture folder for the zone when working on them and forgot to delete some when they compressed together the .s3d file, but that's just my best guess.

Here's new screenshots you'll notice a lot are pointing at walls that's where signs and other environmental details would have gone normally like skulls, signs, armor, and weapons hanging on walls. Anyways this is the overall looks of how I finalized things for the zone.

[knowom]

[knowom]

That's the last of them. Nothing much left to do with Grobb overall.

[trustandfall]

This is really, really cool looking. Nice work!

[knowom]

In case anyone is curious in trying this I'm adding the texture conversion pack kit excluding S3DSpy to Google Drive that's the only program you'll need. I've included a folder with the appropriately renamed .bmp files that you simply add with S3DSpy to your Grobb.s3d file and a text file sort of explaining what was done exactly to which texture file names.

I also included the used textures files prior to the appropriate file renaming and extension renaming changes just in case anyone wished to scale down the textures to converse disk space. Uncompressed these textures take up a lot of space because they are 2048x2048 textures. I'd recommend copying and pasting a backup of your original Grobb.s3d file to EverQuest\backup in case you decide you don't care for the texture mod.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1YE...it?usp=sharing

Feel free to experiment trying it out and enjoy S3DSpy can be found here. I'd recommend copy Grobb.s3d into the extracted Grobb texture folder then pointing S3Dspy to that adding the texture then taking that modded file and copying back into your EQ directory like I said above though good idea to backup your original Grobb.s3d file some place safe first.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/eqem...3.zip/download

[Shendare]

I know I'm necroing this thread, but I just started experimenting with swapping out textures, myself, and came across this one while Googling S3DSpy. Awesome!

It's a lot of fun seeing Felwithe (my testing zone) take on a whole new visual life. Even the low poly counts aren't too bad when you've got 1k uncompressed textures on everything instead of 256x256 dxt5. (DDS compression is highly lossy!)

I made a quick app to auto-convert images to DDSes with mipmaps, or .dds files to .png (or another format) for editing.

Makes it mighty easy to extract the files with S3DSpy, convert public domain .png or .jpg or .gif textures to .dds, and swap the new textures back into the .s3d.

The only slowdowns are:

1. Some of the old zones name the textures whatever.bmp, even though they're actually .dds images. You have to rename each new texture as you import it so that it exactly matches the previous filename. Blah.

2. You have to exit the client and come back in whenever you change something in a .s3d zone file. The client doesn't expect those files to change while it's running, so it appears to do some file pointer caching. Swap out a texture while the client's running and try to zone back in, and the pointers will fail for the new texture and everything after, so you get the white surfaces.

#2 you can't do anything about, but I'm looking into whether I can patch S3DSpy so that it'll automatically rename extensions when needed during importing/exporting, and to get rid of that annoying confirmation popup for each imported file.

Some work-in-progress screenshots showing enhanced texturing:

http://imgur.com/a/acJ4p

Fun times!

[knowom]

There is a plugin for GIMP (a open source Adobe PS basically) that adds a lot of DX compression based export modes and plus can create mipmaps. I think I converted mine to DXT5 or DXT3 upon export they are fairly similar in terms of image quality and file size. I think 1k texture sizes or 768x768 is a reasonable size. I chose 2K just to use for demonstration purposes. Most textures are 256x256 or 512x512 by default.

Here's two tools you might find useful DZoneConverter_1.3 & EverQuest Zone Viewer.

EverQuest Zone Viewer you might find useful you can view zones and texture with it from a s3D file it's quicker than loading the game plus with it you can walk through walls so a real good way to test and look at zones your texture editing.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1...ERhUkxfTmlSRDA

DZoneConverter_1.3 you can export files from a s3d file like .OBJ model files which can be imported into a 3D program like Blender.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/eqem...se_mirror=osdn

Here's a little example of a froglok model exported with DZoneConverter_1.3 into Blender I played around with a little I didn't actually UV texture map it just used a texture material. I also used some of the tools to distort/reshape the model itself it in different ways a little too. If these were player designed models with animations a tool like this and program like Blender would allow for a lot manipulation of it clearly 3Dmodeling is quite awesome stuff.
http://www.eqemulator.org/forums/showthread.php?t=38310

Anyway have fun on 2. Give a Everquest Zone Viewer a try it's a lot better and quicker than loading the actual game client way more efficient for texture editing. Great texture swaps btw I looks like you tried to keep relatively similar natural to the original look, but with higher resolution image quality of course.

[N0ctrnl]

I am very much a fan of the same look, but with higher resolution textures. Very cool.

[knowom]

Originally Posted by N0ctrnl

I am very much a fan of the same look, but with higher resolution textures. Very cool.

Yeah that's generally ideal though you can do subtle tweaks to like change just one texture like a snow to sand or wood to stone to make a zone seem familiar yet different.

It can look neat in certain zones doing stuff like that, but generally speaking I imagine most people would prefer higher resolution texture replacements with similarity to the originals just with better detail to the original design look and feel. Most might not want something too radically different though some certainly would. I tried just to show off a lot of variation so people could see the potential across the spectrum a bit.