#model talking

[clowndotgay]

oh hey what's that. it's the blender ports i keep promising i'll post!!!!!!! holy moly!!!! wow!!! what's that you're telling me it's both toon ports AND cog ports??? wow !!!

^ mac opsys image to bait people into looking at this post. ok i'm free now. send me an ask or dm me if you have any questions

[javiercastan]

Favorite outtakes of favorite photo 

[clowndotgay]

made a blender file that lets you construct a toon from the game rigs without hassle. it's (ideally) usable even if you don't know much about blender. additional (important) information about it under the Read More

there are no accessories (glasses, backpacks, etc.)

the panel on the right will ask you for the name of the TEXTURE of the clothing, not the in-game name of the clothing item. if you do not know the texture name of the item, you can use the spreadsheet that is put in the google drive folder to figure it out. the different types of clothing (shirts, shoes, bottoms) have their own sheets which you can ctrl+f through, or you can make a personal copy of the spreadsheet to use the "user input" sheet, where you can type in the in-game name and the spreadsheet will automatically find the texture filename for you. (worth mentioning that when you put in the texture name - don't add a ".png" onto it, the script will do that for you anyhow)

when you hit "Build Toon", the file will erase everything inside the "COMPLETED_TOON" collection and build the toon from the ground up again. if you wish to keep two different toons, you should move them into other files by appending the "COMPLETED_TOON" collection into them. this also means that you will lose the pose of the toon or anything other edits you made before you hit the "Build Toon" button again. please be wary of this!

you can change the emotion of the snout without deleting the toon by hitting the "Update Emotion" button.

always remember to save frequently, especially as this tool has a tendency to crash sometimes when i hit ctrl z too much??

if there's anything i made unclear, or you have any difficulty using this, or you find an error, please message or shoot me an ask! if i'm made aware of any bugs or issues, i'll likely edit this post and make a list of ones i am already aware of/working on.

[clowndotgay]

I'm figuring out blender using your models! It's been a super fun experience. This is the first render that I've made using a full body + head!

Some problems I'm facing so far are:

I don't know how to color his hands.

I can't get his neck piece to stay with the rest of his head!

Replacing the texture of the suit is HARD.

If you could help me out with those things (and also help me out with any other problems you see with this render) that would be greatly appreciated! Feel free to not do that, though.

oh, this rocks! really long post below!

as for question 1: enter the "shading" tab at the top of blender,

and click on the hands. at the bottom of your screen will be this whole jumble of nodes. click on the "Attribute" one to highlight it, and then delete it.

After you've deleted it, you need to click on the gray next to the letter "A". Click on "Hex" in the menu that pops up, and put in the hex code of the colour of the hands you want. For Flint, that'll be (around) F14E18.

Yay! your hands have colours now!!!

as for question 2:

so, when you append a cog head model to the body model file, it'll kind of just be sitting there. what you need to do to attach this head to the body is to first enter Pose Mode while you have the head's armature (bunch'a bones) selected. then, select their bottommost bone (typically named "root"). for Flint, it's this one right here.

once you've selected the root, click on the blue bone with the thingie around it in the Properties menu in the bottom right.

Click Add Bone Constraint, then click "Child Of" (rectangled in red below)

this constraint is going to make this bone follow the bone of another armature. for this, we want the armature it follows to be the body, so click on the empty field labelled "target" and type "suitA" into the box (or suitB, suitC, etc. dependent on the body). then, click on the empty field labelled "bone" and type in "head" (NOT joint_head!! just head!!). this will make the whole head snap to the neck!

your constraint will look like this:

and flint will look like this:

and... the little thingie around his neck didn't snap up! this is an issue that happens with flint's head, and to my recollection, only flint's head. not to worry, we can fix this by putting the exact same constraint but in the "Constraints" tab of the armature this time.

okay, that fixes him.

as for question 3:

go into the "UV Editing" tab of blender, navigate to the suit texture on the left, click "Image" and then click "Unpack".

it'll prompt you again after you click unpack, just click "Remove Pack". after you do that, click "Image" again, but this time click "Replace". this will open up a file choosing menu. navigate to wherever you stored the blender ports, and there should be a folder of suit textures. open that and double click on firestarters suit texture.

and... there we go! firestarter! in the.. metal!

as for anything else:

the only thing i notice about this render is that some things could be hidden, like the bowtie, other size of tie, and the health insignia. in the top right of blender, there's a listing of everything in the scene. everything has a little eye icon and a camera icon to the right of it. if you click the eye icon you won't be able to see it anymore in the viewport, and if you click the camera you won't see it in the render.

knowing this, you can just make some stuff (like the white health insignia and the bowtie) go away by doing this!

also. if you want to have the health insignia become a certain colour like it does in game, all you need to do is the same thing you did to the hands. go to shader tab, click on the health insignia (and the glow), remove Attribute, add colour, bam!

one last thing that may help if you are unaware: you can make a render transparent by just clicking this in the "Render" tab of "Properties". navigating menus is for nerds, though, so you can just type "transparent" into the search bar and it'll show you where you can see that. turn "Filter Size" down to 0.00 px if you want no antialiasing, also.

closing notes (because i like having excessively long posts)

sorry for making this an excessively long post! i hope that it helps you in some fashion! i worry about putting too many images in 1 post sometimes but i hope that they help! also i am glad you are having fun with blender :o) playing with ttcc models like they are dolls is how i learned literally anything that i know about blender! so it makes me happy seeing other people learn blender for ttcc stuff.

send another ask my way if you have any other questions or i didn't make something clear! i find model stuff to be fun to talk about, and i spent enough time fumbling through trial and error that i'd much rather tell help someone do something rather than have them do the same trial and error

[clowndotgay]

random fun model details i have picked up on;

the back of belles head has a plaque that reads "S.M.E.P. Company", the back of P.R.Rs head has a similar inscription, but it's illegible

the bones for the rigging of chips hat are named "ear", which i just think is cute, and there's something similar with high rollers rig

multislackers neck begins with a small cog, which i am 99% sure is meant to reference the cog that boss cogs (namely his dad) have at the waist!

a handful of models have eyes/no eyes where you wouldn't be able to see them without looking at the textures, i.e. pacesetters eyes under his glasses, low ballers face under the glasses & bill. a bunch of cogs don't have anything of note under whatever covers their face though - dave doesn't have eyes, plutocrat doesn't have an eye under the monocle, high roller doesn't have anything under her shades, etc. (i don't think any of these are meant to be "canon", i'm sure plutocrat does have another eye under there, but i found it neat!)

[clowndotgay]

laughs evilly

[clowndotgay]

have been trying to make a .zip of every cog body & head, rigged proper for blender. there's a lot of technical hiccups i have to work through for that to be possible, so at the moment i'm doing the same thing but for toons instead.

the goal is to make it so that people can mess around with the models without having to do a bunch of technical nonsense and rig editing! i'm hesitant to put any sort of timeframe on the toon models, but they'll probably be done within two months maximum. they won't be perfect but they'll be better than what is currently publicly available for blender (which is nothing, to my knowledge)