Only Skin Deep - Software - Legacy of Kain: The Lost Worlds

Only Skin Deep

software by Ben Lincoln and Andrew Fradley, article by Ben Lincoln

Only Skin Deep is a utility for extracting the texture maps from a variety of games in the Legacy of Kain series. It is not a viewer - a separate application is required to view the textures once they are extracted. Most modern graphics utilities can view PNG images. DDS texture maps can be viewed by a variety of pieces of software, including the DirectX SDK utilities and NVidia's Photoshop Plugins.

Supported formats:

Soul Reaver (Playstation) - preliminary support.
Soul Reaver (PC)
Soul Reaver (Dreamcast)
Soul Reaver 2 (PC and Playstation 2)
Defiance (PC and Playstation 2)

Support for properly coloured textures from the Playstation version of Soul Reaver is courtesy of a joint coding effort between Andrew Fradley and myself. As a result, this version of Only Skin Deep includes a DLL with some of the code from ModelEx.

Only Skin Deep incorporates the exporting functionality of Soul Reaver PC Texture Utility and Quintessence, but not the viewing or replacing capabilities.

Usage (Soul Reaver for PC or Dreamcast):

Use Only Skin Deep to open textures.big or textures.vq, respectively.
When exported, the textures will be in PNG format.

Usage (Other games):

Use Soul Spiral to extract the contents of the game's bigfile.
Open the .vrm files (Soul Reaver 2/Defiance) or .crm files (Soul Reaver for the Playstation) with Only Skin Deep.
When exported, the files will be in DDS (DirectDraw Surface) or PNG format as appropriate for the game in question.

Note: To convert the .crm files from Soul Reaver for the Playstation in colour, it is necessary that the corresponding .pcm file(s) be located in the same folder(s). Otherwise the results will be greyscale.

Only Skin Deep has a batch conversion function in the File menu which can be used to convert .vrm and .crm en masse by selecting an input folder or folder structure to scan and an output folder.

Known Issues:

.crm file processing is very slow compared to the other formats. This is less of an issue on more recent (2010 and later) hardware.
Loading files from any Playstation Soul Reaver versions other than the retail version can lead to the program locking up. This does not affect the other versions of Soul Reaver or the later games.

Updates in Version 1.4:

Andrew Fradley has enhanced the application to handle texture files from the NTSC Playstation 2 Air Forge demo of Soul Reaver 2 (the PAL version uses a different format which is not yet supported).

Updates in Version 1.3:

Andrew Fradley has enhanced the application to display textures directly, instead of requiring that they be exported.

Updates in Version 1.2:

Built with the target architecture as explicitly x86 so that the code which relies on managed DirectX will work correctly on 64-bit Windows®.
Some minor cleanup for the source code release (see Source Code Collections).

Updates in Version 1.1:

Added support for the Playstation 2 versions of Soul Reaver 2 and Defiance.
Fixed export of textures with alpha from the PC versions of Soul Reaver 2 and Defiance (format is DXT5, not DXT3).
Made the application capable of being associated with files. Right-click on a supported file type, choose Open With, and browse to the Only Skin Deep executable.

There are some very helpful troubleshooting instructions in the readme file that is included.

Like all of the software I've written, this application requires at least version 2.0 of the .NET Framework, which is available from Windows Update or the Microsoft website.

For those with an interest in writing their own software, the source code for this application is available in the Source Code Collections article.

A placeholder texture

A temporary version of the painting of Kain in his mausoleum

A mural depicting the use of the Dark bridges

Raziel's textures from Defiance (four times the size of the Soul Reaver 2 textures)

A texture from the Spirit Forge

Yes indeed

A mural from the Air Forge in Soul Reaver 2

Raziel's textures from Soul Reaver 2

Download
File	Size	Version	Release Date	Author
Only Skin Deep	1020 KiB	1.5	2020-05-12	Ben Lincoln and Andrew Fradley

Download
File	Size	Version	Release Date	Author
Only Skin Deep (Source Code)	22 MiB	1.5	2020-05-12	Ben Lincoln and Andrew Fradley

Download
File	Size	Version	Release Date	Author
Only Skin Deep	381 KiB	1.4	2014-09-21	Ben Lincoln and Andrew Fradley

Download
File	Size	Version	Release Date	Author
Only Skin Deep (Source Code)	944 KiB	1.4	2014-09-21	Ben Lincoln and Andrew Fradley
This is for developers only and is not required to run the application.

Download
File	Size	Version	Release Date	Author
Only Skin Deep	387 KiB	1.3	2013-10-13	Ben Lincoln and Andrew Fradley

Download
File	Size	Version	Release Date	Author
Only Skin Deep (Source Code)	1 MiB	1.3	2013-10-13	Ben Lincoln and Andrew Fradley
This is for developers only and is not required to run the application.

Download
File	Size	Version	Release Date	Author
Only Skin Deep	373 KiB	1.2	2012-02-12	Ben Lincoln

Download
File	Size	Version	Release Date	Author
Only Skin Deep	409 KiB	1.1	2007-07-22	Ben Lincoln

Download
File	Size	Version	Release Date	Author
Only Skin Deep	405 KiB	1.0 (Beta)	2007-07-15	Ben Lincoln