TERA Modding - Help Request (1 Viewer)

[Magraal]

I've been figuring my way through modding Tera, have successfully spliced .dds's into .gpk's and so on, but due to the lack of a mod for my favourite Castanic Leather skin decided to have a crack at making one myself. Successfully edited the the base texture in GIMP (will admit I used a bit of copy-pasta from someone else's mod as I'm not terribly artistic) however upon loading up Tera again I was faced with this problem-



As you can see in the image, her waist is completely vacant. I've tried editing the norm and spec files to match, but nothing changed. Have tried a number of combinations of edits to each file and still nothing. I assume by the lack of mods for this particular skin that others have run into this issue as well and wondered if anyone had made any headway into solving what is causing it? I can only assume there is a mask that forces those areas not to load from the diff, with the only solution I have come up with, other than finding and fixing said mask, is to try to hash up the base texture so that the groin is loaded from where the armor once was...

 

[fleet]

I'm glad you are learning how to mod.
Gentle reminder: Do not upload a mod you made using another modder's work without their permission.

 

[Ray Wing]

The problem is that there is no body mesh underneath of majority of armors in TERA (and other games too). So when you mod clothing texture to be transparent, the clothing is not covering that hole anymore. There is no way to fix that issue solely with texture modding. To fix it you have to edit body mesh itself, fill those holes and import mesh back into game. That is much harder than texture modding. And AFAIK it is not possible for TERA (and for majority of other games too). That holes in places of normally invisible body parts are made to avoid clipping issues, to improve game performance and to speedup game development. That is why it is pretty common issue for modders unfortunately.

The only thing you may do is to look for armors which have no holes or have only small holes, or are skin tight, so the armor itself may be recolored to look like skin.

 

[pop1337]

The problem is that there is no body mesh underneath of majority of armors in TERA (and other games too). So when you mod clothing texture to be transparent, the clothing is not covering that hole anymore. There is no way to fix that issue solely with texture modding. To fix it you have to edit body mesh itself, fill those holes and import mesh back into game. That is much harder than texture modding. And AFAIK it is not possible for TERA (and for majority of other games too). That holes in places of normally invisible body parts are made to avoid clipping issues, to improve game performance and to speedup game development. That is why it is pretty common issue for modders unfortunately.

The only thing you may do is to look for armors which have no holes or have only small holes, or are skin tight, so the armor itself may be recolored to look like skin.

From what I've heard, it's pretty tricky to do anything with TERA (this was a year ago). For example it was said that the client wouldn't recognize Mesh edits, Also take into consideration the people who've edited the Ears to make them match the hair on elins. It causes severe bugs at times simply changing the texture. I can't quote since I haven't modded in a long time, but there was a modder who said he attempted to add the mesh and it didn't work.

With that said there had been statements that you can hex edit some files. But on the contrary I do have a file that swapped the Santa 2012 with eh old elin swimwear.

The significance of all this is that I vaguely remember one modder stating that the new files have to be somewhat close to the new files... But if this is true why can we use the Uncensor elin patch (remove the ugly NA edits)? I think it has something to do with some sub-coding of the files, but once again this is purely speculation and also When i tried to replace the old elin leotard outfits it gave me a huge texture issue (of course at that time i probably modded the wrong files). Anyway, my only advice is that when modding remember to add the extension ".patched" instead of overwriting (which the GPK modifier does automatically and II assume you already know this).

Good luck