Changing car textures
To change car textures in NFS: HP2 you will need:
FSHTool v1.22
VIV Editor or VIV Magic
(I personally recommend VIV Magic. Although it has fewer functions than VIV Editor,
for our purpose the former is better suited, since it is more convenient)
Paint or a similar graphics editor
All car skins are located in the Cars/Car Name folder in the skin.viv file
1. Open skin.viv using VIV Magic. Click File -> Unpack VIV File...
and select it. A skin folder will appear in the same directory. In it we see
fsh files with names skin*.fsh, where the different numbers are different colors and skinhp.fsh -
this is the skin of the Hot Pursuit type car.
2. Open the required fsh file using FSHTool. More precisely:
Click on the fsh file, "select a program from the list manually", "browse", select
FSHTool.exe and check "always use this program for this type of file". And OK.
Never try to launch fshtool.exe itself and somehow try to open it with it!
3. Now when you click on any fsh file, unpacking will occur and a folder with the same
name will appear. In it we find the BMP files of the car textures. The alpha file *-a.bmp must always
be black-and-white, 8 bit, and *.bmp must be 24 bit. The dimensions must be the same!
Alpha is a black-and-white 8-bit image, where white is what will be displayed,
and black is what will not, for the adjacent *.bmp file.
4. Change the color texture, then convert the color texture using
Photoshop into a black-and-white 8-bit one and save it as *-a.bmp. This is done like this:
Image -> Mode -> Grayscale.
5. Find the index.fsh file in the folder with the modified textures. Launch it, and all files
are packed back into the fsh that you unpacked.
6. In the skin folder find the skin.idx file. It is the same index.fsh, only the packer
back into skin.viv. In VIV Magic click Fule -> Pack File and select this skin.idx.
A backup copy will be saved to the file skin0001.viv; if you make more changes, to
skin0002.viv and so on.
7. Launch the game, select this car, change the colors, look for the changes.