I managed to get some custom clothing imported in and I got it working within the character editor but I can't seem to get the textures to work with any of them. I read the manual and it said to make them DDS bc1 but they still don't show up. I named them properly so I don't think that's the problem either. I'm kind of stumped on what else to try that I might've missed. I was also wondering with the upper body part for the shirt if you're supposed to export the shirt, body, hands and skeleton for that piece instead of just the skeleton and the shirt. I have this monk outfit I'm doing here. For the hood all I needed was the skeleton in the hood and for the legs I just needed the dress part and the skeleton but the middle part isn't showing up so I assume I'm missing something there as well. I don't know if anyone's tried to mess with this stuff yet but if anyone has any ideas on it I would appreciate it!
(I will probably give it another try with the body before anyone responds but just making sure to have my bases covered. Mainly the textures are the problem)

I'm on vacation at the moment so perhaps someone else can help. I'll be back at my work pc next week so if you still need help I'll check back here then. Its really hard to troubleshoot without seeing the actual files so you can send them to mjblosser@gmail.com and I can take a look next week. It does look like a texture is showing up, are you saying its the wrong texture, or no texture at all? I'm assuming you've followed the naming convention and formats EXACTLY?

Yeah, there's no texture showing up at all. I will send you the files but don't worry about it now, enjoy your vacation! I actually got him to work by just exporting the entire model and the clothing and then importing him in like any other object. The problem with that though is that you can only use the clothes on just the one guy and you can't use it with the other faces or body types and the mouth movement is messed up when trying to get him to talk. Also, he has no shoes! I guess that kind of fits the character though, LOL. I'm pretty sure I got the naming right and the correct formats and tried a couple different ways. I also used the texture converter from the store to make sure they were bc1 dds. There something I'm missing, I just don't know what. Anyway, if anyone else doesn't have a clue before you get back let me know what you find out. Thanks!

I took a quick peek at your files, and they seem to be missing the required SURFACE textures, and also the optional MASK textures. I'm still on vacation so I won't be able to do a deep dive until I get home, but I would guess this is why your textures are not showing up. But check the character pdf guide, I'm pretty sure it explains the format that all 3 character textures need to be in, as well as the optional MASK texture.

Also, I have no idea if any type of texture converter on the TGC store (or whatever it's called now) would work for characters. I always use Nvidia Texture Tools for dds conversion. It's free and it's what I would recommend, just to make absolutely sure you are saving to the correct format.

I did get a surface texture generated when I imported the parts through game guru, I must of forgot to put them in the zip file when I sent it to you. Although the texture it generated is 32 x 32 so I'm not sure why it made it so small. I didn't use a mask for the hood or the bottom section of the cloak but I didn't figure it was required since with the hood I didn't export the head, so I didn't think there was anything to mask. With the bottom section the cloak dress(I guess that's what you call it) covers the legs so I didn't use one there either. With the middle section I can't get that to show up in the character creator at all so I haven't got to the texture problem with that yet. I tried exporting it with and without the upper body and arms but either way it won't show up. I will give the Nvidia texture tool a shot though, maybe I am getting the wrong format for the textures through the converter.

edit: nvidia Texture tools didn't seem to make a difference but it is a handy program =)

Quick note: I noticed there is an extra underscore in the body texture filename. Easy error to make, I've done it myself.

I didn't even see that! Sad part is I've looked these over multiple times, LOL. Well, the shirt works now and it actually has a texture. I didn't use the mask so it looks like he has some kind of disease but it's actually working! Now the question would be why does this one work and not the others? I better double check and make sure there's nothing else I missed…

I was attempting to put a mask on the body and I think I came to a realization with it. Now the suit I used was from make human and I molded it onto the body but it comes with its own textures. And the body itself would have to use another texture so I made a white one for the mask. But once I see the results it appears the DBO doesn't know it uses two different textures. So, when putting clothes on the rig can you even use the original texture or do you have to repaint the whole thing along with the body to get a single texture to make it work? And with the hair/glasses/beard and anything else like that do you need to include the head for it to function properly with textures or just the accessory with the skeleton? Maybe that's my problem with the other pieces?

I got a chance to test out your character files. All textures working here.....once I added some simple surface textures in the correct format. Everything looks good, except of course the body is missing the hands which were not included in your export, but I think you already know that

For your body question. Yes you will need to combine the body and clothing onto a single texture. GGMAX expects each body part to be self contained on a single texture UV layout. And yes, this can be a huge pain in the butt. So you cannot use separate textures for the arms and shirt, you must combine them. And you will need a mask texture to show which parts of the skin are showing - that is - if you want the skin colors to change when you select a black head for example.

I did have some surface textures but for some reason when i used the model importer they were very small. I think I mentioned that above. Well, if that's all that's stopping them from working that should be easy to fix. I guess I was assuming the textures would show up either way with a goofy surface texture or not, just not as detailed.That is kind of a pain to have to combine the texture with the upper body part especially since I like some of the original paint jobs on some of the clothing I was looking at but I guess it's not that big of a deal. I guess I'm going to try to fix these up on my end and see if I can get some stuff going! Thanks for your help again!

No problem! Yeah you have to have all the textures in the correct format and all the channels populated correctly or it's not going to work. Even TGC has the surface textures wrong for the low-poly characters. That's why they look so weird and washed out.

Just make sure to follow the guide exactly. Good luck!

I think I'm back in business! I attempted some women's hair but for some reason despite being in the right spot it wants to be a beard, LOL. So I figured I would just test something simple to make sure I had it down. Now it's time to move on to the masks and see what kind of pain that's going to be

hm...

Looks like you're well on your way. Deep down I always knew it was only a matter of time before a Blender user came along who was willing to read the guide, get his hands dirty, and get it all figured out. Well done!

Thanks! I've been in a learning mood lately while working on my game so I figured I'd force myself to figure all this stuff out. With this one I'm having about 50-50 success. I got the hat working good and another headgear. I tried some women's hair again but for some reason the textures coming out transparent. I also tried the body again with the arms and I figured out a way to combine the texture of the clothing with the texture of the body part and keep the original paint job then bring it back into blender and reattach it to the skeleton. Once I imported it into game guru and then loaded it into the character creator parts I'm kind of getting the same problem as before but some of its textured. The arms are white and the cloth seems to be not textured but the rope around the waist has perfect color. I did just paint the arms white instead of skin color on the color texture as well as to the mask so that's probably part of the problem. I got frustrated by the end and move back to animations for a bit after having a couple failures. If it wasn't for the lip-synching the character creator has I probably wouldn't bother even trying to do the clothing with the character creator and just do the entire characters custom but I don't want my characters to be mimes I did also figure out how to retarget Maximo animations onto the skeleton so that's another incentive to get this clothing thing to work. I'm sure I'll get it figured out, I just have to grind on it a bit.

Hats, headgear, hair, and eyeglasses are definitely the easiest things to start out with. For the hair, hopefully a picture is worth a thousand words. This is 3ds max but the concept is exactly the same in Blender. Here is one of the aztec females, the hair is skinned entirely to the head bone, located in the correct position on the character's head as you would expect. Below that is the texture and alpha channel for reference if you're having transparency issues.

For your problems with the body, it's hard to visualize your problem without seeing it. Can you post some Blender pics showing what it looks like pre-export, along with the UV layout? Just keep grinding

I had the blender file with the replaced shirt and arms but I've been using several of them for animations and for clothing so I think I deleted the one I had. I got company over so I remade it as fast as I could while everyone was busy and somehow fixed the skin color showing through but the shirt still looks blank so it should have similar issues and need the same fix. I don't care if anyone tinkers with the file or uses the shirt so I'll just upload them here but here's what it looks like an blender as well. The fingers normal map is kind of messed up with this since I was remade it so fast and the neck is a little split from the head but it should show you what I got anyway.

I will try messing with the alpha channel to tinker with a hair when I get some more time later today. So yeah, if you wouldn't mind looking at it and telling me what I missed this time I'd surely appreciate it
I'm going to make a better one later today when I get more time to work on it

Alright, now the things of settle down I went back into the deeper look. With a hair the texture it uses doesn't have any transparency on it so necessarily there shouldn't be any reason that it should be transparent, or am I missing something? Here's what it looks like in the character creator

And here's what the hair texture looks like

I also put a picture of the results above of what I'm getting with the upper body . I double checked all the textures and saved the color and the normal on BC1 and the surface on BC3 and the mask on BC1. The Nvidia texture exporter does have several different options for each but I was just using the standard one.The rope on the waist shows but not the rest. As for the hair if you look at it the hair itself doesn't look fully transparent but the little hair ties or whatever you call them are fully transparent.You can see the color on the hair ties but not the hair.They all do have surface textures now that are the proper size so I don't think that's the issue still… I guess.

Thanks for the pics. Unfortunately I thought maybe I could pinpoint your issues from the pics alone but sadly I can't really tell what is going on. The UV's on the hair look like maybe they are scrambled but it's hard to know for sure. I guess I really need to see the files. Could you upload the Blender files and textures here, or email them to me?

Sure, here they are. I did post the files for the monk upper body but I edited the post so it must of got deleted. I had some family visiting so was rushing it. I included those in this file too along with the cowboy hat. I seem to be getting the issue with everything now even though I'm doing the same process as I did with the backwards hat. If we can figure out one of them and what's going on I think I can fix all of them. As far as I can tell I'm doing everything correctly but they just want to fight me every step of the way they look perfectly fine when bringing them into the importer with game guru Max but then go wonky after adding them to the parts.

Okey dokey. Here is what I found from your files.

1. COWBOY HAT. This one worked fine for me straightaway, so I'm not sure what the problem was. The only thing I modified was the surface texture alpha channel to bring reflectivity down to 4%.


2. MONK SUIT. This also worked mostly fine. I just had to modify a few textures. I changed the mask texture so that the mask was only in the red channel, as opposed to all 3 RGB channels to keep in line with the other mask textures. And again I modified the surface texture alpha channel to 4% reflectivity. The only other thing I noticed was some minor skinning errors around the neck - it's important to keep skin weights the same as in the templates. Any deviation from that will cause gaps.


3. FEMALE HAIR. I wasn't able to replicate the texture error you showed in your screenshot. Again I modified the surface texture alpha. Now this hair model isn't all that great to begin with, but it works. The transparency issue is a little more tricky. Even though the texture does not contain transparency, each individual piece of the hair gets sorted in a back-to-front order, that is why some parts of the hair seem to be showing through other pieces. Now I'm not sure how Blender handles things like this, you could probably Google it, but you need to set the drawing order of the hair pieces so that the innermost pieces get drawn first, and outermost pieces get drawn/rendered last. I actually released a free tool for 3ds Max users last year on Scriptspot that helps with this called "Draw Order Toolkit" : https://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/draw-order-toolkit




I've attached the modified files.

So it would seem like my problem with all of these is the surface texture that game guru is generating. As soon as I dropped your surface texture in for the cowboy hat and the suit they work right away. But, even if my surface texture wasn't great shouldn't the color still be coming through anyway? I would figure since they're made up of the metalness roughness and ambient occlusion those things would be affected but not necessarily the color. hm..it does seem strange that they worked for you right away but don't for me. So for the cowboy hat even before you adjusted the reflectivity the color was showing up just fine? Could it be the format of bc3 I'm saving the surface in?

but I guess if it is showing up for you fine than that would'nt be the problem either… Since your textures are working though on my rig something has to be the problem.
I did notice the next split with the monk suit. I had to pull it off the model with the arms and texture it with 3-D coat and then bring it back into blender and reattach it to the body. I was in a rush at the time so I didn't put it back in the right place exactly. I figured I would go back and fix that later. The girls hair is ugly to but I figured it was a good practice model

Yeah it sounds like you've mostly got everything down at this point. I figured the hair model was mostly a practice model. Now that I think about it, I don't think the GGMAX importer will generate the proper surface textures for CC parts since it really needs that extra channel for reflectivity, so it's best to save those out manually using an external tool like the Nvidia Texture Tools Exporter - your settings look ok to me.

No, your cowboy hat did not have the proper color with your original surface texture, but the color came through after I modified it. The alpha channel of the surface texture contains reflectivity, with black being 0 reflectivity, and white being 100% reflective. So with your surface texture containing a white alpha channel, it was 100% reflective which nearly totally overides the color texture. Good values for reflectivity are usually between 4-8% reflective for most materials.

Your original surface texture on the right, and my modified one on the left:

I think that was it! I don't recall seeing a setting for the alpha channel on the game guru Max importer so that's probably why my surface texture was washing everything out like you said. I forgot I bought this tool called X pack from the store a while back for making surface textures and that does have an alpha channel option. I went ahead and made a new surface for one of my test models and tested it out and now it works. I'm going to keep my fingers crossed but I think this problem is finally worked out Thanks again, I appreciate you Hanging in there with me to get this figured out. Now I have to figure out how to make some decent clothes, or just keep borrowing them from make-human, LOL.

Yup, that was definitely the problem. Tweaking the alpha even made my hat not look like it was made of Radioactive wax

Alright, apparently I do have one final issue and I swear I'll be done, LOL. The masking part. You said you changed it to the red channel above, what program are you using to do that? Or does it affect the mask texture from working being in the RGB channels? I created this tank top and everything turned out good but the mask doesn't seem to be working. I did it the same as before with the monk but the textures weren't working at the time but the mask seemed to be. I'm trying to figure out if the mask working at that time was a fluke and if what you did to change it is what I'm missing. I looked in the Nvidia texture tool and it does have color sliders down at the bottom but I'm not quite sure how to use them to get the same effect.

by the way, the skin texture showing through is the one I painted on there, if I make her black her body stays the same

edit: I tried some trickery and used another mask texture and gave it the name of my object and put it in the character creator folder. Everything was in the wrong place so it was messed up but the skin was changing to the proper color. So I went and tried to reverse engineer the mask texture by looking at the RGB channels of that texture. It looks like the red channel is the black and white mask channel and the blue and the green channel are just white textures or blank. So I put my mask texture through the surface generator I have and then made the other channels just white and the alpha channel black and it produced the white and blue mask texture that everything else has. I saved it in the proper format but it still doesn't want to work. So I can't figure out exactly why it's wanting to be a turd

Yeah just the RED channel is used for the mask texture. At the time of the CC's design, it was decided to reserve the GREEN and BLUE channels for future use for other effects. So any image editing software that allows you access to the individual channels will work (Photoshop, GIMP, etc). White for skin areas, black for everything else, all saved to the RED channel of the mask texture and saved to BC1 format. So best not to spend too much time making the perfect skin texture, since it will get overriden by one of GGMAX's auto-swap skin textures that does it's best to match the color of the chosen head.

I figured I might be wasting my time painting the skin, it also kind of makes it more of a pain when I was making the mask to separate the skin color from the shirt color rather than just having a bright red for the skin so I could selected easy and then change it to white. I did figure out how to put the texture in the red channel and I saved it correctly but the mask still isn't working. I did have it working before with the monk suit but I can't figure out how I did it and that one wasn't saved to any special channel. This is how I have it layered out

I must have something wrong because it is in the red channel and it is saved as a bc1 but it still doesn't want to work. I put the files below if you wouldn't mind helping me one more time to tell me what's wrong with the mask. That's the only part I have left to figure out and then I should be golden

Hoo boy, you really pushed my troubleshooting to the limit with this one. I couldn't get it working either, and I was about ready to lose my mind and tell you to report it as a bug. But I figured it out. The reason the skin swap wasn't working is because your mask texture wasn't using PURE white and black. The RGB values of your white was 247 instead of 255. And same for the black. So it seems the CC only interprets values of 0 for black and 255 for white when it reads the mask texture, and ignores all other values. Once I modified your mask texture, it worked as expected. Yippee. I've attached the modified files.

Well, I figured you weren't being challenged enough so this was all a tactic to help your troubleshooting skills, LOL. That is something I would've never thought of and only been able to fix by accident. I kind of assumed that white was white and black was black at least to a certain degree as far as guru was concerned. I didn't mean to make you tear your hair out but I sure do appreciate your help! This should be the last piece of the puzzle. Thanks again!

No problem. I didn't know that either, so I'm kind of glad it came up.