The Actor Variants use Color Change properties. The multipurpose bitmap has an alpha map that controls the color change mask; Darker areas get changed less, brighter get changed more.


If you wanted to simulate this in the diffuse maps, you would want to use a photoshop layer above the diffuse with the color from the actor variant setup, and set the multipurpose map's alpha layer to act as a mask for the layer containing the actor variant's color.

Do you have a step by step guide on how to do all that you've mentioned there?

Edited by hugh on Jul 14, 2017 at 03:05 AM

Not sure what happened to the OP, but the elite cubemaps are special, they have multiple texture sheets that are switched to depending on the actor variant settings "unit/ forced shader permutation" it selects which cubemap of the 4 in the single texture to use. And below that are the color values the variant uses (change colors).



And i already posted in the other thread how to do color change in photoshop



Use a solid color and use the multipurpose alpha channel as the layers mask, then set the color layer to multiply blend mode. 3 steps at most.

idr if there was a way to force shader permutation in shaders or a biped tag for the cubemaps, if you wanted to just make bipeds certain colors and not AI, you would find the color change source channel for the biped and edit the color change in the biped tag itself. In the Elites case its channel A, so you would add permutations to A in the biped tag.


Edited by Imouto on Jul 14, 2017 at 10:30 AM