Silent Hill Texture Explorer

[admin]

Download program:
modding/SHTEXPLORER.ZIP

The SH Texture Explorer program allows you to modify the textures used in the PC versions of Silent Hill 2, 3, and 4. You can do things like changing hair colors, making new outfits, or even swapping some character textures.

Unzip the contents of the folder. Open the program and click the icon of the folder to browse for the file you want to open. It will open arc, mdl, and bin files. These are in the data directory of the PC games. You should also click the “save dir” button to select where the extracted textures will be saved as *.tga files.

For Silent Hill 3, you can fairly easily switch the textures for Heather and Memory of Alessa. Heather’s textures are in the CHRPL.arc file, and the enemies’ textures, including Memory of Alessa, are in the CHREN.arc file.

If you open CHREN.arc, you can scroll through until you find MOA’s textures. There are only three. Right click and select “extract selected texture.” You can then open CHRPL.arc and find Heather’s vest outfit. There are several copies of this in there because one of them is for Heather’s mirror reflection, and others are for her bloodier versions of the same outfit.

You can open these in an image editing program like photoshop. If you edit them, make sure to save them with the alpha channels, or things like hair will be blocky and messed up looking. The alpha channel can make parts of an image transparent, and this is used for things like making it look like characters have individual strands of hair.

For switching Heather’s normal outfit with the Moa skin, you may want to rename the files to something easy to remember, like moaface.tga, moavest.tga, moaskirt.tga, and likewise with the Heather files. Heather also has a 4th file for her hair, so that needs to be edited darker to make it work with the Moa skin.

To replace the default texture with another file, select a file, right click, and click “replace texture.” You can then browse to find the file you want to replace it with. I have replaced all of moa’s files in the CHREN.arc file with Heather’s textures, and then replaced all instances of Heaher’s normal vest outfit in the CHRPL.arc with MOA’s files.
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Some issues with the texture explorer:

In Silent Hill 2, there are different files for the characters under different lighting conditions. All of these will need to be changed.

In Silent Hill 3, the program only opens some of the game files, mostly characters and monsters. Other things (like billboards, etc.) cannot be extracted or altered with this program.

In Silent Hill 4, files have multiple copies of the same texture at different sizes, but you only need to change the firest in each set, not the ones with “MipMap” in their titles.
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Notes:
This may not run on more recent computers. If it’s not working, trying putting it in compatibility mode for WinXp SP3, and/or running it as administrator.

The SH3 files usually include multple models and textures, and the SH2 ones need to be replaced for multiple models, so please don’t ask me to upload the altered model files, since that would be uploading a huge part of the game, and is more work than I am willing to do these days, especially since the PC versions aren’t even widely used or supported anymore. I wil try to upload the tga files in a zip file again of the ones I still have on disc (though many have been lost over the years).

I think it was perdedork that made this program, and he hasn’t updated any of this stuff in years.