Beard trouble

I've done some searching, but can't find an answer. I can't get the beard to come through my face textures. I apply the face texture, and when I go to set the beard all I get is a distorted face. How do i get the beard texture to come through the face?

You can do this one of 2 ways depending upon what you need to do.

If all you want is the default facial hair coming through over textures you have applied to the face then you need to move those textures to the color layer in the client side character folder and replace the head_color.tga file with those textures. This sets the head textures below the facial hair in the layer stack and allows facial hair, freckles, etc. to overlay the skin texture.

If you need to apply custom hair to the face and still be able to distort it, then replace this file (head_hair.tga) in your client character folder with the custom hair you want to use. Make sure the same hair texture is applied to your color or tattoo layer so the blending is seamless.

The only way you can make the beard come through any opaque face textures applied to the server side tattoo layers is to make the texture applied to the face transparent in that area. The easiest way would be to use the head_hair.tga file as an alpha channel mask for cutting out the area for facial hair. This method creates blending issues and locks you into whatever bleeds through the transparent area. I don't recommend this approach.

Got ya, file swapping, done plenty of that. Thanks. Thanks also for showing me all those very useful templates.

Namssor? If you make changes to your client folder files, as you recommend, ummm... wouldn't that only make those changes effective for your client? I mean, I can see how that would make the guy see a nice beard on his own avvie, but it seems that if anyone else met him in-world, they would have no way to see his pretty beard.

when it bakes it will upload to everyone, thats why we see missing image on ppl so much
its cause we didn't receive the baked image
-LW

The file swap actually didn't work. I used the transparent beard face texture, worked fine,

Everyone will see changes made to these files since they all get baked into a single file, then uploaded to the servers (like Lightwave said). Manstan will see the changes first, but once the textures go through a redraw (when they go blurry and then re-rez) everyone will see the textures.

Manstan, if one of those methods worked for you, I won't go into any further explanation.

OK, that makes sense. I forgot the baked texture gets uploaded...

I've worked with the Character Folder files as Namssor says; it works quite well with the x_color.tga files. I haven't had much success with changing the head_hair.tga texture because the facehair_x_alpha.tga files restrict things to their shape. Changing those files results in a crash. But changing the head_shading_alpha.tga, for example, doesn't cause a crash (in fact, it's a great way to add eye socket and lower cheek shading that can be controlled with the skin/face detail slider). Is there a trick to changing the facehair alpha textures without borking the viewer?