A guide for Multiple Material Meshes - ME3Tweaks/LegendaryExplorer GitHub Wiki

Introduction

So you will some repeated information from my other tutorials but a little bit more information too. So you don't have to sieve through the other tutorials. The tutorials I will be repeating information from are;

How to get your meshes setup for import into a PCC found here Adding your outfit armour for Shepard as a new asset found here

So this tutorial will assume you already know how to set up your DLC and have a general idea of where everything is in Lexplorer

What we'll be using;

  • Blender
  • Legendary Explorer
    • Mesh explorer
    • Package Editor
  • Trilogy Save Editor

Blender

In blender you want to setup your mesh for multiple materials before trying to import into a PCC

  • Each mesh part that requires a material must have the material assigned in blender
  • The order of the materials only matter once you reach importing into a PCC so they can be any order in blender
    • however if you want to use the FemaleMaterialOverride or MaleMaterialOverride for a casual outfit in the Coalesced make sure your first texture in the order is the one you want to be able to override as it will only ever override one material that being the first (thanks to munchyfly for working this out)
  • This is for any meshes including outfits, hairs and objects.
  1. So once your mesh is ready (and still in separate pieces) for materials it is a good time to assign each part to their material while they are separate (see Figure 01)
  • So if you have 3 parts before joining and want 3 materials make sure to assign the parts to their material which would mean you have 3 materials

Figure 01

Figure 01 Link

  1. Before joining mesh parts make sure their UV's are all named UV0 or at least the same name as each other (see Figure 02)

Figure 02

  1. So when you join you will have 1 mesh but still have 3 materials (see Figure 03)

Figure 03

This blender addon though paid ($5) is one I highly suggest if you have a mesh with many UVs, as it makes merging them much easier. UV-Outfit - Merge

Package Editor

  1. This happens when the mesh you imported over doesn't have enough Materials applied as you need (see Figure 4)

Figure 4

  1. To fix this lets click on the Material (1) then click on Add Array Element (2) (see Figure 5)

Figure 5

  1. Now a button will appear called Set click that to apply the additional Material slots (see Figure 6)

Figure 6

  1. Now to assign our Materials we need to look at our new PCC in Package Editor at the same time as Meshplorer (see Figure 7)
    • this is where our order of materials from Blender come into play, the order of your materials must match the same order as blender
    • Look at the number next to our other materials. In the example it is 856
    • Click on one of the blank (null) material slots in Meshplorer
    • Type in the number from the material in the PCC so 856
    • Click Set
    • Repeat for other needed materials

Figure 7

  1. Now as you can see all the mesh parts are now showing. Press CTRL + Shift + S to save what you've done (see Figure 8)

Figure 8

Hair

So assuming you have followed the above and assigned all your materials in both blender and your package (PCC) the next step is using save editor to make it show in game.

  1. So like normal you will point to your mesh name in save editor (see Figure 9)
  • for my example I use biog_hmf_hir_padme.Hair_Pad01.HMF_HIR_Pad01_MDL
  • biog_hmf_hir_padme is the name of the package (pcc)
  • Hair_Pad01 is the folder within the pcc that your mesh is in
  • HMF_HIR_Pad01_MDL the name of your mesh

Figure 9

  1. Now in order for multiple materials for hair to work we have to remove the references to textures within save editor (see Figure 10)
  • under texture parameters remove all texture references so they become 'empty'
  • this way the game reads the DLC for the information instead of the save file

Figure 10

Now when you or your mod user loads their save, the game should show your hair with all its materials