Overview
Hopefully this will be helpful to those wanting to get their characters into the engines in this tutorial. If you need more help feel free to leave a comment and I will try to reply asap
Introduction
Thanks for checking out this guide!
To the right you’ll be able to see the table of contents so feel free to skip to any section. The guide is split into 4 main sections the first being Mannequin and how to export from it then the subsequent sections are for RPG Maker MV, VN Maker, and TyranoBuild.
Exporting from Mannequin
After you have made a character in Mannequin the next thing you will want is to get them into your engine of choice. To keep things simple we will be using the default 100% scale in Mannequin though feel free to scale up or down as you need. If you have made several face/expressions for your character you will likely want to do a batch export, but for our purposes we will do a single export.
First click the Export Tab (Camera Icon) then make sure to choose PNG as your file format, then click Export at the bottom of the page. Then make a folder to keep your characters in as this will help with organization! For this example I have saved the characters name as “MainCharacter” into this directory C:Users(yourusername)PicturesCharactersMainCharacter
(For those making expressions in batches follow the same process above but you’ll have to do some manual name management such as MainCharacter_Angry, MainCharacter_Happy etc…)
After getting all your files ready you can get to moving your Characters, Check the Table of Contents to the right to skip to the section you need!
Importing to RPG Maker MV
You have two options for moving the Characters you just made into RPG Maker MV the first being the built in Import feature, and the other being manually dragging the photos from where we saved them in File Explorer to our games project. We will be using the built in feature for this guide to make things easy.
After making/opening your RPG Maker MV project, click the Resource Manager, then on the window that shows up scroll down and select img/pictures on the left. After that just click on Import then navigate to the folder you saved your character in, for our example C:UsersyourusernamePicturesCharactersMainCharacter and select your character!
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…Oh you want to actually see them in a cutscene/discussion?
Alright, first thing you’ll want to do is click on the Event Editor at the top of the screen, then double click anywhere on the map to make an event. Double click the Image section and in the menu that opens you can give the event a graphic.
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Now that there is an event with a graphic on the map we can add the code needed to show the character artwork!
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First in the Contents add a Show Picture event, in the menu that shows up choose your image then see the pictures below to match the settings used then click OK.
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Add a Move picture event and then see the photo below to match the settings used, then click OK. Add a Show Text event and add whatever text you want, for this example I kept it simple.
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Final steps! We just need to make sure the photo gets erased from our scene now so it doesn’t stay stuck there. Add a Move Photo event and copy the values in the photo below then to finish things just add a Erase Picture event and you should be all done setting it up!
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If your Contents looks like that last photo then you likely set everything up right and you can test your scene and should get something that looks the gif below! (sorry for the compression)
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- Show Picture Event loads the characters picture invisible
- Move Picture Event moves photo up and to the left while making it visible
- Show Text Event shows the text along side the character graphic
- Move Picture Event moves photo off screen while fading out to be invisible again
- Erase Photo Event erases the photo so it’s no longer in your scene!
If you need more info on RPG Maker MVs setup leave a comment below and I will try to help asap!
Onto the next section!
Importing to TyranoBuilder
We will start by clicking Project in the top left corner of TyranoBuilder then click Characters. In the menu that shows up enter your characters name and click Add, in this example her name is MainCharacter. Click your character from the list on the left then click Browse to add her expressions from the directory you saved them in, in this example C:UsersyourusernamePicturesCharactersMainCharacter
Now you can go back to the main page of TyranoBuilder and drag the Join Scene function above the Show Text function and then select your character from the drop down list. You may also want to reposition them to fit the scene better. Once positioned how you want you’ll want to double click the Text function to show the texts and this is where you can add your characters name to the text boxes. You will add a # followed by the character name, in our example we will add #MainCharacter to the first line of the Text function. Now if you play test everything should work as needed!
Importing to VN Maker
This is the most tedious one to setup by far of the 3 engines.
First, click on the resource manager near the top left corner of the VN Maker window and in the window that pops up click the Graphics/Characters Folder and on the right where the Files section is right click in the open space and click New Group, a new folder will be made which you’ll want to right click and click Properties to rename the folder to the Characters name in our example we will name it MainCharacter. After setting the name, you’ll see a import button at the top right corner of the Resource Manager window click there to import your expressions for this character, for our example our Mannequin character is located at C:UsersyourusernameherePicturesCharactersMainCharacter then just double click the character art you want to add.
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After having the character resource setup we can now setup the actual character in the database(Collection) so back in the main window click on the Collections tab and on the left side in the Collections section choose Characters then in the Records section in the bottom left corner right click the empty space and add a New Record and rename the New Record as the characters name, in this example we name it MainCharacter. After setting the name click Character Expressions in the Collections section in the top left of the screen and then in the Records add a new Folder and rename the Folder to the Characters name followed by right clicking that new folder and adding a New Record and naming the New Record DefaultExpression. in the middle of the screen click Add to add the default expression from the Graphic Resource window that pops up.
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Finally the coding!
I recommend saving and resetting here as I have had issues with assets loading the first time. On the main page click the Character tab on the Join Scene function and choose your character from the dropdown list. Then in the Join Scene function choose your characters DefaultExpression on the Expression tab. You’ll likely want to reposition your character so click on the Position tab and set it to Direct THEN CLICK THE X,Y value and in the vindow that pops up adjust your character as needed. Next find the Show Message function and change the character display name to yours!
If you did everything right during playtest your character will fade with the proper name.
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End
I tried to keep each section as simple as possible while also trying to include every step in photo form. While this is a very basic way to add the character to your games you could easily expand on this in these engines by allowing for conditional switches where the player can have multiple outfits with multiple expressions though for that I would recommend checking their respective forums for info on that. If anything wasn’t explained well or needs updating feel free to leave a comment below and I will work to fixing it asap.
If you are interested in reviews follow my Curator Page.
You can see my review for Mannequin here!
Also want to apologize in advance as the formatting kinda got wonky and didn’t really look too far into making it display better so there are a lot of decimals/periods in the review to try to keep some of the sections more readable.
