Alternative Clan Colours - 20c based on the latest patch available

[PeaceLove]

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=443949

A samurai wearing a horo, reproduction of a woodblock print by Utagawa Kuniyoshi


ALTERNATIVE CLAN COLOURS

A mod for recolouring the units in S2TW
starting with version 09a

now featuring 20 clans

Updates

I'll be notifying you all about developments in this project here. But be warned, they may be few and far between due to real life commitments...

13 May 2011 - Version 20c based on the latest patch5 from CA posted, adding Ashikaga, Kuroda, Sakai and Urakami. The banner mod that goes with those clans will turn up later. See post #2 for info.
30 April 2011 - Version 16c including new banners out, with changes to Date, Mori and Tokugawa, and introducing Hattori, Hosokawa, Miyoshi and Mogami. See post #2 in this thread for details regarding the latter three clans, and below regarding the updates for the other clans.
21 April 2011 - A banner mod complementing ACC 12b has been released. See near bottom of this post for details.
20 April 2011 - Version 12b released, including a minor adjustment to Oda and three new clans: Amako, Asai and Imagawa. See details regarding the last three clans in post #2.
17 April 2011 - Optional colours for Tokugawa and Uesugi added to post #3. They might be included in the main mod with the next update.

Introduction
Ever since RTW, I've been wanting to do some retexturing and recoloring of the units in the great TW series of games. But I lacked the tools, money and time to do it. Now, with me venturing into the world of hex editing for the very first time, I'm finally able to make a contribution in visual mods. I hope you like the result. I sure have had fun doing this thing.

Approach
The reason I started this project was of course my dissatisfaction with how some of the units looked and my belief that I could improve on that a bit. For inspiration to my changes, I'd like to turn to historical sources. But in the case of the Sengoku period in Japan, good material seems hard to find (for a westerner like me). Searching the web does not yield much, at least not quickly. Then I picked up the information that warriors in this time and place of the world normally did not wear uniforms. This suggests that the soldiers could look pretty much in any practical way possible, united only in the kind of banners and sashimonos they carried. But in Japanese movies like Akira Kurosawa's "Kagemusha" and "Ran", which I take to be trying to rectreate events and life style from the period in question pretty accurately, most warriors do seem to have a uniform, each army only having several of them, one for each fighting unit, pertaining perhaps to what area the units are recruited from. This certainly applies to the "footsoldiers". But apparently not to officers or higher ranked soldiers like the samurais. So in the latter case at least, there would be room for individual and varied appearance in the armor. Anyway, the most informative source about how the clan armies could have looked which I have found on the web to date (just like bar07, but in a different place) is this...

I have come to know the creator of this plate - good Mr Danborg, by fantastic coincidence also known as TomteOFDoom here at TWC (!) - as a person very knowledgeable of Japanese history during this period. So unless otherwise indicated, I have based my work primarily on this source and for good reason.

But it's easier said than done to reproduce the colour scheme of a given source in S2TW. The game design only allows three colours to be changed and these usually in a different pattern than shown on the sources. Take the appearance of the Oda according to Danborg's plate, for instance, black armor with strong patches of yellow on it. The game doesn't distribute the details of the armor in big patches like that, but in tiny details all over the place, resulting in this complementary colour not being seen properly from a certain distance and in effect blending with the colour of the armor. To recreate the general colour appearance of some clans, I've sometimes experimented with swapping the colour of the armor with the colour of the details or clothing. But unlike the clothing in Danborg's plate, whatever colour you choose for clothing in this game will dominate the appearance. So sometimes it's not possible to get it "right". You'll have to settle for an approximation.

Add to this the task of finding the right hue or shade among 1.6 million possible different colours for each area of the uniform, in effect looking at over 4 billion colour combinations, that whatever colour you choose will be affected by reflections of brightly coloured banners and sashimonos (explaining why the black armor of the Oda appear bronze-coloured at times), that the game will render any colour of the clothing in particular one or two steps darker than expected for some reason, and the desire to have rather unique-looking clans, and you get an idea of the difficulties involved in creating a good mod of this kind.

Illustrations
As examples of the result from this mod, I'm posting pics of different units in various environments clan-wise, but I have let the game decide the time of day shown. So if you think the result is difficult to see on occasion, then it seems it's meant to be a surprise when you see those units yourself in game. I may replace the first pics with others later. But I'm not as good at taking screenshots as some of those guys displaying their impressive work in the dedicated thread for this. Your more than welcome to post better shots of this mod in operation here...

So here they are, in alphabetical order...

●Chosokabe-shi

The first clan which I found a satisfactory change for. Later discovered the Ogigayatsu clan to look similar, however. Will have to do something about that. But according to Danborg's plate, now appearing in brown armor with khaki-like clothing...

The Chosokabe might benefit from getting the mon on their banners turned yellow like seen on Danborg's plate.

Edit: Indeed, with the new banners accompanying ACC 16c, this clan has finally come to its right.  

●Date-shi

Found more than one source indicating that the Date should be darker, and less colourful than vanilla. Like this one...

To simulate this darker appearance with ACC 9a and 12b, I gave them black clothing. But with ACC 16c, this have been changed to historically more accurate blue-ish garments. These were apparently rather light in hue in reality, but if given such colour in this game, their overall appearance becomes clearly more blue than black, which is the wrong impression. So I finally settled for the following...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

With a historically more correct white mon on their banners, they turn out like below...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

To change the mon to this colour, see info in the banners department below.

If you want ACC 16c to still feature the Date with black clothing seen here...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

...edit the mod in the appropriate place with hex code 383838 or RGB values 56-56-56.

A variant more in line with Danborg's plate is for display in post #3 of this thread. 

●Hattori-shi

With ACC 16c, I'm finally introducing my variant of this clan, which, for want of other info, is merely following the vanilla concept in a different way...

As you can see, I ended up changing only the armor details to a red hue suiting them better, the clothing to a couple of steps lighter grey and their banner to looking more natural. I like the result. Enough to actually consider playing this faction now.

●Hojo-shi

Started with black armor for this faction but realized that a good deal of the playable clans were up for black armor according to Danborg's illustrations and I think we need more variety here. If any clan should have a different colour on their armor, like blue-ish gear, the Hojo would be a good candidate if nothing else than based on the colour of their banner. Steel blue sounded nice and in combination with the rest of the info on that plate, late in the afternoon somewhere...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

For a better view of these guys, start the game with this mod! Might try to work something feasible out with black armor as an option later.

●Mori-shi

Wasn't sure about the clothing for Mori in ACC 9a and 12b. So when I found this painting of Mori Motonari, a prominent daimyo in the Sengoku period, as inspiration...

...keeping the black armor with sangria red details, the result for ACC 16c was this...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

If you want to keep the old clothing seen here...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

...for 16c, use hex code 9D4B41 or RGB value 157-75-65. 

●Oda-shi

My headache. It seemed impossible to find a good yellow colour for clothing and then make the whole thing more interesting than just a big boring mass of yellow. The reflections from the banners and sashimonos of units affect the Oda particularly bad with the black on the armor often disappearing to more yellowish stuff. I won't tell you how many attempts I made with the Danborg idea, and some other ideas, including bronze-coloured armor, but I was about to give up when I hit upon a track that looked fairly promising. In black armor with a bluish tint, deep ochre details and customized yellow, they came out pretty decent...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

...especially in the updated 12b version below, where the yellow has been cleaned up and made less tiresome, and the armor been given a somewhat stronger bluish tint, deep ochre details still being best in adding some dignity to the whole, I think...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

I want one option for the Oda to be yellow and markedly different from the other playable clans like this. The 12b variant may be it.

Regarding vanilla, the funny thing is that in a scene from Kurosawa's movie Kagemusha Oda Nobunaga meets with Tokugawa Ieyasu in a field camp somewhere. Surrounded by long stretches of cloth setup as a colourful fence in yellow, purple and white with the emblem of the Oda clan printed upon it. Didn't think this colour combination was historically accurate. But other sources give black as the dominant colour in their fighting gear. I'll try a different version according to this idea later on.

●Shimazu-shi

One of the clans most in need of a change from vanilla, IMO. Here's how they can look instead, if it's raining and all...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

I have a different version with green clothing ready, shown in post #3 of this thread. Some may prefer that solution, especially since the Hatakeyama clan turns out to look like a lighter version of the above. But I want to do something about the appearance of Hatakeyama anyway.

●Takeda-shi

Danborg's plate indicate a digression from vanilla with more blue on the armor, but there are sources supporting the vanilla version, like Kurosawa's Kagemusha, where some units in Takeda Shingen's army wear red helmets and armor much like the people seen in this pic from a Takeda Shingen festival in Japan...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

So keeping the red armor but adding black details and dark blue clothing, the exact tone of the latter (not too blue, not too purple, not too light, not too dark) taking lots of experimenting to establish...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

●Tokugawa-shi

For the 16c version of ACC, I have brought in the variant of this faction that is more in line with Danborg's concept of them (dark brown armor with dark blue details and dark bluish gray clothing), which I finally interpreted as zinnwaldite brown, cool black and blue dog...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

They appear to have more authority in this outfit, as is proper.

If someone prefers the older versions of ACC but not the variant of Tokugawa there (as seen in post #3 now), I'm stating the color values for the new standard version here. Hex code: 2C1608, 525C65, 002E63. RGB values: 44,22,0-82,92,101-0,46,99.

●Uesugi-shi

I've wrestled with the purple for this faction until I momentarily gave up and tried something completely different, like the Uesugi seen in this movie Ten To Chi (pic supplied by SonOfOdin somwehere on this site, thank you very much)...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

So now I have them in dark grey armor with white-ish details and black clothing. With ACC 16c, I've made those details silver-coloured for a cleaner and IMO more satisfying look...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

In ACC 9a and 12b, the white-ish details were lavender-coloured (i.e. slightly purple), as seen like before here (with vanilla banners)...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

If you want to keep this tone for the armor details in 16c, change the values back to hex code E6E6FA or RGB 230-230-250.

I've also finished a variant which keeps the purple theme from vanilla for this clan and you can see how it looks in post #3 of this thread.

Flags

I think the banners and the sashimonos of the units are important for the overall appearance of the Japanese armies in S2TW. If the flags are two-coloured, like Asai's, and the units equally two-coloured, like Asai's, then the army in question look rather boring. So I try to make the hues and shades of the uniforms somewhat different from those of the flags. Editing the banners and sashimonos themselves is of course an other way around this. Until recently, we didn't know how to do this, but I'm very glad to announce the community has now cracked that nut, too. Here's one of the results (with ACC 12b)...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

Yes, the Asai have become a real badass clan. My advice is don't mess with those guys unless you have to...

Right, the new colours for some minor clans which ACC 12b introduced created a colour imbalance with the vanilla flags in a couple of cases, so I felt I needed to do something about that before moving on with the recolouring of the units. Whenever I release an update for my main mod from now on, I intend to release a complementary banners mod, if I feel such is necessary with the changes I made for the units. Unless stated otherwise, I have based my changes for the banners on Danborg's plate. The result will generally be shown with pics of coming updates for the main mod. But a description of the changes will always be listed in the logs below.

Changelogs for the banner mod

Banners for a clan not mentioned in the list below have been left untouched. Only changes made from vanilla are noted.

ACC 12b banners:
Amako-shi - white mon on black background with white ties darkened a bit.
Asai-shi - yellow mon on black background with black ties. Much better than vanilla.
Chosokabe-shi - yellow mon. Not sure if it became better.
Date-shi - black mon on white background with white ties. The latter based on a different illustration than Danborg's. But I will test a more natural-looking variant of vanilla for more colour later.
Imagawa-shi - black mon on white background with black ties. Corrected the colour imbalance with vanilla.
Oda-shi - yellow background softened and lightened up a bit, the result appearing more realistic. I think.
Uesugi-shi - white mon on black background with black ties. Taken from the same source as that used for the units. This completing the change for this faction from one of the most colourful to a more serious clan. Tested a variant with black background which kept the red vanilla mon, but it didn't look Uesugi.


ACC 16c banners:
White details on all clan banners have been reduced in brightness a bit, and black details also softened up a little for more life instead of black holes. Other changes...

Chosokabe-shi - the yellow mon from 12b has been given a somewhat stronger kick, somehow enough to make these guys appear decidedly more interesting and one of my favourite clans now.
Date-shi - as per request, golden mon on indigo blue background with indigo blue ties. If you prefer a white mon on this indigo background for more historical accuracy as far as banners or sashimonos go, change the colour values for the mon to hex code E6E6E6 with a hex code editor or RGB 230-230-230 with PFM.
Hattori-shi - red mon softened up a bit for a more natural look.
Hosokawa-shi - background and ties given the colour of natural cotton or cornsilk for more interest.
Miyoshi-shi - different hue of green for mon and ties on black background.
Mogami-shi - black mon on grey background with grey ties.
Mori-shi - ties given the same colour as the vanilla background.

Otherwise like ACC 12b banners.

Credits

Lord Maximus - for his work producing the Pack File Manager without which this mod would not have been possible.
Agostinos, sajaxom, and Zane - for their tutorials or information about how to hex edit the colours of the units which greatly facilitated my making of this mod.
erasmus777 - for reminding me how to pack a file.
D. Danborg a.k.a. TomteOfDoom - for the creation of my greatest source of inspiration for this mod.
The Hedge Knight - for his mod enabling all factions to be played in custom battles, without which modding minor clans would have been too much trouble to consider.
Ftmch - for his Less Glossy Units Mod 3.0 with which all pics of the recoloured units shown here have been taken (so if you think they look nice, like I do, this is partly his fault).
Kurisu Paifuaa - for the crucial tip that enabled me to start modding the banners properly.

Installation instructions

1. Extract the attached file using a free program like 7-zip found here: http://www.7-zip.org/download.html.
2. Place the extracted pack file into the data folder of S2TW, which in the case of XP is usually found along the following directory: C:\Program files\Steam\steamapps\common\total war shogun 2.
3. Make sure you don't have any other mod of this kind (including older versions of my mod) installed simultaneously there, because it might interfere with the function of this mod or the game itself. If you want use any other mod of this sort, you have to remove mine (just drop the file elsewhere) first for the same reason.
4. Enjoy the game!

ACC version history

The number in the version name stands for the number of clans that have been recoloured in it, and the letter for which edition of recolouring it is. So if one version is called 9a and another 12b, for example, then the latter contains three more recoloured clans than the former, and at least one of first clans has been recoloured in a new way.

Here's the development of ACC so far...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

Only changes from vanilla are noted.

ACC 9a
Chosokabe-shi - baker's chocolate brown armor with quartz-coloured details and khaki-like clothing.
Date-shi - completely black armor with lake erie details and black clothing.
Hojo-shi - steel blue armor with winereddish details and bluish grey clothing.
Mori-shi - sangria red details on the armor, and brownish red clothing.
Oda-shi - dark ochre details on armor and lighter yellow clothing.
Shimazu-shi - black armor with green details and light grey clothing.
Takeda-shi - darker details on armor, and dark blue clothing.
Tokugawa-shi - bluish black armor with brown details and liver-coloured clothing.
Uesugi-shi - dark grey armor with purple-ish white details and black clothing.


ACC 12b:
Amako-shi - goldenrod details on armor, and darktan clothing.
Asai-shi - reddish brown armor with falu red details and dark grey clothing.
Imagawa-shi - brown armor with turquoise green details and dark brownish grey clothing.
Oda-shi - yellow clothing from 9a softened up a bit.

Otherwise like 9a.


ACC 16c:
Date-shi - clothing made dark greyish blue.
Hattori-shi - blood red details on armor, and clothing made lighter.
Hosokawa-shi - bluish black armor with light steel grey details and fog-coloured clothing.
Mori-shi - clothing made somewhat more red and brown.
Miyoshi-shi - verydarkbrown armor with softened up black details and light green clothing.
Mogami-shi - bluish grey armor with sienna details and dark olive drab clothing.
Tokugawa-shi - zinnwaldite brown armor with cool black details and blue dog-coloured clothing.

Otherwise like 12b.


ACC 20c:
Ashikaga-shi - kuro-coloured armor with papayawhip details and indian yellow clothing.
Kuroda-shi - light grey armor with cornflowerblue details and light green clothing.
Sakai-shi - bluish medium grey armor with light indigo details and light bluish grey clothing.
Urakami-shi - grey armor with russet details and antiquewhite4 clothing.

Otherwise like 16c.

Now, enough of this talk, to the crucial part, have fun!
Regards,
D

Attached Files

	alternative_clan_colours_09a.7z (1.2 KB, 613 views)
	alternative_clan_colours_12b.7z (1.2 KB, 727 views)
	ACC_12b_banners.7z (1.4 KB, 552 views)
	ACC_16c_banners.7z (1.4 KB, 582 views)
	alternative_clan_colours_16c.7z (1.3 KB, 651 views)
	alternative_clan_colours_20c.7z (1.3 KB, 96 views)

GNOTHI SEAUTON - "Know thyself": precept inscribed in golden letters over the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, Greece
MEDEN AGAN - "Nothing in excess": another golden inscription at the above mentioned place

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Last edited by Demokritos; Today at 01:19 PM.

[SsanDi_Kim]

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