User:Empress Amarox/How to edit capes

= How to edit your guild cape with texmod =

This is an instructional page for editing your guild cape with texmod. These instructions assume a basic working knowledge of programs used; however, I do try to be as gentle as possible in respect to those that simply have no clue.

Requirements
To properly follow this set of instructions, you'll need a couple things. The following list will list what is required to follow these instructions; however, other free options are also available, such as GIMP. My instructions will not be for other programs though, so you may have to adapt them for what you possess.

Required software
texmod Adobe Photoshop NVIDEA DDS plug-in

Preparations
The first thing you will need to do is load Guild Wars through texmod in Logging Mode. Once you do this, you will need to go in-game, log in of course, then just hold down your + key until you see your cape turn a transparent green color. I find holding down the key is much more time efficient than hitting + 100's or even 1000's of times. Holding it down, you'll get to the texture faster, and if you go past it, you can just hit your - key a couple times to get back to having it selected.

Note: Change your output settings to save textures in dds format rather than bmp.

Once you find your cape's texture, go ahead and hit Enter. You're not actually done yet though! It would be a common mistake to simply stop here and start working on your cape. We need to finish getting our cape before we go and start editing it, don't you think?

That's right. We don't have our cape yet. We have 1 of 4 parts of it. While you may have not thought about it, a cape is actually comprised of 3 textures (6 if you wanna get technical, but I'll get to that later). I'm not talking about the little thing that holds your cape on or anything like that; I mean the cape. To cut straight to the chase, the 2 other capes textures you need to find are your PvP cape textures. You will need both Red and Blue. The last one is the one in your guild window. That one is easy enough to get. Just open your guild window and nab it.

Option 1: You can get a guildie to help you for 1 minute. Scrim against a guildie, have them run to the middle and you do the same. Just hit + until you find the textures and save them. If you go through them several times and can't find it, make sure you didn't accidentally filter them. / will reset filtering by default. This is the easy way.

Option 2: You don't have guildies on that are willing to help you. Go ahead and enter Random Arenas and hold down your + key and hope you find your texture before much of anything happens in the match, usually you can find it no problem before anything really serious happens. Just kinda move around with your team while you're still getting to the "sit around and see what the other team has" stage. You should have found it by the time you're engaged, and then you can finish playing the match normally, so you aren't a liability to your team.

At this point, you should have your normal cape texture and either a red or blue one. You need to go ahead and continue with the RA scenario described above until you get the opposite color team and nab your cape from there. Once you're done with that, you can move on to the fun stuff.

Editing your cape
The best place to start here is deciding what exactly it is you want to do. Do you just want to add a bronze, silver or gold trim to your cape? Do you want to make certain parts shiny or translucent? Do you want to keep generally the same design as your original guild cape, or just change everything on it entirely?

Adding a cape trim
This is relatively one of the hardest steps in this tutorial. Most of the others are fairly straight forward, but this one will actually require a little bit of talent and patience on your part. But, hopefully you should be able to follow along and all will be right in the world.

Now, there's a couple ways of doing this... You need to decide right off the bat if you want to just find someone with your cape's shape that has a cape trim like you want, or if you're going to make it really hard on yourself and try to photomanip one from a screenshot found elsewhere. I suppose you could also make your own unique trim, but for sake of ease, we'll stick to the first two options here.

The first thing I'd do when going to edit would be to examine the already existing cape texture. The shape of the texture and your actual shape should distort a bit, so you'll need to understand how that will affect your design. Beyond this, we're now getting to the hidden textures within the textures that I briefly hinted at earlier. I'm actually talking about channels. Generally, with a texture like this you will have a Red, Green, Blue and an Alpha channel. Alpha, for Guild Wars, is what determines both how shiny or dull something is and how transparent or opaque it is.

How to get a cape trim
As I said before, you have two options. If you're going with the second option you either hate yourself, can't find anyone with the trim, or are really good with Photoshop and don't really care to bother anyone or go searching, or simply can't find someone, don't know anyone or none of your friends are on. Either way, it's going to be much harder because there will be distortions and you'll have to transform things, smudge things at 100% power, and cut and paste quite a bit to get it to look how you want. Either way, you'll need to know how to mask.

With the second option, you'll have the alpha mostly done for you (as per the trim) and you'll just have to mask the trim out and then you'll be good to go. This is incredibly easy, it just requires a little bit of patience. It would be a good idea to look up a good Photoshop masking tutorial at this time. I can give you a vague overview, but you're really gonna want a tutorial specifically for masking with full on pictures and stuff.

To start masking, assuming you've opened the cape trim from some top guild that you're going to take the trim from, you'll first want to drag that layer onto the new layer button (looks like a box in the bottom left hand corner of a bigger box) so it copies that exact background layer into a new layer. We're working in the Layer window here. Just hover over buttons in the Layer window till you find what I'm talking about, that's about the best I can do right now. Now click on that new layer you have, should be something like Background Copy, or similar. Now click the Mask button - it looks like a dark box with a white circle inside it. It'll seemingly create a new layer next to the layer you just made, this is that layer's mask. Once you click on the mask layer, it should set your brushes to black and white. Black is transparent, white is opaque. Play with your brush size and hardness, even opacity. Go over everything that isn't the trim with black -- if you mess up, you can switch to your white brush and paint back over it, this is the advantage of masking rather than using an eraser tool.

Once you're done masking you can either right click (in between the layer and its mask) and Apply Layer Mask, or you can just not bother doing that and leave the mask as it is. You can always hide the background layer and Copy Merged to just take out the trim on a transparency and Paste it onto your cape. Make sure you get the alpha layer too. You may need to copy it into a new window and your original cape as well and put a layer mask on one and erase through it so either the trim or your emblem shows. I talk about more complex alphas later in the alpha section.

Alphas
I figure this needs its own section. A lot of you guys would probably be wanting to whack your head into your keyboard to try to make it magically work otherwise. So, I'll just go ahead and give some useful tips...

1. Any darker of a color than the one you see there by default, including the default you'll have, will be considered transparency and will cause your cape to start to become invisible, the darker the color then the more transparent it will be. So, it's a good idea to not make it any darker, whatever you do. Unless you want holes in your cape or something along those lines. 2. It would be complete and utter hell to recreate your cape's design by desaturating it, then playing with brightness and contrast. Instead, I'm going to give you a neat little trick you can do. First, with your alpha channel selected and your alpha layer selected hit Ctrl+A on your keyboard to Select &rarr; All. Now do Ctrl+C to Edit &rarr; Copy. Now, go to File &rarr; New. The pixel size should be exactly the size you want because it'll automatically pick up on the image copied to clipboard's constraints by default. Hopefully you've already done tip #1. If so, now if you had an emblem on your cape you should have a bright white emblem drawn on this gray image, but relatively nothing much else. If you are changing this emblem to your own emblem, go ahead and select the color Dropper (I) and select the gray color, then select the Brush Tool (B) and color over the white with the same gray color as the rest. This will make the emblem you are removing no longer shine, and you will be left with a non-reflective cape. Continue editing the rest of your cape how you'd like. Keep in mind when adding stuff to your cape, keep everything shiny on a separate layer from anything dull, this will help later. We'll talk about that later, but for now we're skipping ahead to saying you've edited your cape to your liking and you're ready to do your alpha. What you do is on your Layer window make everything that should not be shiny invisible -- uncheck the eyeball looking thing in the Layer window next to it and it'll go away. Assuming it's a cape trim and an emblem, that's good. Go ahead and now Ctrl+Shift+C to Edit &rarr; Copy Merged. This just makes it so you copy all of your layers that are making up your shiny stuff, rather than just the layer you happen to have selected - trust me, it'll save you a headache. Now, paste this in the other window you made with your empty alpha with the emblem removed (or left, if you wanted to keep it). Now with the copy of your shiny stuff's layer selected hit Ctrl+Shift+U, or Image &rarr; Adjustments &rarr; Desaturate. This'll take all the color away. Now on your Layer window up at the top where it has a dropdown that says "Normal," go ahead and change that to "Screen" and taket he Opacity down to about 67%. You should now have a faint white outline of the stuff that should be shiny, but the rest of the cape that should be dull left unchanged, this is what you want. We're doing this here because you can't have layers in your alpha channel. But, go ahead and Ctrl+Shift+C (Edit &rarr; Copy Merged) and go back to your cape you've edited, go to Channels, select only the alpha channel, uncheck RGB, and Ctrl+P (Edit &rarr; Paste) and your alpha should now be replaced. That's how you do that. 3. Rather than making your finished product in your working file, go ahead and make a new file instead, just by copying merged and pasting it in there once you're happy. Both the cape itself in the RGB layers, and the alpha in the Alpha layer. You won't be able to save as dds if you have more than 1 layer, so if you somehow do, go to Layer &rarr; Flatten Image, and just hit disgard hidden layers while you do that and it'll get rid of them for you. Hopefully you made a backup before you did that though! 4. Save periodically. I know people say this a lot, but it's crucial. Sometimes your Photoshop might crash, or power might go out, or cat might disconnect your computer cables, there's no telling what could happen, so just save your work often. Make a psd and every couple minutes just hit Ctrl+S (File &rarr; Save) and it'll save for you. 5. Save your finished cape as a DDS file, you should have the option if you read #4 above and have the required programs listed above. You'll want to save as a "DXT5 ARGB 8 bpp | interpolated alpha;" otherwise, the game will not render it correctly (this is important!).

How to get your cape in the game
In your texmod /Out/ folder you should have a file called TexMod.log, unless you changed it somewhere. This file lists everything you took out of the game. More importantly, it lists the hex value the game associates with the texture, as well as what it exported it as. For example, it may say something like so:

0xAFF09C02|E:\Program Files\Guild Wars\texmod\Out\GW.EXE_0xAFF09C02.dds 0x10157198|E:\Program Files\Guild Wars\texmod\Out\GW.EXE_0x10157198.dds 0x24B6CCBB|E:\Program Files\Guild Wars\texmod\Out\GW.EXE_0x24B6CCBB.dds

The hex value is what is important, and that comes first, followed by a bar and the location it extracted the texture to.

What you need to do is make your own .log file, just open notepad and paste the lines that match the normal, blue and red cape you extracted from the game in it. Edit the locations to the locations where you saved the new textures. Once you do that, save the file in notepad as whatever you'd like, but just put .log at the end. For example, goldcapetrim.log.

To get the capes in-game, you need to open texmod and go to Package Build, fill in your name or nickname under author, a brief description, and select the log file you just made. Also make sure you have Gw.exe selected as the game, then click build. It'll ask you what you want to name it, just name it whatever you'd like. If done correctly, it'll say something like "3 textures" blah blah "successfully!" -- I forget. But something like that. If it says anything other than that, then make sure your log file is correct. Now your tpf file (mod file) is built, to see it in the game, just go to Package Mode, choose Gw.exe, select your tpf with the folder there, then hit Run. You should be able to see it in-game now if everything went well, and at this point you're either done or now you know you need to go back to the drawing board! :P

Additional Goodies
1. If you're having a hard time making your own custom cape design red & blue like the game does, then you can get a free plug-in from Flaming Pear called Color Swap and it'll help you out with that.</ul> 2. If you just simply can't figure stuff out on your own, I went ahead and uploaded my psd files from a cape I recently made. You can feel free to build off of these to create your own. You can get the main work file here and the alpha work file here.