Textures

About RE Engine textures:

Similar to most modern game engines, RE Engine uses PBR textures. Shaders and materials are usually setup to use channel packed textures. This means that different types of textures can be stored on the Red, Green, Blue and Alpha channels.

The texture names reflect this i.e.: ALBM stands for AlbedoMetallic where the albedo texture is using the Red, Green and Blue channels and the metallic map is stored on the Alpha channel.

You can find 2 different set of textures for most models, the ones next to the .mesh are the low-resolution textures usually not larger than 1024x1024. The high-resolution textures can be found in the streaming folder.

Low-Res:
re_chunk_000\natives\STM\_Chainsaw\Character\wp\wp40\wp4000\00\wp4000_00_laser_albd.tex.143221013

Hi-Res:
re_chunk_000\natives\STM\Streaming\_Chainsaw\Character\wp\wp40\wp4000\00\wp4000_00_laser_albd.tex.143221013

Replacing the low-resolution texture with the high-resoultion texture will force the game to always load the hi-res file. This makes packing mod easier, because you don't have to include the streaming folder in your mods. However, in some of the newer RE Engine games forcing 4K (4096x4096) or god forbid 8K (8192x8192) textures can impact performance.

Viewing and exporting textures with Noesis:

After extracting the game files you can preview, export and convert .tex using Noesis.
To do so follow these steps:

• Download and extract Noesis

• Download and install RE-MESH-Noesis-Plugin
  Install instructions can be found on the plugin's GitHub page.

• Opening a .tex file with Noesis will automatically load it, once the plugin is installed.

Tip

To change the Alpha channel's blend mode, click on the highlighted icon on the texture preview tab:

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• You can export textures by right-clicking on the texture and selecting Export or alternatively File > Export

• In the 'Export Media" popup window you can choose the format you want under the 'Main output type' dropdown menu.
  TGA or DDS are the recommended formats, because most other formats won't preserve the Alpha Channel correctly.

Texture Types:

Here you can find a list of what each abbreviation stands for. Textures are going to be in channel order from left to right: Red, Green, Blue and Alpha. If only 2 textures are shown assume that the first texture takes up the Red, Green and Blue channels and the second texture goes on the Alpha channel unless stated otherwise.

ALBM - AlbedoMetallic

Albedo is sometimes called Base Color. Metallic or Metalness is a black and white mask texture where white is metallic.

ALBD - AlbedoDielectric

Same as ALBM but the Metallic map is inverted, where black is metallic.

ATOS - AlphaTranslucentOcclusionSubSurfaceScattering

ATOS is made up of 4 black and white mask textures.
Often only the Blue channel is used for Ambient Occlusion.

ATOC - AlphaTranslucentOcclusionCavity

Same as ATOS but the Alpha channel stores a Cavity map instead of an SSS texture.

NRMR - NormalRoughness

The normal map's format is DirectX. Which means that the Red channel corresponds to the X component of the surface normal vector and the Green channel to the Y component. The Blue channel would hold the Z component of the surface vector but since we are in 2D that is omitted.
R = Normal X
G = Normal Y
B = N/A
A = Roughness

NRRC - NormalRoughnessCavity

Mostly found in newer RE Engine titles and the first type of texture that doesn't follow the channel naming scheme.
R = Roughness
G = Normal Y
B = Cavity
A = Normal X

NRRT - NormalRoughnessTranslucent

Same as NRRC but instead of a cavity map on the blue channel it stores a translucency mask texture.
R = Roughness
G = Normal Y
B = Translucency
A = Normal X