Battle Tattoos

Battle Tattoos v1.0
Created By Kevin, Tested By Sam

This Mod adds tattoos to Oblivion. The tattoos behave like clothing or armor. They can be equipped & unequipped. The Tattoos do not have any armor rating, but they do give you different effects: Fire Resistance, Fortify Strength etc... You can buy the tattoos at Jensine's in IC. There are 6 tattoos in this version & I've added 2 player tattoo slots, so players can add thier own tattoos to the mod. This is the first version, so I made the tattoos cheap so everyone can try them out. I've included a separate readme about adding your own tattoos to the game. The future of this mod is limitless. I hope to add more tattoos, better designs, glowing tattoos & tattoo parlors in future versions. Enjoy.

INSTALLATION: Extract zip file into your Oblivion/Data folder & remember to activate the esp. 

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How to add custom tattoos to the Battle Tattoo Mod.

Needed: Adobe Photoshop with dds plugin

It took a long time to develop the technique to make tattoos for Oblivion. This readme is intended for people who have some experince with Photoshop & texturing. I hope the info here is helpful. 

When you go to Jensine's to buy tattoos, you will notice 2 "Player Tattoos" for sale. These are 2 blank slots that I added to the mod to make it easier for people to add thier own tattoos to the mod. The esp file & the nifs are already created, so the only thing you need to do is edit the texture. If you look in Oblivion/Data/Textures/Characters/Tattoos/ folder you will find the textures for the tattoos. You will see that each texture has 2 files, the regular texture & the _n file or Normal Map. You don't need to change the _n files at all. Find the 2 textures named playertattoo1 & playertattoo2. These are the ones you will need to edit. Open one of them up in Photoshop. A box may pop-up saying "Nvidia DDS Read Properties", if it does just select "Load Using Default Sizes" & make sure Load MipMaps is unchecked.   

Once the image is loaded you should have a texture of a male's upperbody. If it looks blue & funny, that probably means that you opened the _n file instead of the regular texture. Now the fun part. Edit the image however you want. The texure is designed to wrap around the 3d model of the upper body. the left 1/4 of the image are the arms, the right 3/4 is the torso. Once you've added your tattoo to the texture there is only one step to go, the Alpha channel. 

If you edit your tattoo & save it without changing the Alpha channel, your tattoo will be in the game, but so will the skin texture. So if you have an Argonian or Khajiit character it will look like they are wearing a human skin jacket. Since we want our tattoo to work well with all skin colors, we need to make it so only our tattoo is visible. This is very simple. In Photoshop, if you look at the box that contains your layers you will see a tab at the top that say channels, click on it. At the bottom of the channel list you will see a channel called "Alpha1" If you click on it you will see a blank white image. In the Alpha channel white areas are visible while black areas are transparent. We want our tattoo to be white in the alpha & the skin to be black. There are many ways to do this in Photoshop, but I like to use the magic wand tool to select my tattoo then switch to the Alpha channel to change it. You can open up one of my textures to see how the alpha should look. 

Once you have created your tattoo & fixed the Alpha channel all you have to do is save it as a dds file. The esp file is looking for playertattoo1 & 2, so don't change the name of the file if you want it to work. Also don't change or rename the _n files. If you think you've got it right, open up Oblivion & try it out.

Good Luck!