- Adding Textures to WoW with Discord Art

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Adding Textures to WoW with Discord Art

Welcome to our first tutorial! This one will be very basic, but I've recieved a bunch of emails from folks asking how to do this. By the time you reach the end of this tutorial you will be able to add any of the TGA textures found on this site to your WoW interface.

I want to make a quick note before I go on though; there are many advanced topics to be covered with Discord Art, and I hope to cover them in later tutorials. This one is very simple and is only meant as a starting point for first time Discord Art users.

Prerequisites:

Discord Art (version 1.51 is the latest as of writing this) needs to be installed.
Any TGA texture from the site (I used this one).
Optional: Photoshop (any recent version)

Getting Started

I'll assume you are going to use the Night Elf image I linked to above. Go ahead and download that now. (Figure 1)
If you have Photoshop installed, lets check to make sure the TGA is a valid 32 bit TGA.
(we will go into more depth on how to create a proper TGA and what the difference is between a 24bit and 32bit TGA in later tutorials)
1. Go ahead and fire up Photoshop, and open our Night Elf Shield TGA. (Figure 2a, Figure 2b)
2. Look over at the layers palette (Figure 3).
3. Click on the Channels tab (Figure 4).
4. Check to make sure an alpha channel exists. If you are using the example image mentioned above, then it should. If it does not, then you will likely not see the results you are hoping to once you get the texture into WoW. For our purposes, if you have chosen an image that does not contain this alpha channel, start over with a new image. Later tutorials will cover more advanced Photoshop stuff like this.
5. Ok, now that we know its there, lets move on.
Copy the texture to C:>Program Files>World of Warcraft>Interface>AddOns>DiscordArt>CustomTextures (Figure 5)
Launch WoW

Create a new Profile Profiles allow you to create seperate UI's. Basically, if you get to a point you like, create a new profile and it will act as a backup of sorts. By working in different profiles, if you end up with something you hate, you can always go back to an older profile.

Type in "/dart" and hit enter (no quotes should be entered) (Figure 6).
Click on Misc Options (Figure 7).
Create new profile called "test" by typing "test" into the New Profile field, then click Create (Figure 8).
Go back to the Texture Options screen by clicking the Texture Options button (Figure 9).

Import our custom texture to the Texture Browser

Note the text in the top middle, "Click to Set Texture" - click this (Figure 10)
Texture browser appears (Figure 11)
In the field called File, type in "nightelfshield.tga" (no quotes) and hit enter.
(Note that the file must be in the custom folder mentioned above or you will have to give the path to the file)
You should see the texture loaded below (Figure 12)
Click Add texture (Figure 13)
You will now find it in the texture browser of DART (Figure 14)

Add the texture to our profile

Now that we've gotten our texture into the texture browser, we need to add it to our profile. Click it (in the browser) to add it to the main DART screen (Figure 15)
In the top, type a friendly name for this texture (Night Elf Shield) and hit enter (Figure 16)
(Note that the texture name in the dropdown at the top right changes to reflect this friendly name)
You have now added a texture to Texture slot 1.
Uncheck the hide button (Figure 17)

Whoah!! What's this white background?!?

Change the alpha to 99 (be sure to hit enter if you type it manually) (Figure 18)
Click unlock dragging at the bottom left (Figure 19)
Now you can move this around at will.

That wraps up the tutorial... you now have a texture in game that you can use. There are, of course, MANY more things to cover in Discord Art, but now that you have a tutorial in game, you should be able to start playing around and figuring things out. Remember, the community over at DiscordMods.com is great - everyone is helpful, and there are tons of examples for you to start with.

Things to try Since we've only scratched the surface of Discord Art, here's a couple of things to play around with:

Don't like the size of the imported texture? On the main screen of DART, you'll find all kinds of controls for adjusting the size.
Want it on top of, or behind another texture in game? Try adjusting the Frame Strata and Frame Level Offset controls
Having a hard time getting the placement right by dragging? Use the anchor controls to anchor it to another texture, window, etc
Mastered these already? Go to the controls tab... go to the scripts tab... you'll find plenty there to keep you busy.

Until next time!

Discuss this tutorial here

Last Updated Friday, June 15 2007 @ 07:50 AM MST

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Where do I put my custom textures for Discord Art? Answer