Dev Diary: Adding a Piece Of Clothing To The Game (Patreon)

A good day to everybody! Jérémie here with this week’s Patreon post!

While we are still working on Live Mode features and designs, I wanted to take some time this week to show you the basic process of how we add clothes to the game, from the modeling software to textures to the control panel! This is not a tutorial, but a small glimpse into our current process and the workflow that will most likely be used for modders in the future. This post is for Patrons only, please do not share it :)

First off, we create the clothes in Blender, a 3D modeling software. There are a few subtleties to keep in mind when creating clothes that will work on our Paras, such as rigging them to make sure they animate with our character.

A piece of clothing in Blender, you might have recognized Sebastian’s jacket!

The next step is to create a texture that goes with the clothes. Texturing is where we add lines, highlights and other surface details to the model. This is done in Substance Painter, a software to directly paint on 3D models. There are subtleties to think about here too - you might notice that the texture on the right is flattened out on a 2D representation of our clothes - because of how 3D works.

The texture is gray, because it gets recolored in-game, allowing players to use our color wheel freely!

When we are done creating all required textures, it’s time to add them to the game via the mod system. You’ve seen a glimpse of the Control Panel in a previous post and you can see it at some spots in the roadmap, but here are all the options and settings you can currently tweak when adding clothes.

There are a lot of things we can tweak and customize in the mod system, clothes can be quite complex, ranging from simple shirts to hats to dresses and shoes!

Here are some settings you can use to control how the clothes behave in-game;

1. You can choose a name and choose which type of character can wear it.
2. Here we add the 3D model we created above.
3. Similarly, here we add the texture we created in Substance Painter.
4. Tags are used in the Paramaker to place the item in the right category.
5. The Swatch Tag is used to have colors specific to that kind of clothing.
6. As you’ve seen in a previous post about layering, Sebastian’s Jacket can be worn with different clothes under it - or a bare chest! - this is where we set that up.

And the result is Sebastian’s Jacket that you know and love!

Heyyyy, looking good, Sebby!

Hope you enjoyed this post! If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask, and I’ll answer to the best of my ability! Have a great week!

Jérémie