Overview
Want to make some meatbags or robomans to toss into the world, kicking and screaming?Learn what you need, what you should do, and all in text, too!
Preliminary
Greetings!
I, as you may understand, am Krev, and this nightmorning Krev shall be your guide to making skins. Having made a few of them myself, from my first Colonial Marines to the shiny new HDF Troops, I reckon that I know enough to tell you how to put them together, be it from scratch or otherwise.
What about something a little less obvious?
Maybe – some fundamentals of functionality.
A decent skin should:
- Take it easy on the verts and tris;
- Keep the material count low,
- Be built around the default skeleton.
Stock RF soldiers run a vertice count of a little under 1.9k, and have 1.4k tris, and while you can do stuff with a more – the HDF Patrolman here is 3.2k and 5.8k, for example – it’s usually a good idea to try and keep the verts low on a model that you’ll see dozens of when actually playing.
It’ll help people actually run your skin – but more important is being smart with the materials. More materials tends to be worse than more verts, and can make a 30 man match run as badly as a 200 man game if you’re not careful.
Then, building around the default skeleton – well, this is all modeling stuff, but if your skin’s going to be shoved onto the default bones in the default positions, the only reason not to do this is if the thing you’re working with has already been modeled.
Modeling around the default puts the hands where they should, keeps elbows where they need to be, makes the spine bend in ways that look normal, and makes the head move right.
Look at this Fortnite Thanos skinport by Crashalot, for example – and look at those arms. That’s a simple taste of what happens if you don’t work with the default skeleton.
In short, a decent, functional skin is efficient and fits the bones.
These are rules that should apply to every skin, regardless of what it is.
Software
Knowing the basic parts of a functional skin is great and all, but it doesn’t tell you much about making them, now does it? How do you get started? What do you do? What do you need?
Not much, really – Krev would recommend you go through JoeThePirate’s tutorial first for setup and all, watch some Blender quick-starts like Darrin Lile’s. Really, if this is your first time modding, go through Joe’s tutorial – go through the official RF modding page[ravenfieldgame.com] – before going here.
This said, if you wanted to youtube it, you probably wouldn’t be here, now would you?
Or, more accurately, what does Krev use?
Well, firstly, Blender. It models, it rigs, it animates, it’s legitimately required to do anything useful in Unity – there is no reason not to have it. Preferably 2.79, as 2.80 onwards doesn’t play so nice with the version of Unity Ravenfield relies on.
So, as you probably guessed, the next thing you need is Unity.
You put the models in Unity, you set up the materials in Unity, you export the mod in Unity, Ravenfield runs on Unity – there is no easy way to do this that doesn’t involve using Unity.
Preferred version for modding is 5.6.3p1, if Krev isn’t wrong, but this isn’t a how-to-mod tutorial.
The last thing Krev uses that you’d probably get use out of is Paint dot Net.[www.getpaint.net] You can do textures with it. Really, any image editor that can do transparency would work here – even MS Paint would work if you didn’t need transparent stuff.
Gimp, photoshop, etcetera – they’re not super important though, since RF doesn’t rely on real textures.
The Files
You’ve got the stuff you need to do the things, presumably set up Unity by following Joe’s instructions, downloaded the modding tools. If you haven’t, go do that and don’t come back until you understand how to drag a model into Unity and change the materials.
I presume that by going into this point of the guide that you understand the basics of making a model in Blender and putting it into Unity. This is basic competency, and you need to have it.
Krev will not handhold you every step of the way.
Regardless, let’s get started – find your files.
There are three files that you want to refer to when skinmodeling.
- Located in the Assets -> Models -> Character directory,
- Soldier.blend
- Hands no IK for custom models.blend
- KickFoot.blend
That’d be the ‘it isn’t working’ kind of screwy, and it’s stalled people like Spades for days before.
That aside, NEVER overwrite these files – always save as a new file when starting a new project.
Heck, I prefer to open a new .blend file entirely and copy the model and skeleton in. A clean start.
You can probably guess why the ‘Hands no IK for custom models.blend’ file is important, partially because Steel made the good decision to have zero subtlety with the name – clear communication.
The KickFoot is, as it’s name implies, the model used for the Duke Nukem mighty foot kick.
The KickFoot is also the simplest thing of the three pieces of a skin – the Model, Hands, and Foot – to do, since you can just bring in your full model and remove everything but the right leg.
But oh, I’m getting ahead of myself – you’ve got the files, now you need to use them.
Before that, I’d recommend you make some folders for your files to go into, organize a little bit.
Keeps things tidy.
Modeling and Shady Skeletons
So, you have your files – now what? Where to start? What to do?
Generally speaking, that’s up to you. What skin do you want to make? How do you want to make it?
What are you trying to do with your skin?
Whatever your goal is, start with the basic Soldier – if nothing else, you need the default rig, his bones. Use as many materials as you need at this stage – you’ll be trimming them after.
Use as many objects and submeshes as you need – we’ll merge them all later.
- Editing the soldier versus scratch modeling;
- Smooth shading and flat shading;
- Fitting the model to the skeleton, not the skeleton to the model;
- Modeling joints.
I’m not here to guide you through every single part of the modeling process, but I’ll throw some tips in that you might find useful in this section nonetheless.
So, to start with:
Short answer: Yes.
There is nothing wrong with making a skin off of the default RF soldier. In fact, if this is your first skin, I’d recommend that over scratchmodeling – and even if it isn’t, there’s nothing wrong with making a skin by modifying the stock soldier.
Look at this spread of skins on the right wherein most of them are edits, and think about how you can have a decent chunk of well-made variety just by modifying the basic soldier.
Now, if you want to do something from scratch, replace the original model entirely, that’s perfectly fine – and in fact, that’s what I tend to do with most of my skins anyway these days.
Keep in mind, though – just because it’s made from scratch doesn’t necessarily make it better than a good edit – and this is coming from a guy who personally doesn’t like ’em.
If what you want is to ‘fit in’ with stock RF and most of the community content, doing an edit is a decent place to start – but I’m going to warn you now not to fall down the lowpoly-flatshade hole. However. . . .
Look to the left. Those are three cylinders, as you can probably tell. Can you guess what the difference between them is, though?
Shading type and edge type.
On the right we have the cylinder with the default flat shading, and you can see every panel on it.
On the left, we have the cylinder set to ‘smooth’ shading, and it just looks weird, doesn’t it?
In the middle, we have a cylinder set to smooth with sharp edges – and it looks way better.
You can see and probably guessed what smooth shading and flat shading were, but what’s this got to do with a lowpoly-flatshade hole?
Well, I think most players and some modders see flatshaded models and think ‘low poly’, and that they think that Ravenfield’s style is ‘low poly’. That’s just not correct.
Look at this Coronian’s helmet, for example – and look at how it fails to fit in with the rest of this soldier edit’s flatshaded shapes. That’s not low poly geometry in the slightest, and in my opinion it just looks ugly, if not outright lazy. This is the kind of ‘low poly’ and flatshading I want you to avoid.
I have a longer, angrier rant regarding people and their conceptions of RF’s art style, but what’s important right now is knowing how to use smooth shading and sharp edges because it’ll let you do a lot of things – and keep your helmets from looking awful.
We’ll have mister Panzercop’s helmet step in for reference today – it’s been a while since I’ve made him, but he’ll do nicely as we use the shading buttons in object mode to play around.
Neither of these look quite right, do they? A balance must be struck – but how?
Well, it just so happens there’s at least three different ways to do it – probably more.
- Manually marking sharp edges and points;
- Using the Edge Split modifier;
- Using Auto Smooth.
In edit mode, you can use the Shading/UVs tab of the toolbar to manually mark selected pieces as sharp edges – pretty straightforward, isn’t it? Sharp edges tend to be represented by cyan lines.
But that can get a bit tedious, so to automate it there’s the other two methods.
Edge Split is a modifier that will – well, split edges in the model based on an angle you feed in. It can make a lot more verts, though, and while I’m sure there are ways to use it efficiently I haven’t worked those out yet.
Instead, I just go to the object data tab and turn on auto smooth, and feed in an angle – and it basically does the same thing without making more verts. Downside is you can’t really apply auto smooth like a modifier, so you have less control.
In any case, using smooth shading with sharp edges is great, and can let you get nice, smooth helmets with those sharp edges and surfaces that fit in decently in RF.
Speaking of fitting, though. . . .
I touched on this before, but I’ll do it again – it’s best to model around the stock RF skeleton.
Do NOT modify the skeleton to fit your model, demonstrated today by the Vietnoot.
Ravenfield does NOT support edited skeletons, and will force the default one on your model.
Ravenfield does NOT support custom skeletons either – the models won’t even load.
Model to fit the skeleton – don’t force the skeleton to fit you!
If you model to fit the skeleton, what you see will be what you get in the end.
On that note,
You must have verts at your bends, and a few more helps the bends bend better.
Stock soldier man has three sets of verts around his elbow and knee joints, if I’m not mistaken, and you should follow a similar rule. They’re not super hard to add, a knife tool can cut them in with no problem if you can’t loop-cut-slide.
You’ll probably be fine tuning your joints more in rigging, but it’s important to consider how the geometry is going to move on either side of the joint sooner rather than later.
Speaking of sooner rather than later – Materials are up next.
Mattes, Glass, and Shiny Materials
Methinks I mentioned at the start of this that a bunch of materials is bad, did I not?
Indeed, a model with like 20 materials on it will usually run way worse than most ‘high poly’ skins. See, Unity doesn’t like having that many different materials going on at once over 60+ bots – probably because at just 60, that’s 60 times 20 – 1200 materials to render!
I have no idea if that’s really part of it, but everyone says too many textures is bad – Sui says it, Erazer says it, Steelraven says it – everybody says it.
So then why’d I tell you to use as many materials as you needed while modeling your skin?
Because there’s easy ways of dealing with tons of colors that don’t involve tons of material slots – textures.
Here, we have a more-or-less finished model with a bunch of objects that haven’t been joined yet, and a bunch of different single-color materials, plus the textures for TC and Camo.
What you want to do for everything that doesn’t need to glow, have transparency, or an actual texture like teamcolor markings or camo is to map them to a color palette or two.
You see this? This is my 8×8 color palette, albeit upscaled to 16×16. I can do 64 colors out of one material slot using this thing – and all I have to do is UV map the right parts to the right areas.
Now, you’re going to need either materials or texture view for this next part, but slide open another window in Blender, and select the conveniently named UV editor.
There are more delicate, careful ways of UV mapping things – but all you need are solid colors, so we’ll do UV mapping the quick and dirty way – selecting everything you want on the palette, hitting U, and selecting project from view.
Then, using the select button on the materials tab, selecting everything you’ve mapped to a material and dragging it to the corresponding color on the texture.
Rinse and repeat a few times, and congratulations – you’re using a color palette!
This is the cheap and easy way to get all the colors you want without a million material slots, meaning your model will look the way you want and people can play with it just fine, probably.
By the way – the TC materials are located in Assets -> Materials -> Actor.
Well, there’s a few different ways of doing it, but the simplest way to do it is to use UV unwrap or smart project, maybe with some UV seam marking.
You can mark UV seams more or less the same way you mark sharp edges, and you even access the buttons for them on the same panel!
In any case – do NOT project from view with Camo, because it’ll stretch on the sides you aren’t looking at straight on. Use smart projection or simple unwrap, map to your texture, and scale things as needed until the camo looks right.
You may notice here that my UV mapping goes over the borders – which is completely fine here. It’s sloppy, but since this is just a camo texture the only problem that’ll come up is if the camo doesn’t tile.
Maybe you want more, though – and I’ll tell you right now I’m not exactly a qualified texture expert by any stretch of the imagination, that’s more Sui’s thing – but this should get you started, and some google searching should explain to you texture stuff in greater depth than I currently can.
Riggy-Riggy
Now we’re going to spend a brief bit of time on the last part before we kick things into Unity – rigging, kickfeets, and first person arms. Once we’re done here, there’s not much else to do.
By this stage, your model should basically be done, and your material should be set up.
Join any loose objects into one thing, apply modifiers as needed to make it work. Once that’s done, select the object, and then select the skeleton – and then, hit CTRL+P.
Set the parent to armature deform with empty groups, and you’ve basically linked the model to the skeleton if you hadn’t already done that.
Now, select the skeleton, enter pose mode – and pick a place to start. I tend to start at the head, myself.
Select the bone you’re going to start from, then select the model – and go into weight paint.
Your model may look something like this, perhaps with less red.
You are now painting how much weight the bone you’ve selected has over the given vertices.
In english, you’re coloring the parts of the model you want to move with whatever bone you have.
Hit R to wiggle that bone around while in weight paint mode – and then hit M to make your life easier.
You can now select what verts and faces you want to affect while weight painting, and whatever you select in edit mode will be what you can paint on in Weight Paint mode.
Shift + K will flood or fully paint your selection.
From here, I recommend using flood, mix, lighten, and darken as you go bone by bone and rig your creation – flood for stuff that absolutely will move with only that bone, and the others for more gradual movements and such.
This shoulder bone for example is only lightly rigged here because it’s an area influenced by the upper torso and the arms. You want to go lighter – blend influence on joint areas – if you’re dealing with more organic connected parts.
Test your model’s posability in Blender, because what you see here is what you’ll get in Unity.
Work out the rigging kinks here, if you can. Maybe use your powers for evil.
Once you can offend people with outdated meme poses, you’re probably ready to get the kickfoot and arm done. The kickfoot is pretty simple.
As I mentioned earlier in this guide, just put in your model, erase the default leg, parent your model to the leg bone, and remove everything that isn’t the right leg.
Maybe merge some verts at the top just so you don’t have any open spots where people could see missing faces. Once this is done, kickfoot is ready.
There’s a lot of different ways to do the arms, and this is a time where it’d probably be much easier to at least keep the default hands than it would be to do your own.
Why is that?
Ravenfield hands are only rigged with two fingers and one thumb per hand – and fingers can be a little clunky to rig.
I’d say your best bet is cut off your model’s arms, remove their hands, close the open end like the leg, remove the default arms, and then use your arms with the default hands, and snazz up the default hands as needed.
From there, fit your arm model to the arm skeleton, and rig as needed until it works.
By this point, that shouldn’t be so hard, and so, three in the morning, we get to the easiest part of this guide.
To Unity and Beyond
I’m going to keep this brief.
In Unity, find your player model, hands, and feet. Drag them into the scene.
This is nice and simple. Just look them over, set up your materials, see if any normals are inverted or if you’ve got missing faces – patch them where you find them.
If you’ve got more material slots than you think you should, make sure to double check that the materials are proper in Blender and that they’re all mapped to the right textures.
A material that’s mapped to texture A with a face mapped to texture B will make two texture slots for no good reason, but that’s easily fixed.
Does everything look right?
Then open up a Skin content mod.
Put in the right models in the right slots, then write in the materials using the exact order you have on the ones you just inspected and set up in-scene.
If you have teamcolors, mark those – if not, write -1 in the Team Material slot.
All done?
Export and test it.
If all’s gone right – your skin now works.
What’s left is setting up the workshop stuff, but I think you can figure that out.