Essentials

You'll need the following to do this tutorial: These are what you'll need to follow this tut. Nothing more, nothing less; it's all you need to (re)texture my way.

Getting ready

Once you've downloaded, installed and opend the Bloodlines tool, switch to the "VPK Extractor" tab (1), open up a VPK inside your Bloodlines directory (2), right click, "Select All" (3) followed by "Exctract" (4).

Rince and repeat for each VPK file, if you've got the HD space. If you're only interested in (re)skinning, unpack pack001.vpk through pack006.vpk; most, if not all, materials (textures) seem to be in those.

Getting the base texture

With the above out of the way, it's time to convert the texture you want to change to an usable format. As an example, we'll change Heather's skin.
Click the "Open File" button (1), and navigate to the file you want to convert and start editing.

All textures are in the install directory\Vampire\materials folder. From there, the folder structure is fairly logical. In our case, we'll navigate to 'models', 'character', 'NPC', 'unique', 'santa_monica', 'heather'.

Then, click "Convert TTZ to TGA". The tool will convert the texture to an .tga, an well-known file format that most graphical editing programs, including Photoshop, can handle. The converting process puts the result (e.g. the .tga) in the same folder as the original, un-converted texture.

So that's install directory\Vampire\materials\npc\unique\santa_monica\heather in this case. Use the Explorer to move the .tga to an other folder, prefferibly named after the texture. For instance, I've got an "Nigh Naked Heather" folder, "Heather's Secret" and "Heather the Vamp" folder, whom in turn are in a "Bloodlines Textures" folder.

Editing & putting it back in

Time to fire up Photoshop. Since this isn't a tutorial about how to make a good texture, I'll skip that bit, and assume you've altered the .tga in some cool way. Safe this altered .tga as an .dds.

Once the .dds has been saved, use the explorer to go back to the folder where you moved the .tga from (e.g. the 'residence' of the original). Copy the file with the same name as you're trying to replace, but with the .tth extension, to the folder the .dds resides in. In this case, you're looking to copy "heather_body.tth".

Switch to the tool again, the Texture tools tab. Open the .dds (1), and this time, choose the "Convert DDS to TTZ" option (2).

Copy the resulting .ttz AND .tth to the folder where you moved the .tga from (e.g. the 'residence' of the original), overwriting the existing files.

Rejoice! You're done!















Don't linger here, just go and check your new skin out in-game ;-)