Understanding Huds

[Maegawa]

UNDERSTANDING HUDS

1-Meaning of the word.
To start off, let's understand the meaning of the word hud, it stands for Heads Up Display.

2-What it is.
Ok, genius, now we now its meaning, but what is it?
Huds are those small character icons that appear on the left corner of the screen, enemy's health bars, conversations, etc... every character in the game has one, the playables and the NPCs.

3-The different resolutions of it.
Depending on which one it is, the hud has a different resolution, let's take  's for example:

Daredevil's Hud


As you can see,  , a playable character, has a hud with 256x256 as resolution, and this, along with 128x128, are the most used resolutions for the playable characters. In some rare cases, such as for  , the hud's resolution is lower, being 64x64, as you can see below:

Silver Surfer's Hud


The NPCs' huds, on the other hand, have the same resolution as  's hud, as you can see Winter Soldier's hud below.

4-The pattern.
Most huds use a pattern: a metal plate as background, the character's head, and a blue glow around it, some NPCs' huds, such as Winter Soldier's, ignore the pattern, having a different background and ignoring the glow (images below).

Metal Plate Background


Winter Soldier's Hud


5-The format.
Huds, just like the skins, have the extension .igb, and the name varies according to the character's numbers, for example: Daredevil's number is 02, and his primary skin's is 01, so the name of his primary hud is hud_head_0201.igb, and this applies to the other characters.

6-Making huds.
There are many tutorials on how to make huds, so I'll leave links to 2 of them:

andersonbrazil's tutorial
BLaw's tutorial

Also, as a bonus, I'll leave the offsets for 2 huds

hud_head_1001.igb,DXT1,128,128,10537,64,64,19265,32,32,18729.
hud_head_15701.igb,DXT1,128,128,10573,64,64,19301,32,32,18765.

7-Internal number
Every hud has an internal number that matches its name, and is necessary in order to make them show up properly for both playables and NPCs, but there is a little trick, if you take a hud with 1001 as internal number and rename the file to hud_head_4001 for example,  's hud will show up instead of  's, so in order to make the desired hud appear correctly for the NPCs, you need to open the hud with a hex-editor (I use XVI32), and change every 1001 to 4001, but if the character's number is a 3 digit number, like Dr. Doom's Iron Man which is 129, you won't be able to change it, so what I recommend is take  's hud (hud_head_15701), change the texture, and rename 15701 to 12901 in the hex-editor.

Downloads:

Hud Template.psd

XVI32 hex-editor

CREDITS:
andersonbrazil: Hud Tutorial.
BLaw: Hud Tutorial.
Person who made the Starters.psd file: The Hud Template.psd I uploaded is the Starters.psd file with some edits by me.
Anyone else I forgot to credit.

TIPS FOR WHEN MAKING HUDS:
- I recommend using 128x128 resolution always, because it is easier to edit, and also there is no big difference from the 256x256.
- Get high resolution pictures to achieve better results.
- Try to keep the pattern always, I mean, use the same background for all the huds and the same tone of blue for the glow.

[LarsAlexandersson]

Seems i did the same thing too since i tried to replace Prof. X hud w/ XML2 Conversion Mod one

[Maegawa]

yeah I think the most important part is the hex-editing, it sure took me some time and a lot of searching to find out the hex-editing secret.

[LarsAlexandersson]

in order to get the NPC hud works without getting Cap or blank Hud shows up sudden

[Maegawa]

well, in mine if I use any of my custom huds on scorpion, thor's hud shows up, so I searched and discovered that in order to get the hud working properly with scorpion, you need to open the hud with a hex-editor, and change all the 1001 to 4001, as 4001 is the number of scorpions primary skin, same thing for other NPCs, bullseye for example, you change 1001 to 5901.

[BLaw]

Great great tutorial!

This should definitely help people to not just understand how huds work properly but also how to create them.

[andersonbrazil]

Maegawa, parabéns pelo tutorial. Há dicas aqui que me foram esclarecedoras. Valeu!

[droid25]

Hi, just asking about making huds - I figure most of it but when I ingame my huds are all different colors.  How do you change the RGB option and what a good program to do that (download)?   Please let know and thanks for your help

[LarsAlexandersson]

Texture Finder (to find full offsets of the hud textures each size until the end of the top offsets) & Skinnerui (easy way is to use CMD + muaskinner cfg notepad is the main file to put the full offsets you've found from Texture Finder) + Photo Editing like Adobe (like Photoshop & Illustrator) & DDS Installer to open DDS (like NVIDIA Tools for Photoshop)