Hey there folks. This here is my first mod release on the Nexus. I mainly made this as a personal reskin, but I felt like I might as well release this one since the Dark Souls nexus needs more attention.

I'm by no means a pro at photoshop, and I imagine any skilled texture artist would scoff at my work, but hopefully anyone that decides to use this will like it.

I tried to stick with the same color scheme, but I wanted an overall clean look. It makes sense that the original texture is roughed up and the blade's edges are dulled and chipped since the sword was laying on the ground in front of a sleeping undead dragon for years, but I felt like the relatively low resolution of the texture made the details basically illegible. The hilt design and the blade engravings are all kind of muddy. In fact, the vanilla texture itself is incredibly hard for me to work off of as a guide. I literally have no idea where the polygons begin and end, so trying to keep things symmetrical and lined up properly is next to impossible. In the end, my "designs" are more like scribbles, but I tried to make it look fancy regardless. It looks awkward when you view the texture itself, but when it's in-game and wrapped on the model, it looks a lot better. Quite frankly, the designs on the original texture weren't symmetrical either; or didn't appear to be at least. If there was a way to rip models from Dark Souls (with the UVs intact) in to 3DS Max, then I could do a WAY better job.

For the cross guard of the hilt, I went with an ivy design while trying to make sure it mirrored correctly. I think the ivy fits the cross guard well, and it's a lot better than what I had at first. The emblem on the rain guard looked like some kind of portrait in the vanilla texture, but again, I couldn't really tell. I opted for a nice big, socketed gem (in this case an emerald). If the demand is high enough, I'll definitely consider making more gem options in case people would rather have a ruby or a sapphire or something. I definitely plan on updating this mod in the future if I can come up with new ideas and such.


Installation is standard. You need DSfix in order to override the default textures, so if you don't have DSfix installed then you need to go do that first. It's available on the Nexus and will have all the info you need. Once you've installed DSfix and enabled texture overriding in the config, you just drop the PNG files in to the tex_override folder and load your game up.

Now, I've included two options. First, the ultra HD version that's a whopping 1024x4096 resolution. One important thing I should mention is that with the ultra HD version, whenever you equip this sword from the equipment menu, your game might pause for a second since it has to load the textures. This is beyond my control and if it bothers you that much then try using the lite version that's half the resolution (512x2048). I might even include a version that's the same resolution as the vanilla texture (256x1024) if people want me to. You WILL NOT get any pausing or lagging if you switch between the sword and a second main-hand weapon, so don't worry about that. This mod should in no way adversely affect gameplay.


Anyway, I hope you guys like this mod. If I'm correct, this is the first reskin of Astora's Straight Sword on the Nexus. :)