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Chapter 1: Files, Embedded Textures

Finding files, exporting to XML, and learning embedded textures

Now that we've gone over concepts, let's actually get to work importing GTA assets into Blender with Sollumz. Even if you're not editing the GTA assets, you will still need to know how to import these things for creating your own custom clothing.

Although this is a guide for people new to creating clothing, from here on out this guide assumes you have the following installed & are familiar with how to use them:

It is NOT recommended to start with clothing if you are completely new to modding. You should start with a simple prop and learn the general import/export process before getting into clothing. For all of that, the Sollumz wiki is a great read.

With that said, let's import a simple JBIB and familiarize ourselves with everything in Blender.

Open up CW RPF and type mp_m_freemode into the searchbar

If you click "Name" at the top to sort by name, you'll then see a list of all of the MP Male folders. You'll notice there are multiple folders for every DLC. This is the original DLC folder, and then patchday folders that hotfixed any issues R* had with various pieces of clothing.

The 🟥 outline is all of the base mp male DLC folders

The 🟧 outline highlights all of the DLC names. Notice the original DLC and all of the patchday hotfixes.

The 🟩 outlines the original base game DLC folder.

Right now we aren't going to worry about any hotfixed files, so just click into the original dlc folder. If you are ever editing GTA assets, though, you should always look through the patchday folders for whatever component you're trying to edit so that you can work off of the most up-to-date version.

Now that we're inside the base folder, you'll see a long list of all the base game components and their YTD textures. Make sure you're sorted by 'Name' so that everything is alphabetical, and then scroll down until you see the JBIBs.

For the purposes of our tutorial, let's export jbib_004_u.

  1. Right-click on jbib_004_u.ydd

  2. Select export XML...

  3. Select an export location. For this tutorial, I've simply created a folder on my desktop.

Now let's quickly visit the folder you've just exported the file to. In the folder, you should have a couple of things. Firstly the .ydd.xml of our jbib & there should also be a folder named jbib_004_u.

Whenever you are exporting a model that has embedded textures, Codewalker RPF will create a folder named after the model you exported to XML with all of the embedded textures placed inside of it.

Go ahead and click into the folder and take a peek at the embedded textures! You should see two: a normal texture and a specular texture. Depending on how new you are to modding, you might be asking, "what the hell are these?". Now, I'm no actual game designer, so it's probably best if you search up these two texture/image types on your own, but I will explain it in the way it makes the most sense to me:

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Normal Texture / "normal map"

A normal map, sometimes also called a bump map, is an RGB texture, where each pixel represents the difference in direction the surface should appear to be facing. Basically, this fakes how the 'light' would hit your object/fabric to make it appear as if there are wrinkles or dents or bumps, when really the 3D mesh is flat/smooth. As an example, you can make a completely smooth cube look as if its made of bricks with just a normal map.

In short, normal maps are super powerful and are used alot in GTA. I'd encourage you to research this more to understand them more deeply!

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Specular Texture

Specular textures are a bit harder to explain, because how they are most commonly used in other games is not necessarily how GTA utilizes them. Specular textures are used to define how something shines. For example, rusty metal would shine less than polished metal, lipgloss would shine more than bare skin, and skin would shine more than cotton cloth.

Specular textures in GTA are RGB textures. The Red, Green, and Blue channels all mean different things. Red channel is responsible for glossiness, Green channel is responsible for reflectiveness, and Blue channel is for texture detail.

For example, most of the time when I am making something metallic (like jewelry), I make my specular a bright green, to represent the reflectiveness.

Specular textures usually require a bit of adjusting to get right, and you will probably spend alot of hours learning how you'd prefer to make certain materials. Luckily for you, there's a beginner cheat sheet for people who are just starting out:

You should study this to help yourself understand how the speculars work. You can see the metals in this chart are yellow and green, taking advantage of the Green channel for reflectiveness. You can also see 'satin clothing' is very red, using the Red channel's "glossiness" to help create that effect.

As you get better at clothing, it's better to branch away from the chart and mess around with RGB channels yourself in a program that can show you what each channel looks like, like Photoshop. Like normal maps, a good specular can make alot of difference in improving the appearance of things ingame.

For the first half of this tutorial, we wont be creating our own normal and specular textures, but it's good to learn about them ahead of time! Now that you've had a look and somewhat know what they mean, you should keep one very important thing in mind:

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Clothing almost ALWAYS has at least TWO EMBEDDED TEXTURES: Normal and Specular.

When you get to creating your own clothing from scratch, you need to be prepared to create these textures. You WILL need them. The few times you wouldn't create and embed these textures is when you are creating things like logo decals (see the rockstar decals for clothing for example). But for the purposes of learning, you should just assume you will ALWAYS need them.

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