Wednesday 3 June 2009

The Wizard of Mods

We've been promising an improved Modder's Workshop for a while, not just because we're altruistic and want to give you nice tools, but because it makes life a whole lot easier for us too. The new version is now based around wizards, which makes the whole process not just quicker and easier, but a lot less error-prone.


Here's a basic Moviestorm mug. Not very exciting, is it? And, much though you love us, you may not want to put Moviestorm branding all over your movie. So let's open it up and retexture it.

First, define an addon which your new model is going to live in. This will be the thing that you can distribute to other Moviestorm users so they can use your mod too.

Next, give your cup a name. We've picked the highly innovative and original MyMug.

Now pick the parts of the mug that you want to retexture. The mug only has one part, so this is easy. If you're dealing with a more complex object, then you can retexture each part of it independently.

We're going to replace the existing texture with one we made earlier, so we select the Replace option. (We previously made the new texture using Photoshop and a public domain image to edit the .dds file attached to the original mug. It's in AddOn\DomesticDrama01\Data\Props\Mug\Textures if you want to try this yourself. However, it's even easier if you use the Edit option to create a copy of the original object and then you can get straight to the textures and edit them in your preferred graphics editor.)


Now we simply select the file we want to use as the new texture.

Et voila! Here's our new mug!

Finish off by publishing the new addon. This will contain a new template and your new texture, so the file size is pretty small and it's easy to distribute. This one's all of 86Kb.

The entire process takes slightly under 30 seconds once you've done it a couple of times.

Simple, huh?

4 comments:

Satscape said...

Wow, that looks very nice and easy. Looking forward to release. @twitt3rscape

Overman said...

Looking great! Features like this are really going to bring modding down to earth while also upping efficiency. Got to love that.

sisch said...

That actually reads as if even I could do it... yay!
Looking forward to trying it!

Craig A. Rintoul said...

Excellent!
Thanks guys.
Can't wait to get my mitts on it!
C