Krev's Skinmaking, Second Edition

Written for EA26/Unity 2020;

Instructions get old, tools change, engines switch, editors swap - a fresh guide through making a skin mod for RF seems to be in order, and I might as well give it a whack.

First draft.

Short Version

Skins. Ravenfield. You need two things.

Blender - get it offa Steam. Model. Rig. Make the thing.
Unity - read Steel's guide. Implement. Compile. Export. Puts the thing ingame.
Let's go. Combine these three files (no-IK hands, kickfoot, soldier) or open my quickstart. One is faster. The other is lame.

Guy. Arms. Leg. Got 'em.
Take the bones. Hide 'em.
Pop refs in. Resize. Adjust. Resize.
Model. Model some more. Shape the thing. Color along the way.
Mirror it. Knife it. Loopcut. Autosmooth. Whatever. This isn't a 'how to model'.

Modeled it, now material it.

Make a palette. Add the colors.
Make a material. Plug in the palette.
UV Edit. Select. Project. Deselect, select. Adjust. Repeat. Fiddle around. 

Less materials good. More materials bad.

Camo material. Some shader stuff. Throw on a Principled BSDF. Add a UV input. Add Mapping Vector. Plug them together. You can adjust camo scaling and tiling.
Scale the camo good. Use the numbers for the material in Unity.

Model, made. Materials, done.

Rigging. 
Merge stuff, apply stuff, mesh-convert.
Select meat, select bones. Meat deforms with bones with empty groups.
Weight Paint. Select bones. Mirror X. Face select, fill weight. Move on. Slather in mix. Clean up.
Check bendies. Fix bendies. Repeat.
Check big bendy. Pose works. Rig done.
Leg.  Copy body. Reparent. Purge meat. Leg done.
Arm - what you did before.

Model done. Materials done. Rig done.
Now - slow.

Go to file. Export. FBX.
Turn off the Camera object type in the 'Include' section.

Transforms - Apply Scalings needs to be FBX All.

Armature - Primary Bone Axis has to be X.
Secondary Bone Axis has to be Negative Y.
Check off Only Deform Bones, don't include Leaf Bones.

Export the FBX with these settings. Especially the Armature Bone Axis. Don't screw it up, or it won't work right. Spines will snap the wrong way.

Unity.
Make material. Attach texture. Find model. Remap material. Drag model in. Inspect.
Tweak materials. Replace weapon man. Replace gun arms. Survey.
Make prefab. Attach Skinmod thing. Lock inspector. Make new one - drag to the middle. Look at materials - punch in materials. Teamcolor? No? Negative one.
Config - done. Export - test. Publish.
Done.

Overview

Skins - model swaps for you soldiers - are maybe the easiest kind of mod to do for Ravenfield. There's no setting up car seats, animating guns, or any configuration short of telling the mod file what colors your soldierman is.


In this guide I'll try to walk through some general tips in the modeling half, lay out exactly how to export the thing properly, what to punch in to the mod config file, and by the end of it you should have at least some kind of abomination tromping around ingame.

I might retread what I wrote in my last guide, and I might not - either way, it can't hurt to give it a look.

So - there are two programs you'll need for this.

Blender is my choice for the first - it handles modeling, rigging, and mapping out the base colors. At the time of writing, I use Blender 3.0.1 - the most up to date default install. The guide will be written according to this.

You could, in theory, use whatever program you're familiar with - but I'm assuming that you may not be familiar with anything else, and Blender is what the vast majority of RF modders work with.

The next thing you'll need is the Unity Editor to implement your model, and it's the whole reason that there's a split between EA25 and EA26.

Ravenfield's updating to a newer version of the game engine, and it's breaking a few things and changes the interface people have grown to know. Steel has a whole guide about setting up for that, and you should probably follow it before looking at this guide.

Setup

Now, when I set up for a skin I usually have three important things at hand, for there are three important things in a skin mod. They are as follows:

• The dude's skeleton, because it's what your main model will be bound to;
  
• The mighty foot bones, because kicking people with your leg is a thing you can do;
  
• Hands of gripping, because most guns in RF are supposed to allow hand model swaps.

The body, the kickfoot, and the first person hands.

You are replacing these three things with a complete skin mod, and it's the skeletons that will control how your model bends and flexes - and nothing stops you from putting them in the same file.

So where do you get these things? By opening three different .blend files in the Assets\RFTools\Models\Character directory for the basic hands, character, and legs.

If you use Blender 3.0 onwards, you could save time by just downloading this .blend file i made.[drive.google.com]

Q: Should you just make the bones yourself instead? 
A: God, no.

Under no circumstances should you try to make your own skeleton or even modify the existing one unless you know exactly what you're doing, because RF just throws whatever you modeled onto the default one in the end. Deciding to model your guy as a T instead of following the A-pose and bending the bones to follow will generally not work out the way you wanted.

Orientation

Alright, so you've opened blender - you've selected everything in the starter scene, deleted it, pasted in the different chunks you need to make your skin - or maybe you've just opened the file I dropped in above. I'll write like you've got the file.

What's probably important is orientation - what might you be doing, what might you be using that you don't necessarily know about from a generic blender tutorial? How do I go about things?

Perhaps to start with, a look at the hierarchy.

The hierarchy, or Outliner as Blender calls it, is where you'll basically see what's in your scene and what's parented to what at a glance. Here we see that there are three Armatures - bone sets - and a Mesh object in each. At this stage of things, you might as well select everything but the soldier and hide them, and this can be done of through either hitting the eye icon in the hierarchy, or by simply pressing H after selecting something.

It'll be pretty important to figure out how to select multiple objects at once, by the way - it's key to joining stuff together and assigning your meshes to skeletons, and it also makes it easy to handle a bunch of stuff at once. There are multiple ways to select (or deselect) multiple things at once, including shift-clicking, box select, and circle select, and box I quite like.

It tends to get everything - and deselection is as simple as holding shift after hitting B.

Moving on - below the Outliner/Hierarchy is your properties toolbox, and there are four tabs I consider relevant here when modeling skins.

Object Properties is the one that you'll probably look at the least, but it's there that you can go to Relations and manually set or unset an object's parent. Most of the time, though, you probably won't look at it - but you can use the Viewport Display on your Armatures to mess with how you see your bones, and whether they're solid or wireframed, for example.

Modifiers are very useful, and the one you'll probably work with the most will be Mirror. This is probably pretty easy to understand - however, Mirrors should come before Armature modifiers, as that tells blender the order in which modifiers get applied. Mirroring after your Armature modifier - which bends the model to the skeleton - tends to have weird results you don't want.

Down the line, Object Data is something I consider quite important and what I go to almost as much as the materials tab. Here, you can look at your Vertex Groups, which are basically the patches and points in your model affected by bones of the same name. Stuff in the Shoulder.R vertex group will be affected by the Shoulder.R bone. If your Vertex Groups are empty or incomplete, well - that's a problem for when you're rigging the model.

There's also the Normals with Auto Smooth and the Geometry Data, which, if you're doing a model with any smooth shading, will be very useful as it can automatically mark sharp edges for you based on the Auto Smooth setting when you hit the 'Add Custom Split Normals Data button. If you want the look Vanilla Plus has, this is going to be important for you.

Then, there's the Materials, and in simple terms that's the colors of the model. Right now it's set up for solid base colors, of which the file I've provided has five. You can probably figure out how to add new material slots, duplicate materials, and select/deselect/assign colors pretty easily - just note that you can only assign stuff in edit mode, as might be obvious.

Normally, these five colors are part of the one team color texture palette used by Ravenfield, and I normally treat them as one material. You might not care, and teamcolors might not matter to you. It's your skin, not mine.

So what about getting actually started with the modeling?

Modeling Tips

The thing that anyone needs is a reference - maybe multiple refs, or at least a few good ones. References are usually pictures of stuff, be they pictures of real gear, doodled soldiers, or screenshots of other 3D models. Whatever they are, if you're looking at it to figure out what you're trying to make - it's a reference.

Some people have programs that allow them to paste these all over their screen - I tend to just save pictures and import them into blender. Sometimes it's kind of like tracing.

What I usually do is I snap to the front orthographic view, look at the guy dead-on, and I'll drop in an image of some kind to follow.

Background and Reference images are basically the same kind of object; when selected, you can mess with their properties in an object data tab, and tell it whether you want to see it in front of stuff all the time, behind it, or to just act normal depth-wise. You can also decide whether it's a double-sided picture or not, whether you see it in perspective or ortho, and whether you only see it at the exact front or not. Mess around, find what works.

Let's say I want to do some kind of TF2 scout - I'll drop him in, and then at right I'll go set him to Front depth and make him, say, halfway transparent through opacity.


This way, I can see what I'm doing with the model and still follow the shapes I want to get in. It doesn't hurt to have more references for more angles, and really it's kind of like modeling anything else - especially since you don't have to think about face posing or really intricate bone sets.

The main rule of character modeling is that you need to have more verts, edges at joints to make the model bend more nicely. You can't have a straight rectangle for a leg - you need to have a cut at the halfway point, and speaking of cuts - the knife tool is extremely useful.

CTRL+R tends to get you the loopcut which is all fine and dandy when it works, but using K for the knife gets you something that can slice new verts and edges wherever you need them. You can get Blender to sometimes get you a decent cut or join between vertices with J, but sometimes the knife is just better.

Also useful is manual merging with M, especially if you have a lot of edges to connect. If you had to separate a bunch of limbs and want to connect them to the body but don't want to have to click every single vertice, you can just select roughly everything, select merge by distance, and it'll auto-join anything within a set distance which can be handy.

When it comes to modeling, the exact way you do it and what you want to come out of it is your own challenge. Want to modify the base guy? Sure, whatever. Make him into whatever you want. Making something from scratch? Power to you. Porting something over? Good luck.

Just remember, it's best to model to the skeleton you have and, at least for the hands, the shape of the default soldier. That's the body that the animations were done for, after all, and if your hands are like half a foot longer than default and suddenly every gun looks weird - your fault. If you're trying to make a vietnoot penguin monster like I did, back in the day, you have to keep in mind it'll be mangled and controlled by the figure of a full humanoid person.

Regardless, some more useful stuff for modeling includes:


The X-Ray button, best used with the Material Preview shading;


Proportional Edit, which has all sorts of applications and ways to tune it, especially for shaping large patches of stuff gently,


And changing the pivot point, which I tend to do a lot. Scaling certain selections individually gets me what I want, other times I need things to work off of the last thing I selected - and then other times, default median pivot is perfectly fine.

Other stuff up there of use include changing the snaps, using the command search thing to mark objects as smooth, sharp marking, clearing sharps, and all sorts of other stuff that probably has some kind of use to someone.

The thing to consider, though, is that you're probably going to have to model in a lot of the details, and you may want to color stuff as you go - but you don't need to go crazy. This is Ravenfield, after all, and most RF skins don't have actual textures beyond camo patterns.

Materials and Textures, part one

Now, when it comes to refining and optimizing your materials, technically the best way to do it does involve making textures. The general idea hasn't really changed from my last guide - more materials means model tends to eat more memory, less materials tends to be better. Color palettes and condensing your model onto them material by material remains the simplest way to do it.


What I probably can do is explain the way you do this in 3.0+, though.

Go to the UV tab that's in all the 3.0+ blends now,

Make sure the window on the right is set to material preview,

Make sure the window on the left is the UV editor and turn on UV Selection Sync,

Make a new material, make sure it uses nodes and that it's set to something like the basic principled BSDF shader, and then set it to use an image texture;

In this case, I'm selecting the default RF teamcolor texture.

Make sure to select the palette in the UV editor,

And then map it, select by material, shove them where they go.

You probably get the idea. For stuff with actual textures, though, like camo patterned fatigues or faces, you tend to need some less crude UV mapping. I'm not covering how to do faces or heads. There are other tutorials out there for that sort of specialized thing.

Camo isn't too difficult to map to, on paper - you unwrap the model in some relatively clean way to a camo pattern using smart-project, but you can go a little further.

Over in the shading tab, if you put in a UV map input and a Mapping node from the vector section, you can get the ability to mess with the scaling and offset of your camo.

This allows you to fiddle with how big or small or squished or fat the pattern is and shift it around without having to screw with the UV unwrap so much, and you can plink these numbers into unity as well once the time comes.

Other stuff you can do is turn on backface culling and a blend mode to test transparency, see if your model's normal maps are flipped, and more.

Notably, if your normals are flipped or the model looks like it's inside out, you can do ALT+N in Edit Mode to flip or automatically recalculate your normals.

Now, part two of this section will be about Unity.

Binding the mortal flesh to eternal bone

Rigging is not hard. People act like it is. I disagree with them.

Boil down/join your stuff for, say, the body into one thing. An easy way to do that would be this command above - it'll apply all modifiers to your selection. Then, CTRL+J to join everything to whatever you last clicked.

Make sure you have the sad, boneless body mass selected, and you could do another thing here.

If you, say, used stuff from the head in the legs and crossposted all sorts of bits in your model, it may cause less headache to delete any and all preexisting vertex groups in your model and start from scratch. That way, you don't end up scrambling to de-rig the leg from the head and the hand from the spine, for example.

Otherwise, continue on and parent the mesh to the bone. What I tend to do is I choose empty groups, because I want to handle the rigging from scratch.

Now that you've done this, the rigging begins. Select the bones, then the model, and enter weight paint mode, which you can do by going to the drop down in the top left or through a hotkey like CTRL+TAB.

You have three different ways to select and deal with things in weight paint mode. In the top left, you can switch between Face Selection paint masking - where it'll only weight paint the faces you select, and this is a thing that carries over between edit and weight paint mode - or Vertex Selection. I assume it's like the face one, but with vertices.

I legitimately haven't ever noticed these buttons were there before, honestly. I always just switched between the normal view and Face Selection with M.

Here, we can see what it looks like in Face Selection, and at right we have the toolbar thing that you can bring up by hitting N. You can tell it whether you want your painting to project straight through the model or not, which I tend to prefer, and mess with the strength of your weight painting and the max weight. I tend to use the Mix and Subtract brushes at reduced weight and strength, and to also turn on X-axis symmetry. If I paint the left shoulder, it'll automatically paint the right, and I don't need to actually use a mirror modifier.

Further right, there's the Vertex Groups - the highlighted one indicates what bone or group you're currently painting to.

The easy way to pick a new one is not to use that list, but to switch to the default paint mode and select a bone.
It's really easy. Just select whatever's on the helmet and do something like SHIFT+K to automatically fill the selection to the maximum weight you've set for your brush, and all you've got to do is a quick paint-over of the more gradual limbs.

In here, you can even pose and move the bones to see if you've missed anything or if it bends right.

I've rigged guys in like ten minutes flat before. You just want to sweep anything that'll be affected by the given bone, and overlap some where you have joints and bends. Check and tweak as needed. Make sure not to rig the other leg to the leg you're working on. Simple.

Some people advocate using transfer weight modifiers, and if it works for you, great. If it doesn't, oh well.

Legs and hands

Here's the secret with the legs:

They use the exact same bones as the full model.

Just delete everything other than the right leg, maybe close up the top, and you're done.

It's stupid easy. There is no reason you shouldn't have a kickfoot. If you could rig it to the main guy, you've already made it.

Hands, though, can be a little trickier depending on how much you try.

Most skins you can get away with just insetting and extruding from the basic starter hands, and really that's probably the best thing to do.

If you try to model your own set of hands, then oh, boy, it can get fiddly. You need to copy the general shape of the basic hand, be careful with your edge placement, so on and so forth - and Ravenfield's hand skeleton only has three fingers since everyone wears mittens.

What I like to do is this thing with the separated index finger, but I suppose that's just me.

You could totally get away with posing one a specific hand for holding the gun, though, and using that hand on your full third person body. I think it's a little cooler and less vague than the generic slightly-cupped mitten hand - and the exact thing that the armature modifier is useful for.

Apply the Armature modifier, and it'll apply the pose that you put whatever the model was in to the model geometry. Instead of having to arrange the verts of the hand, you can just pose it that way.

This would also be how you'd make, say, statues, or maybe adapt model ports and rips from other games to the RF skeleton. Just get them to copy the general pose of the default RF rig, apply the modifier, then rename the bones - and bang, model's rigged for Ravenfield. More or less.

Some models tend to have way more bones than RF does, but that's where those transfer weights modifiers can be useful, too - combining weight paint data into one vertex group.

Fabricating the FBX (Exporting to Unity)

This is where a lot of people will have a lot of problems for what looks like no damn reason.

The settings in my current EA26/Unity 2020 export thing are as follows:


Set it up like so, put it where it needs to go, and it should be ready for you to implement into RF without anymore hiccups.

Unity Setup (Materials Part 2)

The skin is now modeled, you colored it in Blender, you rigged it, you made sure it moved, and now you've exported it.

Before you do anything else - set up your materials in Unity.

Make a new one from scratch, modify an existing one, I don't care, whatever works.


Color palettes and most textures will begin life by going into the Albedo slot of a default material after you've put the image files somewhere in your Toolspack directory.


If you are using a Camo Pattern or anything else you have messed with the UV scaling on in Blender, the scaling goes into the tiling fields, and the location is the offsets.

It's not hard to get these configured, and you can tune them more in a moment.


Go find your .fbx file, and remap the relevant materials to whatever you just set up in Unity. Apply.

Drag your FBX out into the scene, and look at it.


Is there something that looks wrong? Adjust the materials, check the normals, see if anything's flipped. Make sure it looks right.


Copy the materials off of one of their bits. Paste it whereever you're going to test something.


If you're in the weapon test scene, replace the weapon holder - does he actually get replaced? Does he hold the gun? Does he not explode into a million weird pieces for no reason?


Do the hands replace properly? Do they animate on whatever you have? Do they look functional?

If so, congratulations. You're ready to set up the mod file.

Unity Exporting

It's time.


Make a prefab, dupe a prefab, whatever - just put something in there.


Add the Skin Content Mod component.


You'll have this, now. It'll be empty, there'll be nothing there - but don't get at it just yet.


The tab that you're doing this in is an inspector- lock it so that it stays on that mod prefab.


On the left, make another inspector, and drag it to the middle window so it replaces the scene.


You will now basically put in what model the skin uses, punch in what materials were used in the exact same order, and tell it where the teamcolor material is.

If you do not have a Teamcolor Material, then just put in -1.

Do this for the Character, Arm, and Leg - what we've done is a 2020 rig.

Once it's all punched in, assuming your tools pack is linked to the executable already - which is probably covered in Steel's guide to modding - you basically just select the mod file, and hit CTRL+E.

This should bundle it up and export it to your RF directory. There, you can test it, and if it works - if it's what you want, and if it's ready - you can publish it on the workshop.

That should more or less cover it.


Other guides exist, like my last one, or the one by Kartoffelov, Creepalot, and Spades.

Troubleshooting

Is your flesh twisted the wrong way? Are limbs rotated ninety degrees one way or the other?

You probably didn't use the right Bone Axis settings in the FBX Armature settings during export.

The Primary Bone Axis must be X, and the Secondary Bone Axis must be -Y.



Is your model all squished and weird?

Under the Transform section of the FBX export, there's a field labeled 'Apply Scalings'. You need to mark it as FBX All.



Are you encountering this weird issue where your hands aren't showing up in first person? Does literally everything but your hands work? Do your hands only show up on certain guns, and not on others?

If so, then make sure to go look at the 'Only Deform Bones' checkbox in the FBX export section, and make sure it's turned on when you export your hands. It's under the Armature section, and directly under those bone axis settings.

What's probably happening is your arms are exporting with more bones and perhaps a different hierarchy that makes them incompatible with most RF guns.

Either way, this fix should be pretty easy.

[Bread]

Very nice guide. Up to date as well

[epichayle]

good guide, i'm just too incompetent to make a skin

[NEW001]

thanks! this guide is a life saver

[Nightmare]

nice

[SOPPI]

helpful

[Striker]

oh hell ya cant wait to burn my house down

[WeeErazer]

chunger

[Andbrew]

WHen are ye gonna start moddin again?