Subscribe to download
Faction Colored Empire Artillery

Thanks a lot for the information. Bugman XXXXXX for you

Yes, you will need to make wsmodels with these changes, but Ole's Asset Editor should be able to do that and generate the XMLs perfectly right at the click of a button. All you need is to assign your textures in the Asset Editor menu to the right paths in the rigid model (the model you would edit in Asset Editor. Editing colors in a SEM is pretty much the same as with any other unit. The biggest challenge would be that big models also have big and often complex textures, but that's it. Another suggestion, is you can swap around which mask colors are where, then generate wsmodels with just the mask changed, and you can get a lot of color variation by just referencing different wsmodels in your variantmeshdefinition.

@Snek Thank you so much for the detailed response! I have a bit of experience with textures for game, looks not as complicated as I thought.
Will I need to make any changes to the xml.material or .wsmodel files? As I understand it yes, I have a skill issue with these files.

I want to make a paint for some SEM dinosaurs of lizardmen. Are there any things I need to be careful with? I'd welcome any advice

As you cut out/copy those layers, copy them to a parallel version of that texture image where you will make a "mask" file. Using either color editing or even a paintbrush tool, make a blob of color on the mask that overlaps the elements of the base_colour you want faction colored. What you want is a base_color where elements are greyscaled, and a mask where a blob of either red, green, or blur overlaps where you want faction colors 1, 2, or 3. Those faction colors are defined in database tables and can be overwritten by individual unit.

I recommend opening this mod up to see what files should look like. This is pretty straightforward except for the TWO mask files I use on different parts of the main models to make the wheels different colors.

@not-so-skaven, sure, I am happy to try to explain. Opening up this mod in RPFM or Asset Editor would be a good way to compare against vanilla assets. Basically, if you get into the game's texture files you will see a lot of files labeled by names ending in "base_colour". This texture is, as it says, the base color.

If your base color is something wooden that you want to turn into faction color, you would extract that texture somewhere to edit (The Discord can tell you how to do that), and you cut out all the "wooden" parts of that texture and use chroma/saturation keying to turn them white/grey. Basically you desaturate the color from it.

Hi Snek!
Sorry to bother you, is there some sort of guide on how to add faction colors to models without them? I searched on modding gen and couldn't find a suitable topic.

Yes, this should still work.

Is this still works?

Fair enough, haven't played empire yet so did not know that canister shot is now in base game. That's pretty cool.

Yes, 5.0 created a bug where swapable projectiles having a shrapnel or explosion caused a CTD. To my knowledge that is not resolved and easily 1/3rd of the artillery options began causing CTDs. If I get a chance to resolve those I will make it visible again. 5.0 also added grape shot as an upgrade through the novelty engineers school, so it would function weirdly with another canister shot being just available by default.