Creating LooksMenu Overlays (by

krisser143/WünderWafflen)
Requirements

Required Tools
● B.A.E
● Creation Kit
● Photoshop or Gimp
● Intel Texture Works for Photoshop (Only Photoshop users)
● DDS for Gimp (Only Gimp users)
● Notepad++ or Sublime
● Material Editor

Required Mods
● F4SE
● LooksMenu (and the sample overlays if interested)
● Any body textures. If you for example choose CBBE textures, then your mod will only
support the CBBE body.

Installing required tools

B.A.E
This tool stands for Bethesda Archive Extractor, and will be used later for checking that
everything is packed correctly. The download link can be found here:
http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/78/?

Creation Kit
Every modders must have when doing anything. For this guide, we will use it for packing our
ba2 archives. Here’s a tutorial for installing it: ​https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/Videos/1964
Intel Texture Works (Only Photoshop users)
If you use Photoshop, this is a requirement for working with DDS files. The following link will tell
you how to install, and includes the official link to the plugin. The download link is in the upper
right corner with a button called “zip”. ​https://gametechdev.github.io/Intel-Texture-Works-Plugin/

DDS for Gimp (Only Gimp users)

Gives the same function as Intel Texture Works, but for Gimp. ​http://registry.gimp.org/node/70

Material Editor
This is used for editing material files. More on that later in the guide.
http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/3635/?

Preparing
The first thing you want to do is prepare your workspace. The way I have done it, is to have a
folder on my computer, where all my project files are (photoshop/gimp files). In this folder you
want to create one new folder called “Separate Overlays”.
Now you want to find the body texture you wanted to use. This one is just for positioning the
overlay, you will be able to use any body texture in-game, as long as it works on the same body
as the body texture you used for positioning. So if you used a CBBE body texture for
positioning, then your mod will only support CBBE. You want to open this body texture in
Photoshop/Gimp, and once open, save as a project file for your respective editor with the name
“positioning”.

Now go into Creation Kit, and create a brand new project. Save this as a new esp file, even
though you have made no changes at all. Call it something unique, you will use this esp name
later, and don’t put spaces or underscores in this name.

After that, you should create the following four folder structures (and files) in your data directory.
Replace the stuff in brackets with what it says:
F4SE\Plugins\F4EE\Overlays\<esp name>.esp\overlays.json
interface\Translations\<esp name>_en.txt
materials\overlays\<your nexus username>\
textures\overlays\<your nexus username>\
Editing

Greyscale Overlays
These are the easiest overlays to create. You can make them out of any image, as long as
there’s a white or black background (solid color that is).
In the following steps I encourage to use adjustment layers if you are using Photoshop. It makes
stuff so much easier.
Firstly, open the image in your image editor, and remove ALL the hue from one of the layers.
This is done with the Hue/Saturation option in both PS and Gimp.
Now you want to also inverse colors of this same layer.
Lastly you should add a layer, and fill it solid black, and add a layer mask. Copy paste the first
layer into this layer mask. Now hide the first layer, and you should have your transparent grey
scale tattoo. Save as a project file in your separate overlays folder.

Colored Overlays
These requires some knowledge of using a photo editor. You basically need to make a
greyscale overlay, add a color gradient (Photoshop required), save this gradient to a dds file,
and add it in the greyscale part of the material file (read along to learn how). Save as a project
file in your separate overlays folder.

Positioning
Now you need to position the overlay. Firstly open your positioning project file. In it there should
be only one layer if you haven’t done this before. Go ahead and drag&drop one of your overlay
project files, and position it where you want on the body texture. Don’t merge anything, but keep
the body texture and overlays separate.

Exporting
Exporting the texture files is very easy. You should export from your positioning project file. Do
this by first hiding every layer, but the one layer with the overlay you actually want to export. It’s
okay that there’s a lot of whitespace, the archive later on will take care of this for you.

If you use Gimp, then simply save as DDS, set compression to BC5/DX5, and set compression
to highest.

In Photoshop however, you need to press “save as”, hit “as copy” so it’s checked, set
compression to BC7/fine and texture type to color+alpha, then hit ok.
If you want to follow a proper naming convention, then please add “_d” after your file name (but
before the .dds part). This stands for diffuse.

Now simply put the texture file into the texture path you created before.

Material Files

BGSM
These files are used for normal everyday texturing. They don’t support alpha channels though,
so we want to avoid these. However they are the only ones supporting skin tinting, which is a
new feature of LooksMenu. Go and pop the path in for you diffuse texture, and save it with the
same name as the corresponding texture file, however without the “_d” part. Save it into the
material path you created before.

BGEM
These are essentially effect textures, but will do the job for now. You need to put settings into
the “effects” tab in Material Editor. Here you will put in the path to your texture file in “base
texture”, and if you do in fact have a gradient for coloring this texture, put it in “greyscale”. Save
it into the material path you created before.

Implementing

Registering
To register an overlay, you need to open up both your overlays.json file and the translation file.
These were created earlier. You need to open them in Notepad++ or Sublime. To edit it, you
need to have a bit of an understanding for tabulation and json, this is not a json tutorial ;)
This is the basic structure of the json file. For gender, 1 = woman and 0 = man.
Sort works like this: Firstly it will sort the ones with lowest number on the top of the in-game
overlays list, then it will sort the overlays with the same number by alphabet. Remember that it
sorts by “name”, and not the name in the translations file.
For slot, 3 = body and 4 = hands.
[
{
"id" : "tattoo_one",
"name": "$Tattoo One",
"slots" : [
{
"slot" : 3,
 "material" : "overlays\\<your nexus username\\TattooOne.BGSM"
}
],
"playable" : true,
"transformable" : false,
"sort": 0,
"gender": 1
},
{
"id" : "overlay_ten",
"name": "$overlay ten",
"slots" : [
{
"slot" : 4,
"material" : "overlays\\<your nexus
username>\\OverlayTen.BGSM"
}
],
"playable" : true,
"transformable" : false,
"sort": 1,
"gender": 0
}
]

Translating
The translation file is a bit harder to edit, because of tabulation. The format is the name (from
the json file) to the left of the tab, and the name you want to the right. Spaces are allowed on
both sides, and the name to the left needs to have the dollar sign.

Testing
Really simple, test the changes without packing stuff, just let the loose files be there in your data
directory.

Packing
Packing is essentially compressing your files. As most of you overlays are 80-90% whitespace,
it will greatly reduce the total size. My general results are 1GB -> 20MB. That’s a lot of
compression
To pack the mod, simply go into Creation Kit and load the empty esp you made. From there,
press file>create archive. Press “add files”, and choose the texture and material files you have
created. It’s best to do this in one run for textures, and one run for materials.
Once done, pack the archives. The naming convention which you NEED to follow for archives is
as following:
For main archive it’s “<esp name> - Main”
For texture archive it’s “<esp name> - Textures”

Now open up each archive in B.A.E, and verify that they are in fact packed correctly. Test
in-game before releasing, you don’t want to release a broken mod ;)