Xenoblade Chronicles HD Texture Pack v8.52 - (August 21, 2018)

[Bighead]

@ReNext: Awesome thanks! Since these textures for Colony 6 are also used in Colony 9, I'm curious what is different about them. I'll have to give them a look later.

@Evil Jerk: Great job, but I can't help but feel somewhat concerned when it comes to portraits. The sizes and positions of the faces have been carefully calculated through tons of trial and error to make sure they line up the best they can in all situations. I haven't tested the many cases in-game, but glancing through them and comparing them to the current portraits I noticed the offsets are different which worries me. To bring you up to speed, I'll link a few relevant threads relating to this.

This was from before the old texture format, where all portraits could be fixed independently from each other because of the paletted texture bug.
https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-xenoblade-chronicles-hd-texture-pack-v7-6-october-15-2016?pid=328008#pid328008

Couple posts here worrying about what happens when the paletted texture bug is finally fixed.
https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-xenoblade-chronicles-hd-texture-pack-v7-6-october-15-2016?pid=354919#pid354919

Eventually I did tweak all portraits after the new texture format, but I don't think I ever made a post about it since the changes were minor. I got pretty close with my first changes, so all they needed was a few nudges. If you look hard enough portraits and the issues around them are mentioned throughout this thread dozens of times.

I'll have to heavily test these for all situations. Most portraits should be fine, the ones that concern me most are the ones in the Party folder since they are shared all over the place. If I recall correctly, they are used in:
- Combat portraits
- Party Menus
- Gifting
- Skill Trees
- Organize Party Screen
- Gem Crafting
- More?

[ReNext]

(12-11-2016, 10:37 PM)Bighead Wrote: @ReNext: Awesome thanks! Since these textures for Colony 6 are also used in Colony 9, I'm curious what is different about them. I'll have to give them a look later.

The same applies to the Mechanis' textures (rusty), due to the resolution there are two different hashes for the same texture: one (tex1_512x512_9a01e5e35a816dbd_14) is used in Sword Valley/Fallen Arm, and the other one (tex1_256x256_8f80bec9b7c497fa_14) is used in all of Bionis' maps. 

[Evil Jerk]

(12-11-2016, 10:37 PM)Bighead Wrote: @Evil Jerk: Great job, but I can't help but feel somewhat concerned when it comes to portraits. The sizes and positions of the faces have been carefully calculated through tons of trial and error to make sure they line up the best they can in all situations. I haven't tested the many cases in-game, but glancing through them and comparing them to the current portraits I noticed the offsets are different which worries me. To bring you up to speed, I'll link a few relevant threads relating to this.

I aligned most stuff to my liking as they begun as tweaks I made for myself over the last month that I had no intention of sharing and only in the last 2 days, with the exception of Dunban, I made all the edits to fix mirrored details in addition to all things guest related that changed my mind.
With aligning I favored how'd they look in battle and reserve with some attention to how they looked on the Arts screen as that's where alignment issues looked the most unsightly. For Shulk, unless I'm forgotting additional revisions I may have made, I recreated his exactly to scale with Core but shifted left so no cropping on the right was visible in battle. I believe his is the worst of the alignment issues. Reyn was scaled larger to Core (I wanted his large size evident) and similarly shifted left to avoid visible cropping. With Melia I rotated her wings slightly to avoid cropping and may have also shifted her left. The rest I believe I aligned their faces with Core. If I were to revisit everything I'd probably put an alpha fade on the right of every portrait that'd only be visible in battle instead of offsetting.

[Evil Jerk]

I'm making further revisions while addressing alignment issues.

Here's a half scale preview of standard and tension portraits for main and guest characters (character SPOILERS):

Spoiler: (Show Spoiler)

There were major alterations to Shulk to appear in similar posture with the rest of the main cast and for Sharla I removed the windswept hair. There were also further changes to guest characters' tension portraits to make differences more apparent.

Above are using what I think is the reserve screen alpha mask. I couldn't find the in battle alpha mask in the Core package to test. In battle there will be more visible on the left with a transparent fade.

Above is how they'll approximately look on the Arts screen, where alignment issues are most apparent. I'm not trying for exact centering on the faces, but more so for evening out negative space left and right. I won't bother aligning guest characters for use here.

[Resus]

I'm always glad when I see peoples stepping up and helping this project to stay alive.

Thanks for not letting this project die guys.

[frozenwings]

Alignment looks good to me.

[Evil Jerk]

(12-16-2016, 04:19 PM)frozenwings Wrote: Alignment looks good to me.

Good, thanks. I must've made an error copying and pasting Fiora into the template in the first preview. The bottom one is more accurate to what I have it now.

Also is the armor and weapons texture dump you did listed in the original post the most up to date?

I had gone through and dumped the missing ones a few weeks back, which I think were mostly Riki and Sharla and few for Fiora and updated those that needed it to the new naming conventions. However I did I have to redo folder structure because of filename length errors I was getting. Basically the folder structure I did follows the model/skin name method '#(A-Z)' used here and here.

Would you be interested in updating the original yourself with these files? Or I could upload what I have as is.

[frozenwings]

Yes, the post on the front page is still the most up to date; I haven't done much work on Xenoblade in a long time. I was actually working on a couple textures last week but ultimately got sidetracked by a few other things currently on my plate.

If you wanted to upload a pack comprised of what I did before plus whatever you have updated/added to it (it would be nice to have them all in a single pack), I'm sure we can get Bighead to update the OP with a new link. I honestly wouldn't mind having it either in case I get the itch to work on something.

[Evil Jerk]

I've updated the portraits files:
Download (.7z): PNG DDS

Armor & weapon texture dump here

[frozenwings]

That wiki page is really awesome - wish it was around when I was first dumping this stuff. Would've made it a lot easier.

All in all, I love this organization method a lot. I wish there was a way to do it where it wasn't dependent on the internet, but I suppose if people are here downloading the pack then they probably have access

Only thing wrong really is that I didn't see any save files and I think they are pretty nice for testing how things look in-game. I figure most people won't need them - they're probably going to be retexturing things in their current inventory. However, some people might just download the dump pack and go to town retexturing things and might not want to locate the item in-game. Basically, I'd like to make it easy for those type of contributors to come in and do work without any extra hassle.

So, I can go through and put the save files in if you don't have the inclination. No big deal for me.

Edit - Finally took a close look at those portraits. Man, you did a really great job editing those. Very impressive.