General Texture Replacement Tutorial

Deleted User 1104

General Texture Replacement Tutorial

Post by Deleted User 1104 »

At last, here is the tutorial you've all been waiting for, sorry for all the delay. This currently works on the latest steam version, havent tested on any other version but it should work just fine on about any game version.

Texture Injection:
This method requires Special K, a game modifying framework that can inject custom textures over the in-game textures, kinda like how TexMod used to work for dx9 games back in the day. Although, Special K only works on the DX11 version of the game.

Installation

1. Install Special K from their official website using either Global Injection or Local Injection. I recommend the former since it does not interfere with ASIMK11 and can be started simply by running a service, although make sure to disable it once you've quit the game and you are done with modding.
2. Run the SKIF Injector, and launch the DX11 version of Mortal Kombat 11. You will know Special K has been injected into the game if you see a GUI showing up at the top of the screen.
3. Next, press Ctrl+Shift+Backspace to bring up the GUI. There are a lot of different options you can tweak, but what interests us is Render Mod Tools. If you can't find it, it should be under Direct3D11 Settings.

Dumping textures
1. Open the Render Mod Tools menu, and a GUI should pop up. There's a lot of information on the screen, you have a live shader view for those who want to test with modifying shaders, although the shader override parameters will not save once you switch pixel or vertex shaders. I will release another tutorial on this later on. If you just want to do texture modding, ignore this section.
2. Go to the right of the screen under Live Texture view, and expand this section. On the left side, you have a list with all the textures currently loaded in the scene and their hashes. You can start scrolling through them, you will know which texture you have selected if the texture starts blinking in-game. If no textures show up, click refresh textures.
3. Find the texture you want to replace. For example, let's say I want to replace Scorpion's default color palette, as to change the colors on his armor. I would go into kustomization, select scorpion and wait for him to load. Then, I would open Special K, scroll through all the loaded textures and find his color palette texture (use [ and ] to scroll down and up through textures. Whenever you've found the texture you want to dump, select it, then press Dump Texture to Disk.

Remember, color palette textures look something like this:

Image

This is Scorpions default palette. Each color represents something on his gear or armor, so you have to test to see which color corresponds to what. Let's just say I wanted to change some of his colors from red to green. I would do as follows:

- Find Scorpion's color palette texture and dump it.
- To find the dumped texture, go into your Documents folder, and go to "My Mods/Special K/Profiles/Mortal Kombat 11/SK_Res/dump/textures/MK11.exe". Your path might look different if you've used local injection.
- Inside the folder, you should see a dds file with a prefix, usually uncompressed for color palettes, followed by its hash. If the hash of the file matches the one you've dumped, you got the right texture.
- Open up the texture in Photoshop or whatever image editing program you use, but make sure it supports dds files. For Photoshop, use Intel's DDS Plugin (other older dds plugins wont work).
- Modify the texture, in my example by changing the red color to green. Once you are done, you need to export the texture in a specific format, for color palettes its usually uncompressed, but for other textures it might be bc7. So for color palettes, while exporting from Photoshop you need to select "Compression: none 32bpp", the other settings dont really matter since theres no alpha in the picture, and dont create mipmaps. Cool, you've exported your first modified texture.

For whatever reason, Photoshop fucks up the header on uncompressed dds textures when exporting, so if that's the case, you need to manually fix the header. You can tell that the header is fucked by opening the file in a hex editor, such as HxD, and going to offset 80. If your header looks like this:

Image

It needs fixing. Again, this is a problem which I've only noticed when exporting uncompressed dds textures, so mainly for color palettes. To fix this, open the original texture which you've just dumped in HxD, press ctrl+g, go to offset 94 and copy everything before that. Next, go back to your newly exported texture, go to offset 80 and replace everything before that with the header you've just copied. That's it, your texture should now be fixed. I will make a tool that automatically does this if it's needed.


Injecting textures
Now, you can inject your fresh new texture into the game. You can do this by:

• Going back to your documents folder, and under "My Mods\SpecialK\Profiles\Mortal Kombat 11\SK_Res", create a new folder called "inject". In that folder, create another folder called "textures". This is where you will place all of your modified textures you wish to inject into the game.
• Copy your modified texture into that folder, and remove its name prefix, such as uncompressed or compressed. Keep only the texture hash, thats how the game knows which texture is which.
• Launch the game, and check your newly injected texture. For my example, you would go into the kustomization tab, select scorpion and you should see his gear with your modified texture on it.

This is how you can dump, modify and inject textures into the game, so far any texture can be modified and injected, including normal maps, roughness maps, speculars and many more.
Last edited by Deleted User 1104 on Tue Nov 23, 2021 2:15 am, edited 1 time in total.


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Scorp-Sub
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Re: Overkill's Texture Replacement Tutorials

Post by Scorp-Sub »

Great Job! Keep up the great work. :D
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Re: Overkill's Texture Replacement Tutorials

Post by thethiny »

Nice Tutorial! Well done.
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All of my Mortal Kombat 11 Mods are now unified under a Single Thread. Click The Image to go to the thread.
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Re: Overkill's Texture Replacement Tutorials

Post by Scorp-Sub »

Overkill wrote:I will make a tool that automatically does this if it's needed.
I was wondering when you will be releasing the Tool?
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Re: Overkill's Texture Replacement Tutorials

Post by K0BR4 »

Overkill how we can make the model swap like your Cyber-Spawn?
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Sorry for any writing error, I'm still improving my English.
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Re: Overkill's Texture Replacement Tutorials

Post by Deleted User 1104 »

Scorp-Sub wrote: I was wondering when you will be releasing the Tool?
Don't know exactly when, but using HxD should be pretty straight forward. Download it from here, and open the two files inside of it. Go into the original texture which you've dumped, press ctrl+g, go to offset 94, and copy everything before that. Make sure you check "Offset relative to begin".

Then, go into the texture which you've modified, press ctrl+g again and go to offset 80. Select everything before that, and paste what you had copied to your clipboard, save the file and you should be done.
K0BR4 wrote:Overkill how we can make the model swap like your Cyber-Spawn?
That was done using TheThiny's Coalesced Modding Tutorial, just add mCAPDefinitionsPath=Disk.Characters.NPC.SEK.SEK_ASSET.SEK_CapAsset, and add "GearAssets_SEK_ScriptAssets" under mCAPPackages.
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Re: Overkill's Texture Replacement Tutorials

Post by K0BR4 »

Wow really fast reply
Thank you!
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Re: Overkill's Texture Replacement Tutorials

Post by Scorp-Sub »

Im getting a RunDLL Error for 64-bit Service

There was a problem starting ../SpecialK64.dll
The specified module could not be found

How do I fix this? (32- bit Service is working)

Also when I launch Mortal Kombat 11 it gives me the option to launch the DX12 version of Mortal Kombat 11 only. How do I launch the DX11 version of Mortal Kombat 11?
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Re: Overkill's Texture Replacement Tutorials

Post by Deleted User 1104 »

Scorp-Sub wrote:Im getting a RunDLL Error for 64-bit Service

There was a problem starting ../SpecialK64.dll
The specified module could not be found
Make sure you properly extracted SKIF somewhere on your pc, and make sure you have SpecialK64.dll inside of the folder. Follow the guide on their wiki as to properly install it. Usually that error means the folder doesn't contain that dll, make sure you download it from their official downloads section on their website.
Scorp-Sub wrote: Also when I launch Mortal Kombat 11 it gives me the option to launch the DX12 version of Mortal Kombat 11 only. How do I launch the DX11 version of Mortal Kombat 11?
If you're launching it through steam, it should ask you if you want to launch MK11 or MK11 (DirectX 12). If not, just go into the folder where you've installed mk 11, and launch the game using MK11.exe (not MK11_DX12.exe).
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Re: Overkill's Texture Replacement Tutorials

Post by Shag »

Hey, thanks a lot for putting the effort to make a tutorial and explaining this to us lowly peasants :P
I gave this a try with a couple of textures, in my case from Sonya.

Edit: Earlier today i had some problems but i was able to solve them, that's why i edited the post.

This is the final result: https://imgur.com/a/BrUil94
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Re: Overkill's Texture Replacement Tutorials

Post by Mdk35sb »

Shag wrote:Hey, thanks a lot for putting the effort to make a tutorial and explaining this to us lowly peasants :P
I gave this a try with a couple of textures, in my case from Sonya.

Edit: Earlier today i had some problems but i was able to solve them, that's why i edited the post.

This is the final result: https://imgur.com/a/BrUil94
Oh wow that looks sick! So far I've only gotten far as changing their outfits. How did you go about changing her makeup and hair, if you don't mind me asking.
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Re: Overkill's Texture Replacement Tutorials

Post by Deleted User 1104 »

Shag wrote:Hey, thanks a lot for putting the effort to make a tutorial and explaining this to us lowly peasants :P
I gave this a try with a couple of textures, in my case from Sonya.

Edit: Earlier today i had some problems but i was able to solve them, that's why i edited the post.

This is the final result: https://imgur.com/a/BrUil94
Awesome job man, glad you could fix whatever issues you had, I didn't have time to check the post earlier. I'll be doing a tutorial on changing stuff like the color of Sonya's rings, blood color, and many more later.
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Re: Overkill's Texture Replacement Tutorials

Post by Shag »

Mdk35sb wrote:Oh wow that looks sick! So far I've only gotten far as changing their outfits. How did you go about changing her makeup and hair, if you don't mind me asking.
Hey! Sorry for the late reply, the hair was fairly easy, i just looked for the texture and when i selected it the hair started to appear and disappear, then i knew it was the right one, so i edited it through photoshop adding color layers and then reinjected it.

I had some problems with the face though, it looks like each character has a different set of textures for each expression they make, when i modified the base texture i noticed that each time she changed her expression it was back to normal, so i had to look for the others textures as well, 3 in total.

I also changed the skin tone from her body to match her face, for some reason her war games skin has a different skin tone and i always wanted to fix it.
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Re: Overkill's Texture Replacement Tutorials

Post by Shag »

Overkill wrote:Awesome job man, glad you could fix whatever issues you had, I didn't have time to check the post earlier. I'll be doing a tutorial on changing stuff like the color of Sonya's rings, blood color, and many more later.
Nice, i'll be waiting for those aswell, even though i already lost interest in playing the game i'll entertain myself with this stuff :P
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Re: Overkill's Texture Replacement Tutorials

Post by Mdk35sb »

Shag wrote:
Mdk35sb wrote:Oh wow that looks sick! So far I've only gotten far as changing their outfits. How did you go about changing her makeup and hair, if you don't mind me asking.
Hey! Sorry for the late reply, the hair was fairly easy, i just looked for the texture and when i selected it the hair started to appear and disappear, then i knew it was the right one, so i edited it through photoshop adding color layers and then reinjected it.

I had some problems with the face though, it looks like each character has a different set of textures for each expression they make, when i modified the base texture i noticed that each time she changed her expression it was back to normal, so i had to look for the others textures as well, 3 in total.

I also changed the skin tone from her body to match her face, for some reason her war games skin has a different skin tone and i always wanted to fix it.
No worries, and much appreciated!
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