See-Through Textures - Editing weapon mod textures/meshes

[sirfloopy]

I've had this idea mulling around in my head for a while, now, but I haven't been sure how I should approach it. So, as many of you may have noticed, some of the weapon mods in ME3 are damn ugly, and some look very impractical to boot. (The power amplifier in particular obstructs the shooter's vision and blocks their view of the sights, which would make it much harder to shoot accurately.)

I've wondered if it was possible to hide weapon mods for some time, and just have them not produce any visual change in the weapon at all. In singleplayer, it particularly annoyed me to have random, bright patches of weird colors on my weapons when their mods weren't fully upgraded, and any lights on them running through the colors of the rainbow before I got the respective mods to Level V. Even then, the red lights tended to clash with the weapon's original color scheme. So if anyone knows what exactly affects those (and if it's possible to remove these changes, such as by blacking out any "pattern" textures), that would be awesome as well.

But what I'd really like to know is whether it's possible to hide the weapon mods that have actual 3D models, like the scope, power amp, extended barrel, etc. I noticed the other day while playing ME1 that a railing on a catwalk wasn't textured on all sides; if I crouched down and looked at it from the open bottom, I could see through it, since there were no textures applied to the inside of it. I thought it might be possible to replicate this for the weapon mods, or find some other way to make them invisible.

Am I getting hopeful over a lost cause, or is there some way to make textures transparent? (This would be my preferred option, since a texture change to weapons applies to both singleplayer and multiplayer.) And if there's some alternate method of hiding the weapon mods, I would love to hear it as well.

[sil]

I suppose you could export the 3d model of the mod, shrink it to be miniscule and reinsert it, that would work. No idea on other ideas, I'd assume there is a way of getting the bonus to appear without the model.

[ottemis]

While some objects will have a texture associated with it that can map transparent area's, unles this is already hooked up to work, it won't be something you can do straight out of the box.
For the weapon mod models, there is no reason to have transparency so my assumption would be you can't control transparency of the model through the textures in any way.

In theory you should be able to disable any colour/pattern overlays for the weapon mods, assuming they are controlled by tint/stripemaps. You can black out channels on those textures to disable their overlay function. You'd have to do a search, I've personally not really looked at weapon mods yet at all, so not entirely sure how it is handled and where they are located in the texture tree.

[sirfloopy]

Thanks for the suggestions, Ottemis. I had looked at tint maps before, and for some reason I just never found the weapon textures. But now I have, and the possibilities are actually better than I had thought. Upon further inspection, I noticed several small, dark blue stripes on most of them that corresponded to their glowing parts. So this means that blacking out the tint maps should not only remove the patterns, but also blot out any glowing lights on the weapons.

I've been hoping this extra benefit was possible for a good while now, because who the hell puts nonfunctional, brightly glowing lights on their weapons and armor? The lights on the armor, I could at least black out in the armor customization screen. But now I can get rid of the lights on the weapons as well. Happy day!

As for the mods that have actual 3D models, I can edit the tints for those as well, now that I've finally found them. So even if they're still there, at least they won't be glowing any more. And I will keep searching for a way to hide them completely.

I'm still not sure what BioWare was thinking with those damn things. Honestly, a giant block of metal that completely blocks the weapon's sights...

[ottemis]

Cool =) Yeah, honestly I've never liked they change appearance per level. Having no direct control over their look always bugged me.

I'm gonna leave this thread open for now, should you have any more questions or remarks regarding this issue. Once you feel this business is concluded do you mind requesting a lock for this thread yourself?

[sirfloopy]

Sure, I can do that. But first I want to see if anyone has more ideas about the mods with actual 3D models. I know mesh modding is pretty common in ME3. And I'm pretty sure any mesh changes made on singleplayer objects transfer quite nicely to multiplayer. For instance, the Re-Scoped Avenger, Mattock, and Vindicator mod works in both.

So maybe I can see about changing the weapon mods' meshes to a really small block that just goes in the middle of the weapon where nobody will see it. Although that might require a texture resize to avoid buggy textures poking out of the weapon... This is probably going to be a headache. But dammit, I want this to happen. And unless there's some catastrophic error in the texture modding, I should at least be able to remove the random weapon colors and glowing lights pretty soon.

[ottemis]

If you rescale the mesh, you don't need to worry about resizing the textures. They can't unhook from the mesh, that's not a thing that can happen.
You just gotta make sure you preserve the weighting so when you import into a 3D program, you cut out the 'Skin' before you rescale and move, then paste it back in when done.
In 3DS Max, you can find it here, just right click on it and 'Cut'. Scale/move the mesh then right click on 'Editable Mesh' and select 'Paste', should place it back.


When you Scale the mesh, do a vertex selection of the entire thing so it stays in place as you scale it.



I've edited your topic title to be a bit more descriptive btw. If people have similar questions in the future, it might be a bit easier to find =)