How do I work with this?

I had this crazy idea of putting my own face, and maybe my own body as my character skin, by replacing my character's skin with real pictures, using texmod.
(seriously, wouldn't that be really cool?)

But I was a bit disappointed when I saw the skin textures are really more complicated then I had hoped for.
This is the texture for my character I'd like to mod:



Does anyone know if their is a way to organize this better?

just try stretching ur face over top of the existing one =) it's not gonna look too good though prolly ;-)

What I had in mind was some way to stretch this textures on the screen like they appear in-game. Right now, it looks like some sort of figure you print then fold together. I wanted it to look like a map of our globe, stretched across the paper.

But since it isn't, isn't there a better way to do this then Eragon suggested?

all 3D objects are achieved using two parts: a 3D mesh, and a 2D texture. the texture is wrapped around the mesh to give you the basic look of that object. to paste your own face onto a model, you pretty much have to do what eragon suggested.

also, keep in mind that texmod only changes textures, not the mesh underneath it. so while you can potentially paste your face onto a model, it won't look right unless the underlying mesh happens to match your face also.

however, if you are Jet li or Adriana Lima, your face is already in the game

It doesn't work like that. This is a texture for a 3D model and the results will not be pretty if you try to organize the layout another way.

You can add your face to the texture, but it will require a little more than cut and paste if you want it to look natural. If you're not very good with Photoshop, you could probably have a friend (or a volunteer from here) help you with it.

Yes, I've realised when modding other textures. But as there is a visible pattern in the image, I believe you could reorganize the textures to make editting just that little bit easier. After editing you would have to place the textures in the same order you started with.

But I suppose nobody has done this before...

What you see is what you get. The texture, as you see it, gets wrapped around the wire mesh of the character model and displayed. Since there's no program available for extracting the wire meshes from the .dat file, the folding rules are guess-n-check. If you really wanted to engage in a work-intensive process, you could systematically produce a series of test textures using small patches of transparencies and solid colors to figure out the lines where the texture gets folded around the mesh, then apply some educated guesses and geometry to come up with the angles that it folds at, then take a whole bunch of pictures of your subject from the appropriate angles, then paste together the images for each polygon. I'd suggest using your image-editing software's smudge tool to clean up the edges/folds where the images meet.

Thanks. Those are some intresting thoughs. I hadn't thought of using the smudge tool. My first attempt at putting my face in-game already looks more realistic after smudging a little.

It reminded me of the front cover of Sepultura - Arise cover ^_^

I think I should keep you updated about this. This is what I have so far:




And this is the in-game result (looks pretty nice already imo) :

lmao nice boxers haha

In other words if he wants his character to look like him he has to make his own mesh and stretch the 2d texture across it. More trouble then its worth imo.

Well you'd best use photoshop so you can put your face on in another layer, make it slightly transparent to line it up and stretch it then adjust the color to match your char's color of skin tone.

Oh then of course flattening the layer back down and saving it as the file name so texmod will remember it and load it.

lol.... this was my exact thought, also xDDDD

That's almost exactly how I did my face. I've put the texture layer on top, set it to soft light, then put my picture in a seperate layer underneath it.

I also had my ears and hands done, but I forgot to save the photoshop project (stupid stupid stupid!!). I did save the .dds file, but it looks messy and I want to rework it.

EDIT: HA I know what I'll do, I'll cut away the messed up part and replace it with the original texture from my backup file!

EDIT 2:
Before:

After:

lol thats pretty funny hahaha

so how accurate did it turn out to be?

That came out great!
I'd just adjust the skin color now, yours or his
Neat! Love the boxers too, make ones with tie dye :P

I haven't figured out how to match the skin colors
The original texture and my real face textures are on different layers..
could you (or anyone else) tell me how to do this? :P

Can't you just use the eye drop tool to match the color of the original skin then add it to yours?