Star Wars: Squadrons

BadHorse here's the texture along with the separated UV's for the hair cards and cap meshes: www.mediafire.com/file/fgnvbzh5syt72wz/Hair_TEMP.rar/file

Note that when you apply the texture to Cards_UV2, that is how it is supposed to look. Somehow I need to get the texture to look like that on Cards_UV1.

BadHorse so I take it you haven't had any success with the hair texture re-baking either? I've been playing around with different settings, but still no luck yet.

Hmmm, I just played with it for the morning..and it boils down to what I think is a second UV on the Hair_Cap just to add the Grey hair and Streak. I can barely get it to work but it trashes the overall hair shader in the Process. It is Mashing all the Hair cards down to a small portion of the Hair-Cap, to get to the gradient texture n the corner. That may help you figure out the direction to go...but IMHO it is a total waste of time...Personally I would just delete that second UV and do the same thing assigning the Grey section of the Specular map adding a second texture and ramping up the specular and using the  Alpha Mask to the streak the hair. you can see on the Face Texture where the streak is supposed to start so that is a good reference...

All in all it is a really badly done...under texture for the hair on the face map is too high to be useable...alpha mask is really chunky, should have used a brush half the size for the hair and mask. Can be fixed but not without some time and effort... seems they got started, gave up saying to themselves., "there will be a helmet over this anyway"!

I have a question please: There are maps with _Sm ... is this specular?

thank you

According to the Frosty devs, the "S" in the SooG "CS" textures stands for smoothness (sometimes called glossiness), which is the inverse of roughness and the source of the "Sm" in the parsed texture filenames. From what I can glean, they (EA/DICE/Motiv) mostly supplement the lack of an actual specularity texture in their PBR workflow with a metalness texture where needed. Even though smoothness and specularity are not the same thing, I've admittedly used the smoothness texture in the specularity shader slot, albeit with a scaling node to temper its impact.

There's an interesting conversation about the different PBR workflow approaches here.

I finally got a chance to look at it, and I think you've found one of the circumstances under which trans-channel UV re-baking will not work. The fact that the UV "islands" are overlapping in the UV channels is not in and of itself a problem. This is a common practice especially with normal map UV islands due to their tendency to take advantage of symmetrical features. It's even okay to have overlapping islands in the destination UV channel, but only if they are overlapping consistently between the two channels. With your hair cards, this is not the case. The overlap of hair card UV2 islands is not consistent with the overlap of the UV1 islands. Does that make sense? 

It's possible to work around this issue by using Blender to create a new, unwrapped UV map and rebaking the textures to fit the new UVs.
Here's a fixed mesh and rebaked textures for the provided files: mega.nz/file/yoln0CaZ#69JUKzGK938qYhYESlbWcOy39ZMjpghaaowqeDitZgQ

Stym , I've actually used this method before (i.e. creating a whole new UV map without island overlap to be used as the re-bake target mesh) and it works like a charm. Hair cards should work especially well due to their very simple geometry. The only downside is that the output texture needs to be a bit bigger, or you end up sacrificing some of the source texture data due to relatively smaller target UV islands, but maybe that's an acceptable compromise.

PNG does support RGBA. All of the original textures with the alpha channel intact are in the folder labeled SooG (straight out of game).

With that said, there is a workaround that you can use to extract textures yourself from Squadrons using standard Frosty. It'll crash if you try to open any meshes, but so far it's been pretty reliable for textures.
01) Go to your Squadrons installation directory. In the same folder, make a copy of "starwarssquadrons.exe" and rename it "bfv.exe". This will trick Frosty into using the "Battlefield V" profile.
02) Open Frosty, pick the "New" button, and then navigate to and select your "bfv.exe" file.
03) "Star Wars: Squadrons" should now show up in your list of configurations to choose from. Select it.
04) You'll get a message saying that "The SDK for profile 'Battlefield V' is out of date". Dismiss this message by clicking the 'X' in the upper right corner.

That should do it. You should now be able to navigate the Squadrons game assets and view/extract textures. Again, viewing/extracting meshes will not work, but you're welcome to try if you enjoy watching Frosty crash.

Crossing my fingers for these. Can't wait to see them available 

Please!

So how did BadHorse get a hold of it?

He's special, and he has connections.