Blender Character Kitbashing - Part 1: The Basics

kit bashing is a creative process that involves using various assets from different models to create something unique the main advantage of Kit bashing is that you can produce fully formed Concepts without having to create complex models and assets is also much faster to Kit bash than to create everything from scratch by enabling us to express our ideas quickly and efficiently it allows us to progress our project without being limited by our experience with Anatomy perspective and posing in this tutorial series I'll be showing you how to create a fully rigged character model by combining assets from Call of Duty and Battlefield the first thing we need to do is download all of the add-ons and assets needed for this project you can find the links for everything in the description below our first download is Source IO add-on which will allow you to import Source engine assets into blender the second is distribute objects add-on which will allow you to sort the assets which we are going to download next the last two files we need to download will be on The Source Filmmaker Workshop we will be using Matt Ivan's generic operators pack this contains the models and textures for our project you can find both of the links on his Workshop page description one link will be for the models and the other link will be for the shared textures copy each link and paste it in make sure to delete the space before the NZ in the URL these links will take you to a download page for both files when the download is complete you'll have two compressed folders you can unzip both of them if you open the generic operators folder you'll find the materials and measures delete the text file and the jpeg navigate back to the shared materials folder you will find a single folder called materials copy that folder then paste it into the generic operators folder once you have pasted that folder there you can then delete everything that is in a generic operator's folder the last thing we're going to do is create a project folder this will house all of our assets and blender scenes I'm going to name this kit bash project and then we're going to place the generic Ops into the project folder inside the generic Ops folder navigate to models and continue navigating through the subfolders until you get to the folder that contains all of the meshes once we have found that mesh folder we're going to copy the Windows Explorer URL open a new blender project and save it as generic Ops Redux inside your project folder before you import anything I would recommend going to edit and then preferences and switching off for autosave so you don't end up with 2 GB Autos saves every 2 minutes if you do turn off autosave remember to save your project man ually every 10 minutes now we're going to import our assets go to file then import navigate down to Source engine assets then go to the source model mdl click that then using the URL that we copied paste that into the URL tab press enter now we have all our Assets in a long list for us to import we are not going to be importing everything cuz there are a lot of repeating assets in this folder select equipment carrier 551 and then at the very bottom shift select on the item watches deselect hair and be beards by holding control and clicking on these files as we will not be using them now that we have everything selected we can now click on import source mdl files it might take a while for all the assets to import all of the assets are going to import on top of each other like this before we start sorting we will need to unparent everything to prevent disruptions click on select select all and then right click parent and then clear and keep transformation go to select again and then go select all by typee and then we're going to select empty we are now going to right click and delete these empties as they are leftovers from The Source engine and they are no longer required for what we're going to do now for the last time we're going to press select and select all by type but this time we're going to select Armature and then we're going to press h to hide them as we do not need them right now we can now begin sorting press the X-ray button up at the top right and then box select everything you can turn the X-ray off now and then go to object and then to transform and there you will find an add-on for distribute object click on that add-on the add-on will sort everything into a nice long line but it's too long to navigate efficiently be much easier to navigate in a grid formation I'm going to change some parameters in the add-ons control panel to accomplish this select the max x value which will shorten the length of the line and set that to 10 now it's brought everything closer together but it's still overlapping so we're going to go over to the spacing x value and change that to 0.6 now that's space everything out but I need more length so I'm going to change the Y value to 0.5 the clothing is now at the back of the formation and I'd rather have it at the front so it's easier to pick from click on sort click the drop-down menu and change it to by name reversed that will bring all the clothing to the front now that we have finished positioning our kit bash pack I'm going to stop for a moment and explain how the source IO add-on Imports textures because the source engine uses a different texture format the add-on will first convert the files into a PNG or TNG format and then store them within the blend file itself this is a problem because when we copy the objects from the blend file and paste them into the new one the textures will embed themselves into the new blend file causing extra memory usage so what we're going to do is unpack this blend files textures so that when we do copy these objects into a new blender file it will share the texture files from a dedicated library to unpack this blend file go to file external data unpack resources select use files in current directory create when necessary that will unpack the embedded Textures in our blender scene into the texture folder if we go to the kip bash project folder we can see a folder named textures has appeared this will house your blender scenes unpacked textures now save your blender scene with the embedded textures removed you'll notice a large reduction in your scenes file size Now set blender to shade of View and move on to the next step which is character design when it comes to character design it's important to collect as much reference material as possible you can use Google Images to find your references and make a collage that represents different parts of your character I heavily influenced by the stalker and Metro universes I'm looking to create a character who is a post-apocalyptic scavenger I do not want him to be heavily militarized I want him to appear like a civilian who has found his gear when and where he could find it I will now look at this kit bash set and decide which pieces of clo best suit my vision let's start off with the torsos I'm gravitating to this lover jacket because it looks like something a civilian would own but it offers protection from the elements now let's look at these cargo pants remember the theme is post-apocalyptic scavenger so all this military camouflage shouldn't really be considered we should only be looking at these cargo pants for their utilitarian look I'm liking these cargo pants but not so much the ones with the knee pads due to their uniform look but this one right here I'm going to shift select that and take a look at it I think I'll keep this one let's get back to the selection let's take a look at the boots now we don't have a large selection of boots so I'll select these ones finally we need to select some gloves with the gloves I'm leaning towards these fingerless tactical gloves cuz I would like my character to have a slight tactical Edge having a mixture of utilitarian and tactical gear would go a long way in our character's design now that we've selected all of our items of clothing we're going to zoom out and make sure that everything is selected properly then right click and select copy objects we're going to open up a new blender scene right click to paste these objects into the new SE everything is off center due to the distribution add-on in order to fix this we need to select our armateur and then go to object properties and then where it says location X right click and select copy all selected and that will collapse everything to the center of the seene now that we have all our clothing collapsed on top of each other I'm going to teach you about armatures armatures are the skeletons that go underneath character models which when coupled with weight paint information will allow the fabric to flex realistically as if it's being worn there are two methods of using armatures when it comes to Kit bashing the first one is using the already existing Armature that's in this pack the other one is armature stitching which combines pieces of different armatures together in order to use the Armature that's already existing in the generic operators pack open up a fresh blender scene then we'll navigate to file import Source engine and Source model and then we will again paste the URL we copied earlier in this time we will be using one of these character gen a1s we don't need to import all of these we just need to select one so once that is imported we should have this which is a basic character model with a bunch of clothing presets but all we really want is the arure that's inside it we're just going to grab that and copy it coming back to this original scene we're going to hide all of these armatures right click and paste it in I also want to note that there are some other items within this folder that will come in handy later as we did with the kit bash pack we're going to go go to x-ray mode select everything right click parent clear parent then we're going to go up to object transform and then to the distribute object at and that will push everything out all we want out of this project is the head and the arms with no hands right click and copy those objects then go back to the main scene and paste them in once everything is pasted into our main project we need to go over to the object properties again and make sure all the transforms are set to zero for every object right click on it and copy all selected we can now delete the blender scene that contains the lineup these meses will bring in a duplicate Armature select the duplicate and delete it rename the amateure to full character arm that way we don't get confused between these armatures at the bottom now we have a small problem since I've copied the head and the arms from a temporary blender scene these two objects now have embedded textures also when I copied the arms into our scene the materials for the Skin Within the arms was already being used by the fingertips on the hands blender will create duplicate materials and textures when it finds matching names for new objects that have been added to the scene since I have copied embedded textures into this scene this means when I unpack this it will create a duplicate texture with 001 at the end of its name this will waste memory so how do we fix it we simply select the arms and go to material properties you will see a skin texture for the arms but it will have a 001 at the end select it and then select the material drop down menu you'll see another skin texture but without the 001 select it that will replace the material we don't need this other texture in this material select it and press the minus button as the head has no pre-existing materials in this blender scene none of its materials were duplicated so ignore it now all we have to do is remove the unused material which we replaced go to the display mode drop down menu and press Oran data then press Purge this will remove all unused materials in your blender scene return to the view layer then go to file external data unpack resources then select use files in current directory create when necessary that will unpack the extra embedded Textures in your blender scene into your text folder let's try to move this Armature select it go to object mode select the dropdown menu and hit pose mode now select a bone and try to rotate it you'll notice that the Armature is moving but the model isn't that's because we haven't applied a modifier to the mesh in order to allow the Armature to interact with it we're going to click on this mesh and then we're going to go over to the modifiers tab as you can see it already has a modifier selected but it's not the correct one this is because each asset in this pack has its own amature now we're going to click on this find the full character arm and select that now when we move this bone again you can see it's moving the model's arm there's a much easier way to do this go to the X-ray tab switch that on box select everything and then hit contrl L and you'll see a tab called link transfer data you want to hit copy modifiers select that and you will transfer the Armature modifier to all the meshes that you have selected all there's left for us to do is to ensure that the Armature is correctly applied to the mesh select it go to pose mode and then move the different bones around as long as you don't see any strange weight pain deformation everything should be fine however if you do my solution for that will be in the next video we'll also be covering how to stitch together separate arates to save time weight painting your [Music] character

Channel: Armoured Avian

Views: 3,450

Keywords: Comic, Book, Game, 3D, 2D, Digital, Characters, Story, Blender, Kitbash, Tutorial, Series, Models, Weight, Painting, Modeling, Clothing, Sketchfab, Learning, Project, Download, Teaching, Editing, Dressing, Sculpting, Beginner, New, How to, Armature, Skeleton, Weights, Face

Id: oB6mW0thgVY

Length: 12min 56sec (776 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 28 2023