Summary

Published: ??? by Last documented update: May 13 2024 by

This page collects basic information about hair profiles.

Wait, this is not what I want!

• Check WKit Blender Plugin: Import/Export -> #hair-profiles-.hp for a guide on importing/exporting

• Learn more about Hair and skin material properties -> #hair-material

What's a hair profile?

Via hair profiles, it's possible to quickly and easily create a large variety of hair colour variations without the need of having colour textures. That happens via two arrays:

gradientEntriesId

Determines the strand to strand colour by using the Strand_Gradient texture. The gradient serves to empathize/de-empathize contrast among the black/white scale.

Together with the gradientMap, this is used to generate varieties of unique hair materials.

gradientEntriesRootToTip

Is applied to the Strand_Gradient texture to determine the hair colour from start to top. Via gradientStops, the colour positions from root to tip of the strands are determined.

Summary

Last documented update: Apr 06 2024 by manavortex

This wiki page contains documentation about xbm files and their properties.

Wait, this isn't what I want!

Would you rather…

• Edit, import, or export textures?

• Learn about textured materials?

• Use a textured material on your mesh?

Texture files

.xbm files are simply CR2W (REDengine) representations of .dds files. Regardless, you still need to .

Header

Any CR2W file includes a section telling the engine how to read it, the header. Most of the file encodes texture data, but the header for textures includes:

• size

• mipmapping (lower-resolution versions of the same texture for LOD and streaming)

• texture format

• dimensions (e.g. if your texture data is 1024x1024, but the header says it's 512x512, then the engine will resize it)

Setup

The setup section of the XBM file is in essence an extension of the header.

It contains settings that, more than just describing basic information about the texture, such as:

• bit depth

• texture type

• format

• gamma correction

• streamability

• mip chains

Summary

Published: ??? by manavortex Last documented update: May 01 2024 by manavortex

This guide will teach you how .mi files work

What is a material instance?

A .mi file encapsulates a material in a reusable template file, which you can use a .mi file as base material in a material definition.

It is possible to use multiple .mi files in a row. For an example of this, check the player's skin materials.

For more information of this, you can look at Shaders -> #the-daisy-chain

Why do I need this?

Put yourself in the shoes of a hypothetical modder.

• You are creating a mod that offers multiple versions of the same item (e.g. toy props or hair)

• You have created a base material

• You duplicate and re-duplicate the material for each of your variants, changing the properties that defines the colour

• You wish that there was less copy-pasting involved

.mi files to the rescue

Take any of them from the game, move them to your custom directory, and group all the properties that you keep copy-pasting into the .mi.

Then, in your material, you can now use your .mi file as baseMaterial, and only change the properties that are actually different!

Instead of copy-pasting six properties, you now copy-paste only two.

Making material templates

Let's take it another step further – we can make a bunch of different colours to re-use across your files. An example for this are hair files, or the plastic materials I've used in my toy prop pack.

For this, I first created a plastic_base.mi with all the common properties, and then created one additional .mi file for each shade of plastic, setting plastic_base.mi as baseMaterial, leaving me with the following folder structure:

- materials
  - plastic
    - _plastic_base.mi   << baseMaterial for all materials below
    - plastic_black.mi
    - plastic_yellow.mi
    - plastic_red.mi
    - plastic_green.mi
    - plastic_purple.mi
    - plastic_pink.mi
    - plastic_orange.mi
    - plastic_blue.mi

If I decide that my plastic is too shiny, I can edit _plastic_base.mi instead of touching every template individually. Pretty neat, isn't it?

And if one of my items happens to have a custom normal map and/or texture, then I just add them in the values array of my material and call it a day.

Maximally lazy: external materials

But we can take this approach even further! If you don't have any properties, your mesh doesn't even need materials! You can simply use the externalMaterials list instead. You do this by unticking the isLocal property in the materialEntries definition:

Warning

You can of course mix and match local and external materials! Just make sure that the materialEntries indices are pointing at the correct material.

However: