How to add custom preview images by using a custom .inkatlas file
Uploaded: ??? by Last documented update: Mar 18 2024 by yellingintothevoid
This guide will teach you how to make custom inventory preview icons.
Technically, this guide is a subsection of the ArchiveXL item additions guide, but you can use it to make any kind of preview item.
The guide below will teach you how to make preview icons. While it's a technically a subsection of the ArchiveXL item additions guide, you can use the steps below to make any kind of preview item.
Difficulty Level: You know how to read and can either edit images or make use of the corresponding guide. While the process is easy, it also is, unfortunately, quite tedious!
If you want to have gendered preview icons, check here.
For a script to generate inkatlas files, check The Magnificent Doctor Presto's github
To learn more about the files involved, check Game icons: The inkatlas file
If you downloaded the example project (#getting-the-files), the preview is already hooked up. Otherwise, download the template archive for your kind of template (kindly provided by Apart).
Okay, you do you. Here's how:
You should now have a structure like this:
You have two options on taking preview pictures. Both are relatively tedious, since you have to do it by hand. This is not a step-by-step, but you can find a few pointers here:
You can export your mesh with all its materials to Blender and take your preview pictures there:
This part of the guide is a bit longer, since it tells you how to get decent-quality preview pictures. If you don't care for that (you should, but we all hate it), you can skip ahead to #hooking-up-the-inkatlas.
The idea is to combine mods that make V invisible and a ReShade filter called DepthAlpha.fx to create in-game screenshots of your item where the background is transparent. This means you don't have to spend a lot of time painstakingly removing the background manually in Photoshop. The screenshots taken with DepthAlpha.fx only need a little bit of cleanup (#creating-the-actual-icon), but can be basically directly imported into the .xbm file containing your icons.
Using ReShade is, of course, entirely optional, but teaching how to mask out objects in Photoshop is outside the scope of this tutorial.
Invisible V by manavortex or the Invisibility Cap and Shoes by PinkyDude
Optional, but highly recommended:
DepthAlpha.fx (make sure to set up the depth buffer properly)
AppearanceCreatorMod or Equipment-EX
Preparation:
Start the game
Equip the invisibility garment and the item you want to create icons for.
To switch through appearances on-the-fly, you can use AppearanceCreatorMod while V is in the center of the camera.
Alternatively, you can save outfits for all colour variations of your outfit In Equipment-EX:
Lighting:
Optional: Finding a good spot
If you can't be bothered, you can simply teleport to the window of Saburo's office:
Make sure to have some decent lighting on your item.
Sometimes, it can be helpful to disable RTX to create icons. The screenshot of item on the left in the image below was taken using Path Tracing and DLSS, the one on the right using rasterised lighting without DLSS:
If your item is a jacket, the shadows on the inside can look broken with RTX.
If your item is jewellery made from glossy metal, you might get unwanted reflections with RTX.
If your item features fine textures, you might want to disable RTX, so that you can also disable DLSS/FSR without burning up your graphics card.
If your item is a piece of clothing made from glossy material, you might want RTX reflections.
To actually take the screenshot, position the Photo Mode camera so that it is rougly parallel to the bottom edge of your photo booth.
Set the Field of View to about 30 to prevent distortion when taking a closeup.
Move the camera so that the item fills the entirety of your screen without cutting off a part of it.
If you're using ReShade:
3.1 Enable DepthAlpha.fx in ReShade. Check Colorize Transparency and adjust the Range until your item is the only visible object in the scene.
3.2 Disable Colorize Transparency and take the screenshot using ReShade (not the built-in Photo Mode).
Switch to the pose tab and cycle through all appearances of your item and take a screenshot of each one (make sure you haven't skipped any!).
You can use AppearanceCreatorMod to switch appearances without changing the tab!
Open the first of your screenshots in Photoshop and drop all other screenshots of the item onto the one you've just opened.
Select the newly created Smart Objects, right click them and select "Rasterize Layers".
Select the first layer and hide all other layers.
Go to "Layer" in the menubar at the top of your screen on the left and select "Layer Mask" → "From Transparency".
Create a new colour fill layer and choose a colour that contrasts with your item.
Double click the layer mask on your first layer in the layers window to enter Select and Mask mode.
Make sure your View Mode is set to "On Layers" and play around with the "Global Refinements" until the outline of your item looks smooth.
Smooth <5, Feather <1, Contrast 30-50, and Shift Edge of around -30% works quite well usually. Highly depends on how intricate your item is.
Duplicate the Layer Mask onto your other layers.
From here on out, you can play around with a bunch of Adjustment Layers with Clipping Masks for each of your layers/appearances. I recommend some Levels Adjustments to set proper black and white points, as well as Black & White Adjustment Layers for items that are black, grey, silver or white and so on.
Once you're done with that, select each layer and its Adjustment Layers, right click them, and select "Convert to Smart Object".
Give each layer a meaningful name and save your image as a .psd.
Open this .psd and import the Smart Objects of your icons into it. The .psd is based on the preview_icons.xbm found in manavortex's Archive XL item additions and guide and can be easily used with projects based on the guide.
With all layers selected in Photoshop, transform them so that the longest side is 158px.
Align each item to the centre of each grey square.
Hide all other layers except your icons.
Now save the image as a .png in the raw folder of your WolvenKit project.
Import the .png into your WolvenKit project with the TEXG_Generic_UI TextureGroup setting and make sure that "Transparency from alpha channel" is enabled.
Open the file in WolvenKit.
Open the list slots.
For the first two inkTextureSlot items, set the value for DepotPath to the relative path of your xbm (tutorial\torso\my_custom_shirt\ops\preview_icons.xbm):
Save the file. If it doesn't update, reload it (Hotkey: Ctrl+R)
You now have a tab "PartMapping", where you can see which texture corresponds to which slot: select it on the left and check the partsName, which corresponds to the entry in the slot's parts array:
Congratulations! You now have preview icons!
You can now hook up your preview icon(s) to whatever mod you are making.
If you want to use gendered preview icons, check here. In this case, you do not add an icon record to your item.
Check the code box below — the last three lines add a preview icon.
Please refer to the ArchiveXL guide for an explanation of the other properties, as this page will only hold information about preview icons.
atlasResourcePath: relative path to your .inkatlas file
atlasPartName: slot name in your .inkatlas file (which you can see in the PartsMapping tab)
Again, please note that indent is crucial here, as it determines the node structure. The first line needs to have an indent of 0, the lines from $base to icon need to have two spaces, and the lines atlasResourcePath and atlasPartName need to have four.
If you run into any issues with your texture's transparency, please check the textures import/export guide!
This is a sub-page of "" and only contains information on how to hook up gendered variants once you already have the files. If you aren't quite there yet, refer to the other guide first.
For the technical documentation, check TweakXL's .
This will not work unless your item is using the corresponding suffix. Without it, the game has no way to tell male and female items apart.
If you want to know more about this, you can read up here:
If you don't have a gendered item yet, see the original ArchiveXL guide, section "".
Type the following command into your CET browser:
That won't help you if you want to path items in bulk, but it'll help you to spot mistakes. For the rest, please keep reading.
By adding an icon property to your item's yaml, you're setting the UIIcon property of your record. The generated records will be the same for all genders, variants and tags.
If you want to use a gendered preview picture, you can create a more specific record yourself. In this case, you can delete the icon entry from your item.
Its name will follow this schema:
ENTITYNAME, APPEARANCENAME, SUFFIXES and VISUALTAGSabove are placeholders for the corresponeding fields in your YAML.
For example, if you have the following item:
… then you'd define a preview image like this:
The trailing underscore separates the empty visual tags from the suffixes entry.
Your items won't need an icon record anymore, the assignment now happens by magic!
It does! All you need to do is to add the appearanceSuffix Gender and define an anchor for your $instances, like this:
ArchiveXL will ignore suffixes for dynamic variants, but they need to be present in the yaml file for the icons to work.
Then, you can define your preview images (remember to strip away the ! and + from the variants):
The rest just works (tm)
Given an item with multiple variants:
The icon definition would then look like:
You can also use static variants - the same rules apply, even if the result looks strange.
Given an item with a mixture of static and dynamic variants:
The icon definition would then look like:
| Adjustment Layers | Converted to Smart Objects |
|---|---|
