Exterminatus - Rival Species 2

Spacemarine Chapter Skin Packs

This readme will describe how to use the contents of this package to make your own custom spacemarine skins for Exterminatus(EX).

You will need a paint program that can edit Photoshop PSD files.  GIMP ( https://www.gimp.org/downloads/ ) is a free program you can use to edit the PSD images.
You will also need a way to convert images from your paint program into VTF files used by Source.  VTFEdit ( http://nemesis.thewavelength.net/index.php?p=41 ) is a free program for converting images to VTF format.  You can also get a VTF plugins to add VTF support to many popular paint programs ( https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Texture_Format#Utilities ).

In this archive you will find:
readme.txt
package_folders.7z
photoshop_templates.7z

package_folders.7z contains the folder structure to deploy your skins to your "sourcemods/ex" or "sourcemods/ex_alpha" folder.
For brevity I will assume you are working in the "ex" folder for this readme, but you can replace "ex" with "ex_alpha" if you prefer to work on the alpha branch.

Start by extracting package_folders.7z to your "ex" folder. You should now have a "sourcemods/ex/custom" folder.

photoshop_templates.7z contains 4 folders:
dread
marine
marine_medic
terminator
weapons
props

Each of these folders conatins PSD files for all the materials used by the IMP.  Edit these PSD files in your paint program to suit your chapter.
A basic edit to make would be to replace the colour in the "Paintwork" layer of each PSD with the primary colour of your chapter and the "Decal" layer with the insignia of your chapter.  You may also want to change the "Trim" layer to a suitable trim colour for your chapter.

Materials with glowing parts use the intensity of the alpha or transparency channel to determine how bright each pixel in the material should be.  I have included <material>_alpha.PSD files to provide the appropriate alpha channel values for the glowing materials.  How you apply the alpha channel will depend on the paint program you are using.

Save each PSD and re-open them VTFEdit.  You may need to export your PSD files in another image format such as PNG or TGA as I have had trouble importing transparent or glowing images into VTFEdit.  VTFEdit will give you many import options.  The options you should specify are specify the "normal format" and "alpha format" as DXT1.  For glowing materials (see above) you should use DXT5 instead.

For PSDs from the "weapons" sub-folder save the material to the "sourcemods/ex/custom/your_skin_pack_name/materials/models/weapons/" folder, with the name for the material as the PSD file (just with a VTF extension).

For PSDs from the "props" sub-folder save the material to the "sourcemods/ex/custom/your_skin_pack_name/materials/models/props/" folder, with the name for the material as the PSD file (just with a VTF extension).

For PSDs from all the other folders save the material to the "sourcemods/ex/custom/your_skin_pack_name/materials/player/" sub-folder that matches to the folder that the PSD came from.

You can now test your custom skins in-game by loading the map tech_adept_lab_879 , which features all the spacemarine player models.

When you are satisfied that your custom skins are working as intended:

Rename the "sourcemods/ex/custom/your_skin_pack_name" folder to the name of your custom chapter.
Zip up the "sourcemods/ex/custom" and you can now distribute this zip so others can play with your custom chapter.
Installing your skin pack should simply be a matter of extracting the "custom" folder to the player's "ex" folder.

If you have any problems, questions or would like to see your chapter shared through offical EX channels please contact ChromeAngel at Leader@40ksource.com