UE1 - UT Bad Color/Blocky Bits on Skin Texture

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Superunknown II

New Member
Mar 23, 2008
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I was trying my hand at skinning for ut99. I got some pretty nice results out of photoshop until I loaded the skin up into the game. I'm sure I have the Image Size correct (256 X 256) but when seen in the game, it looks like the texture gets messed up.

"Messed up" as in, you can see these little blocky bits on them and the color is no longer as clean as it was in Photoshop. I used this app called Ut Skin MAKER V2.41 to make the skin files and loaded them into the app as .PSD so quality of the textures wouldn't be degraded. I checked this against the native ut99 skin textures (quality) in-game and this doesn't seem to happen to those, they are completely smooth and colors are radiant. Anyone know what the problem could be here with mine?
 

meowcat

take a chance
Jun 7, 2001
803
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18
Could you post a pic? UT textures also needed to have their colors reduced to 256 palletized (.pcx format). Also depending on what you have applied the texture to you may need to set the bNoSmooth variable to false for the given actor.
 

Superunknown II

New Member
Mar 23, 2008
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Ok, can you see the section on the models thigh (on the right) that's what happening with all the textures. You really notice it in the player setup screen, rather on when you see it in-game using that 'behindview 1' code. Palettize the textures to 256? I haven't figured out how to do that in this outdated version (Photoshop CS). And the textures are for the Male Commando, as you can see from the picture. Next, where do you set this bNoSmooth variable to false at?

SCRNSHOT1125.jpg
 

meowcat

take a chance
Jun 7, 2001
803
3
18
hmm, I don't quite know what the problem is (too dark? or just pixelated?). Could you post a screenshot of the texture as it appears in PhotoShop CS.

In the original Unreal and UT, all 24 or 32 bit textures were reduced to 8 bit palettized (to save memory). Basically a program was used to sort through all of the colors in a given texture, and select the 256 "best" colors to use and save that as a color palette. All of the pixels that were another color were given one of the 256 "best" colors. These algorithms were usually built into the Pint Program. In addition, if I recall correctly, Epic's own program Bright, could further combine the colors of several textures and pick the best 256 colors, allowing multiple textures to use the same texture palette (thus saving 256*24 bits of color information for each texture that used the same palette). This can result in some major problems for some algorithms though. If for instance you have a tiny bit of red (like for a button) that is used in just a few pixels out of the texture, some algorithms will probably exchange it with another more frequently used color unless the algorithm also takes into account color contrast/variation with neighboring pixels in addition to frequency of use.

Whatever algorithm UT Skin Maker uses for palettizing the color to 256 may be less than ideal (I usually had pretty good results with JASC Paintsho Pro's reduction algortithm). The command line program Bright 1.81 was used by Epic to reduce their textures colors down the "optimal" (for their purposes) 256 colors. You might be able to find a working download link for it somewhere on the web, but here is a page that explains the parameters.

And don't worry about the bNoSmooth variable, its appears to be set correctly.
 
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Superunknown II

New Member
Mar 23, 2008
23
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It's working now, here's what I did.

It was definitely some kind of palette problem. In Photoshop, from the drop menu in the top, I went to Image > Mode > Indexed Color. At that point it asks you to merge layers, I clicked ok. Then it brought up another menu window with options for Palette, Colors, Transparency, Matte and some others, I left it all unchanged and clicked ok. Then, from the drop down menu, go to File > Save As > .PCX

Now here was the daunting part, I opened up the .utx package (with Ued) that UT Skin Maker creates for you. I replaced all the badly palettized textures with the new .PCX files just created out of Photoshop, but made sure to rename (the new ones) with the same names as the old ones generated by UT Skin Maker, then deleted the old ones. Then I saved the changes made to the .utx file. This is so I wouldn't have to change any info in the .int file for the texture package.