Origin

Traditional Workflow

Using skins in GTFO is not new, it’s been around long before I got into trying out skins and using them. The “traditional” method of skin creation involves more or less the following steps (or so I’ve learned).

1. Locate the meshes for the gear parts of the guns that we want to change the skin of.
2. Export those meshes.
3. Assemble the meshes in a program like Blender then re-export for skin creation use.
4. Import these meshes into a texture editor like Substance 3D Painter.
5. Create the actual skins in the editor.
6. Export the the texture images.
7. Open the specific .asset files in GTFO_Data that stores the textures for gear parts of the gun we are skinning.
8. (optional) create an individual copy of these .asset files so we have a backup.
9. Modify our copy of the .asset files to include the textures that we have exported in step 5.
10. Replace the game’s .asset files in GTFO_Data with our copy
    1. This step installs the textures

The Catch

This workflow and method also comes with a few catches:

1. After installing a skin, reverting to vanilla skins involves re-verifying in-game files (unless you have backups of the .asset files)
   1. The skins are also now a part of the game, meaning reinstalling the game involves reinstalling the skins.
2. Because GTFO shares gear parts across different weapons. Some weapons that were not intended to be customized also have some gear part modified because a skin for a different gear happens to modify that part, making it look out of place.
   1. You cannot use skins that overlap in the .asset files they modify together — explicit modification to the .asset file(s) to include textures for both skins is required.
   2. As a result, a lot of times you can’t perfectly mix and match skins across different authors.
   3. As another side-effect, sometimes it is impossible to only use a subset of the skins distributed by an author.
      1. Even if it is technically possible, doing so involves figuring out which asset files modify which gear.
3. Managing asset files is a pain — people usually have a LUT for which asset files contains what gear parts and have to cross reference each time.

What this Mod Achieves

This mod currently¹ optimizes steps 7 to 10 of the workflow, making the process a breeze by using the SkinGroup Editor. Skins will also no longer break because of game changes². It also completely eliminates any of the 6 catches that I’ve mentioned above.

Footnotes

1. I do plan on simplifying the mesh exporting workflow so that reassembly is no longer needed. That would turn steps 1 to 3 in the workflow to a simple button press in-game. ↩

2. Though there was a security update that broke most skins, let’s be honest, this game is probably never getting another update. ↩