DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO – Modding Tutorial: Color & Texture

Sparking Zero Color & Texture Guide

By NovaTedd.

Requirements

• FModel Basic Knowledge
• Knola’s Material Recreation (UE 5.1)
• Character ID
• SZ UE Project

Step #1

Choose the character you want to edit colors / textures on, get their ID and find it in FModel. Once you find them, go to (ID) > 1p > Materials.

In here you’ll find many files, to summarize their meaning:

• ACC = Accessories
• HIR = Hair
• FCE = Face 
• SKN = Skin
• EYB = Eyebrows
• EYE000 = Left Eye
• EYE001 = Right Eye
• CLT = Clothes
• TOP = Top Clothing
• BTS = Boots / Shoes

Some characters (like transformable characters) will have similar IDs but with incremental numbers. In this example, the left image is Base Gogeta (Super)’s hair, and in the right is SSJ Gogeta (Super) / (Z)’s Hair.

Remember the location of your character’s materials, you’ll be going back to them for both their names and the information inside their files

• Now, over at 1p > Textures you can find all the character’s textures.

(If the character has extra detail in their model like a Gi symbol they might have more textures than usual)

• Download these textures, you’ll need them for BOTH coloring and texturing. Make sure to click Save Texture and not Export Raw Data.

• With the textures downloaded, you can now open the SZ UE Project. Extract the folder inside the .rar and open “SparkingZERO.uproject”
• ONLY change colors and textures with this project, NOT a default UE 5.1 project.
• On the project file you’ll find a folder named SS. Go inside it, and recreate the following folder structure (replacing the “0110” numbers with your character ID):

• Once you’re done, drag the textures you downloaded over to the Textures folder.
• Lastly, on the top left, hover over Edit, and then in “Editor Preferences” and “Project Settings”:

• Editor Preferences = Tick “Allow ChunkID Assignments”
  • (General > Experimental)

• Project Settings = Tick “Use Pak File” “Use Io Store” “Generate Chunks”
  • (Project > Packaging)

Great! We’re set up, now we can move on to the specifics.

Step #2: Recoloring

(Skip to step 3 if you only want to texture).

• For recoloring, you’ll need Knola’s Material Recreation (located at the top of the guide).
• Once downloaded, extract the Common folder from the .zip to your project’s Characters folder (Make sure you extract it in the file browser, not UE).

• You should be able to see a Toon Material inside the common folder now:

• Open the “BaseMI” folder, and in there you’ll find Material Instances for all the material types I mentioned on page 1. You’ll use these to make your recolors.
• Back to FModel! Inside the Materials folder, double click the piece of your character you want to edit, and you should be able to see their parameters:

• This is what you’re looking for, the Parent. You’ll notice the parent’s path can be traced in your own project file!

• You should find the material instance parent in your own project, and make an instance out of it (If there’s none that matches, make your own).

• Now, name the instance you just created identically to the material you opened, in this case, I’ve been looking for SSJ Gogeta’s hair, so i’ll name it the same as his file:

• Move this MI to your character’s material folder, and open it. Now, using FModel to check the parameters, you’ll want to either tweak these values identically to the file you just recreated, OR, use another file as reference (EX: SSG Vegeta’s hair parameters on SSJ Gogeta’s hair).

• If the file doesn’t show a parameter as changed, don’t enable it.
• Finally, change the color to whatever you want! You can either copy the color value from the FModel parameters, copy it from another character’s color or just change it to whatever you want!

• Keep in mind, how the color looks in Unreal is not how it will look in the game, the game will usually display the color darker or brighter, and with completely different hues. Experiment by packaging it (Step 4) repeatedly and trying out changes!
• Also remember to add a character’s mask or anything else if the FModel info says they have one!
• Repeat this process for as many materials as you want, just remember that with eyes, you should disable all color parameters, and enable “EyeColor”.

Step #3: Texturing

(Skip to step 4 if you just want to package your materials).

• Texturing is really simple, you just need to grab the textures, edit them with any program you want (EX: Photoshop, paint.net) and then overwrite them in your project’s folder.
• In this example, I retextured SSJ Gogeta’s eye textures by overlaying the SSB Gogeta’s eyes on top of the existing ones with paint.net.

• Since they were overwritten (the new textures have the same name as the old ones) they will now display instead of the old texture. (I recommend keeping the old one as backup if you don’t want to redownload through FModel).
• If you want to change a character’s textures, one way of doing so that’s used in this example is using the Global Text Parameters:

• In this scenario, “Mask1” is the texture for Gogeta’s hair strand lines, the game follows a similar format with most textures!
• You can edit or replace all of these textures (albeit with some trial and error) to get your desired result!
• In these parameters, this is how you’d add an eye texture to your eye material!

Step #4: Packaging

(Make sure to follow all steps).

• Packaging is vital in getting your mods to work, so let’s see how we do it.
• In your Content folder (the most you can get to your root in your project), right click and go through Miscellaneous > Data Asset, then specifically find SSPrimaryAssetLabel.

• DO NOT use the standard Primary label, use the SS variant, otherwise it won’t work!
• Rename this Data Asset to “Label_(yourmodname)“.
• Open the Data Asset, and add all the materials and textures you changed or edited in the “Explicit Assets” tab:

• Set your priority to 1 or higher, tick “Label Assets in My Directory” and set your Chunk ID to ANYTHING higher than 18 (highest pakchunk used by Sparking! Zero).
• Finally, you’ll need to assign the chunk ID you set in this file to everything you changed (Ex: My chunk ID is 150 in this image, so I’ll use 150 for everything). To do this, right click whatever you need to assign and go through Asset Actions > Assign to Chunk:

You SHOULD do this procedure on:

• Your Data Asset.
• Materials you recreated and put in your character’s material folder.
• Textures changed.

You SHOULDN’T do this procedure on:

• Textures left intact.
• Any material from Knola’s pack.
• Anything else.

Once you’re done, go over to Platforms, set your Binary Configuration to Shipping, and package your project! It doesn’t matter where you package it as long as you can find it.

• The first package will take quite a while, while the rest will be extremely fast. Keep this in mind!
• Done! Follow the folder path from SparkingZERO > Content > Paks and grab your 3 generated files! This is your mod. You can delete the rest once you’re sure you don’t need it.

• I recommend using Unverum to try out your mod. Simply download it, and once it’s set up on Sparking! Zero click “Add Mods > Open Mods Folder” and add your mod in like this:

• The mod.json should be optional, I just added it for the sake of it!
• Once it’s enabled, you’re good to go! Try your mod out and enjoy!

Helpful Information

• You don’t need to follow any specific .json for your material’s parameters, you can go wild and make whatever you want, just expect varying results!
• If you’re changing eyebrows, there’s a chance you might want to disable “Mask1” since it might leave weird lines on the eyebrows.
• If changing eye textures, make sure to pay attention to their parents! SSJ Gogeta’s Eye001 had Eye000 from the same material folder as its parent. 
• Also relating to eyes, I had lazy eye problems with my Gogeta until I got rid of Eye 001 from the Data Asset and just left it completely blank. Eye 000 SHOULD be the only you need!
• ALSO Also relating to eyes, if you’re tweaking with eye textures in any way shape or form…

Make sure to change their tiling method to clamp: