UE 4.26 template project and texture/mesh/MI modding tutorial for Midnight Suns
UPDATE: If your materials broke after the Deadpool update, see fix below!
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Thanks to FatihG, Narknon, amiibolad, Samsamts, and many, many others on ToA and FF7 modding discords who held my hand and walked me through UE4 modding for ToA and FF7. Really excited to be able to pay it forward and hopefully inspire some more modders!
Thanks to gildor, matya, samsamts, narknon, and fluffyquack for the tools that make UE4 modding much easier.
Thanks to Epic for building an incredible engine that gives us a common framework for modding so many AAA games.
Thanks to 2K and Firaxis for this awesome game, and Stan Lee (RIP) for creating amazing characters.
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UPDATE: The Deadpool update modified a lot of the game's material uexp files. If you followed the material hacking portion of my tutorial (e.g., step #10) and made custom material instances (MIs) with renamed versions of the original game's uexp files, and the Deadpool update broke the materials in your mod, you will need to repeat step #10 (e.g. re-copy and rename the uexp files) with the updated MIs from the updated version of the game.
Modding textures, meshes and material instances (MIs) in Midnight Suns works basically like any other UE game with nothing fancy, so it's basically the same procedure as modding Tales of Arise, Gotham Knights, and so on, except you need to use UE 4.26 for Midnight Suns. I put together a basic tutorial with an outline of the steps, although any of the various tutorials on UE4 modding should give you the same info. For example, this is the video which helped me get started from when I first learned to mod Tales of Arise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb--0jjXy2M
The tutorial text file extracted from this zip is specific to Midnight Suns.
The zip file contains: - The tutorial text file - A basic template UE 4.26 project - A directory structure already set up for you to copy cooked textures and meshes generate by UE, as well as your hacked material instances.
Once you successfully figure out how to mod this game, you will also be able to mod almost any other UE4.X game.
Happy Modding!
KNOWN ISSUES: - Following the steps in my tutorial appears to be working well for all the body and hair meshes I've tried modding so far, but doing the procedure I outlined (import PSK->Blender, and then export FBX->UE and cook in UE) on head meshes (at least for Nico's head mesh) appears to translate the head, so that it appears disconnected and floating in-game. Hacking the materials of the original game's head mesh in UassetEditor works fine, and is how I made https://www.nexusmods.com/marvelsmidnightsuns/mods/25, but it looks like some more debugging/hacking is needed to enable fully custom head mesh mods.