Creating a Modular Replaceable Character

Create your Replacement Item

Duplicate one of the prefabs inside of the character that you will be replacing. In this case we are replacing the Synty characters from the City character set. You want to select an item that is skinned to the skeleton that the characters avatar is built on. The item you are replacing should be skinned to a similar skeleton. Watch the video below on how to create this.

Note: Not all Synty models are created equally, some are built on different skeletons and some have more or less bones. The Apoc has a Jawbone that is not present in most of the others, if you have the apoc set it is better to use this as a base since it has this extra bone.

 

Once this has been created you can then create your Modular Replacement items which will use this location you just created.

 

 

Create your Replacement item where the Full Model Replacement is the prefab you want to change too. The system will first look for the item internally and then replace it with the external item if that cannot be found. Name the item the same thing as the internal name. In this example here, a replacement was created for the Character Biker 01 in the Synty prefab folder. Even though our model starts with this, once the original skin has been changed, it cannot be switched back unless there is a Replacement item for it.

Under Replacement Items, select the Full Body Replacement option and add in your model to the Full Model Replacement field. 

You can also add in the text value for the internal model, if for some reason the system is unable to determine the model that is supposed to be used from the replacement field. This is shown below in the model as an internally available mesh.

 

 

 

 

Once your items have been created add all of the replacement items to the list as follows.

 

 

 

You can also use the Atavism Toolbox to create a series of items for replacement. This will create a full body replacement, which can then be altered to add additional items as needed. We are unable to generate items for specific body replacements due to the complexity of the requirements for this process. In this example, the Element 0 and 1 are commented on the left, the output of clicking the button is in the middle with Element 0’s and 1’s output being in the same folder.

 

 

Replacement Item Renaming

During the game play, the replacement item will be replaced with the existing item that is currently loaded in that slot. This way it’s easy to identify the prefab that might have an error while loading.

 

Modular Swapping Issues

 

Something to note when using the Synty models for the Modular Swapping, not all the models are the same. Here we are swapping through several hundred In this example you can see me cycling through a ton of models, at some point there is one that is weirdly deformed and then some that seem to be stuck when I click. In the example of the deformed items, the skeleton that is deformed has an additional bone that does not exist in the other model skeletons. This causes the system to try to target a null item and creates the weirdness seen below. The easiest solution to this is to start with the model that has the extra bone in it. In this case, start with the Apoc character prefabs to have the extra bone available.