Costume Creation Process

The following guide for costume creation comes from the minds of the Thunderspy server. The following guide has been adapted from their documentation.

Adapted from https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YEd0mW-0zC2xlS0axrAOT_27ItktthJtFuvsdR4CDRw

Required Software

Items you will need

• 3DS Max 2011 (Mandatory for now)
  • CoH_VRML_EXP.DLE plugin for Max 2011
    • (https://git.ourodev.com/CoX/Source/-/tree/develop/Utilities/3dsmax/coh_vrml_exp)
  • ScrapYarder M, F, and/or H Master Files
• Your preferred modeling program
• Your preferred image editing software
• Text editor such as Notepad++, Visual Studio Code, etc.
• Getvrml
  • (https://git.ourodev.com/CoX/Source/-/tree/develop/Utilities/GetVrml)
• Gettex
  • (https://git.ourodev.com/CoX/Source/-/tree/develop/Utilities/GetTex)
• Your own CoH test server (Highly recommended)

This document will not cover how to use the 3D or 2D software, it expects a basic level of understanding on how to create 3D models and textures. There are many, many tutorials online that will help you learn how to use programs. This document will explain what certain things do and how to get your items in game. I will also give some advice on attempting to match the style of City of Heroes should that be your goal.

City of Heroes is an old game, and as such the artists were limited in what they could make via polycount and texture size. Nowadays you see 4k textures and tens of thousands of polygons on a single model. I have not tested whether or not CoH can handle these absurd sizes, but I don’t doubt that it can. That said, I highly recommend avoiding using super high res files as well as porting over models from other games if you wish to preserve the style and character of City of Heroes.

If you do wish to try and keep the style, then I recommend each costume contain no more than 1500 triangles, and no texture be larger than a 1024. Textures tend to be on the realistic side of things, with real textures of real world materials and some hand drawn details. Programs such as Quixel or Substance should have no problem giving you good results for textures.

Specific Guides

Texture Maps Basics

Modeling Basics

Using 3DS Max

Exporting models from 3DS Max

Basics of Tricks

Basics of CTM

Binning

• You will only need to do this if you change any ctm or trick files.
• You cannot do live updates, you’ll need to close out of the client for every bin update.

Run the command prompt and enter in this command mapserver_debug -verbose 2 -nosharedmemory Let the program run its course or until you see the costume.bin and/or tricks.bin update. Press CTRL+C to stop the binning process. Copy and paste “Costume.bin” and/or “tricks.bin” into the bin folders of server and data.

Testing in Game

Start server, load game, check your model

Common Troubleshooting

Model doesn’t show up at all.

• Make sure names in the ctm entry are correct
• Double check that your wrl file actually contains geometry

Model shows up with no textures

• Make sure names in the ctm or trick file is correct
• Make sure that you’ve assigned the texture to the model in Max before you’ve exported.

Model’s normal map looks off

• Be sure that the green channel has been flipped.