Niko's Bomber Jacket

1.0 - initial release
1.1 - vertex color and illumination fixed
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I originally made & finished this mod over a year ago with the intention of releasing it right away. Then shit happens, I get caught up with other projects on other games, and it sat forgotten on my drive until now. So here it is, finally uploaded. A bomber jacket (also called a flight jacket) for Niko.

This is one of the first mods I ever created for GTA IV. I’m a long-time, pretty knowledgeable modder on GTA V, but when it came to IV I had absolutely no idea what the fuck I was doing. There were no tutorials I could find, no guides that actually helped so I just applied what I knew from V, experimented, troubleshot constantly, and somehow got it all working.

The model itself was ported over from Max Payne 3. I completely redid the textures at 2048x from scratch then downscaled to 512x like the rest of the clothing in game. I also added Niko’s original turtleneck from his main jacket to keep things "lore friendly". Rigging it was a massive bitch, but I managed to get it dialed in nicely. Everything was put together using Blender and Substance, then finalized in 3ds Max to get it in game.

Huge thanks to JolyWonk for supporting & helping me find bugs and errors through playtesting it.

If anyone experienced in IV modding has tips or knowledge on how I can improve this, or improve my workflow for making clothes for IV, I’m open to learning more.

Hope you enjoy.