User:Sir Teatei Moonlight/RoA2 resources

Rivals of Aether 2 uses UE5.4 and names files in descriptive English, so there's much less weird stuff to deal with compared to e.g. Xenoblade's unique formats and numerical files. Still, it's good to have a central README file just in case something needs to be "globally" updated.

See also: /Palettes

The general disclaimer

I view tMR as a "casual-friendly" site - people don't need to know anything technical about whatever game they're looking for, they can just grab the model and be on their way. Because of this, my submissions make some minor changes to make the model more suitable for easy consumption. If you're interested in a more "raw" representation, you're probably better off getting the tools (I use FModel for RoA2) and doing some ripping yourself.

Things to know about these submissions in general

• I didn't include any models that are purely for special effects (e.g. attack trails). If you need things that deep to be accurate, you're probably better off doing your own ripping anyway.
• RoA2 models tend to face towards +X. I rotated them to instead face -Y.
• _L bones are flipped so poses can be mirrored more easily.
• A set of pre-computed colour images for the character's default palette is included, for people who just want the default and don't care for setting up the colour masks (as below).
• Texture name hints:
  • _BC is base colour.
  • _CM is colour mask (see below).
  • _N is normals.
  • _ORMS is channelised:
    • Channel R is Occlusion. I'm not actually sure how applicable this is since it seems to make eyes go dark.
    • Channel G is Roughness. Easy plug.
    • Channel B is Metallic. Easy plug.
    • Channel A is Shading. Multiply the base colour by this.
  • _WPO is for "world position offset", which I think is used mostly to fake wind-blowing effects.

Colours

Many, many things in RoA2 use colour masks instead of actual colours. There's a two-step process for this.

Palettes

Palette colours are defined in files in two simultaneous formats. Here's an example:

"Key": "Element1",
"Value": {
    "R": 0.672443,
    "G": 0.004391,
    "B": 0.001518,
    "A": 1.0,
    "Hex": "D60E05"
}

Since D6 == 214 and 214/255 != 0.672, clearly it's doing some sort of linear colour space shenanigans. The good news is that if you just paste the D60E05 into Blender, you get (0.672, 0.004, 0.002) as expected, so it seems to be of the same mind. Otherwise, you may have to research your own tool's colour space shenanigans to figure out what's correct.

Note that some colours are fixed, and do not vary based on palette.

Masks

_CM textures are colour masks. Basically, they represent the idea of:

• Where the mask is black, the base colour shows.
• Where the mask is red, colour 1 shows.
• Where the mask is green, colour 2 shows.
• Where the mask is blue, colour 3 shows.

But that's not all: the alpha channel can be used to split the mask, so it's actually 2 sets of K/RGB at once. This means a single mask can supply up to 8 colours. This also means that you have to beware of "transparent means black" optimisations - Blender is fine as long as the texture is marked as "Non-Color", but other stuff may need watching.