Bad Piggies Save Editor

[Edco Haglund]

Thisguide will get you through a simple retexturing of an item found in the dayz_communityassets.pbo. Once you're able to do this you'll be well on your way to adding your own items to the game. This guide will only get the items in game via the 3d editor but the pathing and practice is compatible with Elvaron's guide to setting up a test server.

Assuming you installed the BITools correctly, you should have a P:\ drive. Go ahead and create a \z\addons directory on your p:\ drive. Unzip everything from the DayZ build's \SQF directory into your p:\z\addons directory.

Open your texture in Photoshop or your favorite image editing software and save it as .tga format to a folder of your choice. You can name it anything you like but I'm going to use soda_example_CO.tga in this guide. **Note the _CO part This is important.** Open soda_example_CO.tga in TexView2 (BITool) and save it as soda_example_CO.paa and place it in your P:\z\addons\DayZ_Communityassets\textures directory. (You may need to type in the full file name for it save properly)

Open the \z\addons\dayz_communityassets\models directory. Double click soda_clays_clean_full.p3d. It should open up in Oxygen2 (BITool). Go ahead and save this .p3d as soda_example_full.p3d in the \models folder.

With the model selected, press "E". The Face Properites menu should open up. On the bottom right you'll see a section for Textures & Materials. Click the folder for Texture and navigate to your texture in \z\addons\dayz_communityassets\textures. Click Apply, then click OK. Do not worry about the Material setting right now as we're going to use the .rvmat supplied and it should already be set.

The can is small so you'll need to zoom in on it. When you do you'll notice your texture is blurry. This is okay and will not effect how the model will look in game but you'll still want a small clear image of your item for the inventory screen. Close Buldozer and save your model again.

I find it easiest to take a screenshot of the item while in Buldozer. Try finding an angle that makes sense and hit the print screen key. Open photoshop and create a new image with the dimensions of 256x256. Paste in your image, resize it, and delete the background color. Save this image as soda_example_CA.png so the transparent background is preserved. Open it in TexView2 and save it as soda_example_CA.paa and place it in your \z\addons\dayz_communityassets\pictures directory.

Navigate to \z\addons\dayz_code. Open the cfg_magazines.hpp in Notepad++. Scroll down to the ItemSodaMtngreen class. Highlight and copy both the full and empty entries. Paste this right below. The first thing you want to do is change the class name to ItemExampleSoda.

Right click on the dayz_code folder and select "CreatePbo". Click OK. You should get a "no errors were found" message. Right click on the dayz_communityassets folder and select "CreatePbo". You should now have a dayz_code.pbo and dayz_communityassets.pbo in whatever output folder you told EliteNess to use. Locate your @dayz folder and make a copy. Rename the copy @dayzmodding or whatever floats your boat. Navigate to your newly created .pbos and copy them into your @dayZmodding\addons\ folder. Go ahead and overwrite the files.

You may want to launch DayZ without having to mess with Steam. If you haven't already, open your Programfiles\Steam\SteamApps\Common\Arma 2 Operation Arrowhead\ directory, find the _runA2CO_beta file, and create a shortcut to it. Place the shortcut on your desktop.

Save the file and launch DayZ by double clicking your _runA2CO shortcut you placed on your desktop. When you see the main menu, press Ctrl-E. A new window will pop up asking you to pick a map. I pick Utes because it seems to load a little faster but any map will do.

Select "Center" and doubleclick on the map. Click OK. Select "Group" and doubleclick. Click OK. Now select "Unit" and double click. Select "bandit" from the 'Type' drop down and click OK. Click preview and you'll be able to run around on the map. When you're done messing about, hit escape and then 'edit in 2d map'.

Click OK, click Restart, and then go ahead and save the mission file so you won't need to recreate it each time you want to test. Now click "Preview". Press 'G' and you should see your item icon, description, and title.

So there you go. You can now re-texture just about anything you can get your hands on. A lot of the steps here can be used to add completely new items to the world. Follow the steps carefully and you shouldn't run into any major problems.

If you're editing a preexisting model you only need to open the appropriate .rvmat file. Double clicking on it will open the Material Editor. Then just scroll down until you see the _smdi already applied and change it to yours. You can also open the .rvmat in notepad++ and edit the text. Both ways will work but you should save the _smdi with a new file name so you don't accidentally mess up something else. This means you have to open the model, press E when the mesh is highlighted, and edit the Material setting in the Face Properties menu. If you don't already know what the models .rvmat is called you can find the name here too. Just make sure you save your model with a new name too. :D

OK, cheers! I'm just trying to get some decent pics in Buldozer and it's looking weird because it has no material. I'll do a quick edit of the .rvmat and make sure it's all correct, take the shot and put it back.

Well, the guide wasn't meant purely for retexturing cans but.. that is pretty much what it guides a person through. I used the same process to retexture character models and other nonsense but a lot of people asked about the cans so that's where I went with it. You're right, there's only a handful of us actively discussing and working on this, on these forums at least. Your call on the merge. I don't mind either way if it helps someone out.

Did you follow the BItools guide completely? It looks like Buldozer is looking for the \ca directory on your p:\ drive. I just tested this by renaming my \ca folder and that is the error I get when loading the example can up. If you followed the steps already we can troubleshoot it further.

Select a suitable image in main view or thumbnail mode and either right click on the image and select "Edit IPTC/XMP Data..." from the menu or select the "Edit IPTC/XMP Data..." option from the Edit menu. These options will be grayed out if the image doesn't support IPTC data.

The IPTC Data dialog is divided up into six different sections: Description, Keywords, Categories, Contact, Origin and Image. Click on the tabs along the top of the dialog to select the required section.

Tokens can be used to insert information from the image properties and shooting data e.g. use @time@ to insert the time the image was taken, @iso@ for the ISO setting, @model@ for the camera model name. This is particularly useful if you need to add information from the shooting data to a batch of images. The tokens are the same as used for HTML generation. Press the "Show tokens..." to display a list of tokens and their values.

The "Load..." and "Merge..." buttons displayed under the image thumbnail can be used to load previously saved IPTC data. Load will load all the saved data and overwrite the existing data whereas Merge will only fill in empty fields in the IPTC dialog. The "Save..." button can be used to save IPTC data to file for future use.

Pressing the "" buttons will save the IPTC data for the current image and display the previous or next image. You may also use the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+[ or PageUp to move to the previous image and Ctrl+] or PageDown to move to the next image.

Click on the Keywords tab to display the keywords. The keywords are displayed in the order they were entered (as opposed to alphabetical order) and each keyword must be unique and no more than 64 characters in length. To add a new keyword enter the keyword in the text edit area at the top and either press the Enter key or the Add button. To delete keywords first select them from the list then press the Delete button.

The keyword catalog is read from a simple tab delimited file called keywords.txt in the BreezeBrowser Pro installation folder (if keywords.txt can't be found BreezeBrowser Pro will try to load sample_keywords.txt instead). The sample_keywords.txt file included with BreezeBrowser Pro is a small extract from the controlled vocabulary created by David Riecks. Please visit for details of the considerable benefits of using a controlled vocabulary for keywords and to purchase the full keyword controlled vocabulary file.

Another source of keywords is the Hierarchical Keyword Catalog from Tim Makins at -keywords.com. His keyword-catalog is carefully organized in an easy-to-use logical structure designed so users can quickly 'drill down' through the hierarchical list to find not only the keywords they are looking for, but also similar keywords to expand the definition, and associated words to more fully describe the scene.

One other source is the Keyword Catalog written by Shangara Singh and available from -catalog.com It covers a broad sweep of subjects, divided into 40 convenient main categories, subcategories, headings and subheadings. You can load all of the categories or on a need-to-use basis in order to streamline the navigation. The full version contains over 30,000 keywords but you can pick-and-mix and purchase only the subjects that interest you.

Keywords can be selected by browsing the keyword tree or by entering a search string and pressing the Find button. Then press the OK button or double click on the item in the tree to copy the selected keywords to the IPTC/XMP keyword dialog.

Synonyms are shown in braces/curly brackets after the keyword and are included when searching. Synonyms are only copied to the "Selected Keywords" with the main keyword when "Include synonyms with selected keywords" is selected.

In the screenshot above the user has searched for "swine" which is a synonym for "pigs" along with the synonyms "hogs", "pig", "piggies" and "piggy".

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