This is not a guide on "How to use Blender"!

This guide is simply there for people who just wanna port models over to Tower Unite, who also have experience with Blender. So don't expect any detailed explanation on certain topics.

Josh, a Pixeltailgames developer, made a good video explaining the process similar to this guide. Feel free to check it out as well








Alright, lets get started!

Since the current Armature rig only accepts models with T-Poses and doesn't let you configure the bones manually, we have to change our model pose to a T-Pose

Throughout this guide, I will be using Solid Snake from Metal Gear Solid 2:

He's A-Posed and we have to fix that!

• Select the Rig
  
• Go to Pose Mode
  
• Press Numpad 1 and Numpad 3 to change the cameras perspective
  
• Select the shoulder and rotate it so its straight

hold CTRL to grid-like rotate the shoulders. It makes it more symmetric

If the legs look to spread out, do the same as well

You can also change hands/fingers or whatever to your liking too, just make sure it follows the TU rigging rules!

It should look like this:

We have to get rid of our model-provided rig. But first, lets apply the pose we set up

• Click on your model
  
• Go to the Modifiers Tab
  
• Under Armature click on Apply

Now you can delete the rig, since we wont be needing this anymore.

Now the important part is to scale the model to the rig that Pixeltailgames[www.towerunite.com] provided us. This process is relatively easy too

Copy and Paste the entire Rig in your scene. it should look like this:


Now, scale up the model to fit with its current rig set-up:


VERY IMPORTANT STEP!: Select the Parent model (Including Childrens from that Parent model) and go to Object > Apply > Rotation & Scale
(Also make sure you're not selecting the rig as well. Otherwise this could cause issues)

On the bottom left, select all these 3 options!

This step is important because now all your transformation, rotation and position values are set to 1,1,1
This will make sure that your model doesn't become super spaghetti once you export it to Tower Unite!

Now its time to the rigging process!

There are 3 ways to rig the model:

• Automatic Weights
  
• Manual Weightpainting
  
• Vertexgroup re-naming

Automatic Weight painting is the reason for that weird looking right shoulder glitch. Thats why its recommended to avoid it for now until Pixeltailgames finds a solution to this!

A solution has been discovered. In order to remove the right schoulder glitch, you have to go to the vertex groups and remove the vertexes that have the name "twist" in them.


I'll be talking the 2 ways a model can be rigged:

• Right Click on the Model
  
• Hold Shift and Right Click on the Rig
  
• Press CTRL + P and apply "with Automatic Weights"
  
• Click on your model and go to the Vertexgroup tab and remove every vertex that has the name "twist" in it (Select the vertex and click on the Minus button on the very right)
  
• Repeat the step with every children object

(Don't forget to test your rig. Fix the mistakes by applying manual weightpaintning)

• Select your model and go to the Modifier Tab
  
• Add an Armature Modifier
  
• Click on that empty field with the label "Object" and select Armature

Next, click on the Vertex icon and we should be seeing this:

Notice the Vertex names? Those are from our previous rig. All we have to do now is re-name them from the ones in the Armature rig.

To make this process easier, you can show the bone names of each bone by clicking on the Armature rig and clicking on the Armature Tab. Click on X-Ray and Names

Every name of every bone should now be visible on your workspace window
Now its time we re-name the Vertexgroups

• Click on your Rig and put it to Pose Mode
  
• Click on your Object and put it to Weight Painting mode, it helps identify which belongs to what
  
• Double Click on the vertex group and rename them accordingly to the bone name
  
• Remove unessesary vertexes (for example: Hat, Wings, Mouths, accessories, etc) (Doing this requires you to weight paint them)

Rename those vertexes like this:
ValveBiped.Bip01_Pelvis = pelvis

Make sure to change the vertex names on childrens models as well!

Once you did that with every Vertex, lets give it a try and see if it moves
(You can reset the poses by pressing Alt + G, Alt + R and Alt + S)

if certain parts of the models don't look right, you can always fix it by weight painting on it.

You can find unpainted weights by rotating the [pelvis] around in Pose Mode. If the whole model rotates with you, you weight painted everything!

For weight painting in general, watch some youtube video tutorials about it. It's relatively the same here too. I won't cover that here in the guide, due to it being relatively complex to put in words. Sorry about that :c

Sweet. The worst part is done! Onward to Texturing!

Now that we are done with the rigging part, we can move over to the texture bit.

What you need is a .png or any supported format that blender accepts as texture. If you using a model from any Source Engine game, you'd have to export the .vlf with VTFEdit

You don't have to extract all of the texture. Blender lets you know what textures were used under the Material tab.

Make sure that there are no Shader Nodes attached to them, or your textures won't show up in the Workshop editor!

There are 2 ways of assigning textures

• UV Mapping
  
• Material Mapping

Both are feasable to work with, but UV Mapping is by far the safest one.

• Select your model and choose Edit Mode.
  
• Go to the Material tab and choose one of those Materials, then press Select
  
• Drag and Drop the texture in the UV Mapping window.
  
• Repeat these steps for every Material.

Once we switch to Texture view, our model should look like this

That concludes the UV Mapping

• Select your model and choose Object Mode.
  
• Go to the Material tab and choose one of those Materials.
  
• Go to the Texture tab and make a new texture.
  
• Open up the image
  
• Repeat these steps for every Material.
  
• Add a lamp to the scene and make it a Hemi, in order to see the textures

Once we switch to Material view, our model should look like this

Now, we are ready to Export our model

Now its time to see our model in action.

• Go to File > Export > Collada (Default) (.dae)
  
• Check the bottom left for the exporting options
  
• Under Texture Options, choose which one you worked with. Either UV Mapping or Material Mapping
  
• Export your model!

And thats about it. Now lets head to Tower Unite and see how it came out

Once we go to the Workshop editor and import our model, it should look like this:


Make sure you test it full through by switching up the animations. If something looks wrong or it has certain parts of the verticies going to the ground, go back to Blender and make sure all the verticies are assigned and weight painted.

Bare in mind that not everything will look the way you expect it to be, if its simply not possible.

One small tip, once you set up your metadata, click "Open in Explorer" and backup your .json file. Your metadata will be replaced to the default one, if you import the model again.

Origineel geplaatst door Question:

Is it possible to rig non-anthropomorphic characters?

Yes, however, you are pretty limited on rigging the whole model. For example, if your model is a Pokemon, who doesn't walk on 2 legs, you won't be able to assign the arms or legs without completely deforming it. Not every bone from the rig needs to be assigned, so its fine if you ignore certain ones to make it work out.

Origineel geplaatst door Question:

My characters arm goes through the body. Can I fix that somehow?

Depends. Certain characters won't make this easy or not possible at all.
What you can do is scale up the model in blender, to the point where the shoulders are reaching at the same lenght of the shoulders rig.
However, that means that you have to scale it back down in the Workshop editor, with it, sacrificing the ability to place hats or other accessories to it. Your character will be slower and sitting dow on something makes it scale back to its origina size, since the scale changing process is the same one like it is with potion (It will get fixed lateron I think)

It's very complicated to get it to work right and requires a lot of tinkering. Best of luck to you if you managed to get your model to work.

Origineel geplaatst door Question:

My Character is super thin and/or still spaghetti

You might have applied the rotation & scale with the rig as well, which causes some issues. To fix this, remove the armature rig and re-add it fresh. You don't have to rename the vertexgroups again, so don't worry!

Only apply the scale & rotation on actual models. Deselect everything by pressing A just in case when you try to apply

Origineel geplaatst door Question:

I applied the textures but it still won't show up in the Workshop editor

One thing I noticed is that previous models had their own shader nodes attached to them. If it has this, it won't apply the textures. What you have to do is deselect it from the Materials tab