Skining Tutorial (English)

CoD4 Skinning Tutorial



As skinning is getting more and more popular for movie making purposes,
here is a step-by-step guide for people who want to make their movies
come out cooler.

First of all, we are going to need these
applications and plugins:

• Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Photoshop Elements:
  to edit the skin files
  
• DDS Plugin for Photoshop: to be able to open .dds
  files in Photoshop
  
• iwi2dds: to convert .iwi skin files to .dds format
  so that they can be opened in Photoshop
  
• dds2iwi: to convert the modified .dds files to cod4
  usable .iwi files
  
• An archiver program (Powerarchiver, Winrar, etc.)
  
• makeMod.bat and other things inside the CoD4 ModWarfare
  folder
  

So, after you have these equipment in the right places, it's time to
get to work. I am first going to just tell what you have to do to skin a
single gun, so that you don't get confused by all the details. I will
get a bit more in-depth afterwards.
1.
Locate
your Call of Duty 4 folder and go to 'main'-folder. Open iw_02.iwd and
locate weapon_ak74u_col.iwi. As you can see from the name, we are now
going to mod our AK74 skin. Extract it from the archive and move it to
the folder where you have iwi2dds and dds2iwi. Then simply drag and drop
the AK74 skin file on top of the iwi2dds converter, and you will get a
new file named weapon_ak74u_col.iwi_out.dds. Now open it in Photoshop,
you will get a question about Mip maps. Click 'No'.

2.
Time to get skinning.
You will probably have no idea of where all the parts are going to be in
the ingame AK74 model, so here is a comparison between the skin file
and the ingame AK74:



3.
Modify the skin to your
likings.

4.
When
you are ready with the skin, save the file with .dds file format and
name it weapon_ak74u_col.dds. You will get a setting window. Check that
you have 'DXT5' as save format and 'Generate MIP maps' chosen under 'MIP
maps'. Convert the saved file (weapon_ak74u_col.dds) with the dds2iwi
tool. The original skin file will get replaced with the new one you just
made.

5.
Now
locate the ModWarfare folder and create a new folder called images
inside it. Move the weapon_ak74u_col.iwi file there and start
makeMod.bat. You will get a new file called z_modwarfare.iwd. You can
rename this file to whatever you like, just retain the 'z_' prefix and
.iwd file format. Move the file to the mod folder you are going to use
(eg. promodlive or promod442).

6.
Fire up CoD4 and the mod where you have
the skin, and voila! Enjoy the skin.


Tips:

As you probably
already noticed, almost all of the weapon skin files are in the
iw_04.iwd archive. However, there are some weapons in iw_02.iwd too,
they start with the prefix 'mtl_weapon'. When you are looking for the
models, be sure to select the files including '_c', '_col' or '_clr'.
These are the real models you see while gaming.
I did a comparison between some of the skin files and ingame weapons,
this covers the most used guns in CoD4. Here are also the gloves used
by Opfor and Marines.


AK47:




M4:





AK74:





MP5:





M40A3:





R700:





Opfor
gloves:




Marine gloves:




Deagle:




Knife:





Troubleshooting (can be updated if
questions arise):

Photoshop reports ”Could not
complete your request because it is not the right kind of document”.
Make
sure you have the dds.8bi file in the right folder. It should be in the
plug-ins folder of your Photoshop directory. If this doesn't work,
check that you have the 32-bit version of Photoshop. I couldn't get the
plugin to work with the 64-bit version of the software.

The
skin won't work!
Is your skin in the right folder? It
should be in the folder of the mod you are trying to use. Also, check
that you have the 'z_'-prefix in front of the name, eg. z_ownskin.iwd.

I
get a file sum/name mismatch error.
I got this problem at
first too when I started a devmap'ed server, and really couldn't figure
out what helped. However, in case you did some errors in the skinning
process, try to remake the skin. Also try to devmap a map before you do
anything (/devmap mp_mapname in console). Though, what seemed to work in
my case, was that I didn't do anything for like 10 seconds after the
server had started, but I'm not really sure about this because the error
suddenly went away after some server startings.