Creating a skin

Contents

How to create a skin

This will cover the basics of how to create your skin from installing the software needed, editing and viewing your skin in-game.

Helpful Links

Helpful links will be a collection of useful sites people have used to help them create skins.

Setup

Software

  • Blender
  • Asset Studio

Blender

Blender can be downloaded from their website or steam.

Asset Studio

You can download Asset Studio from AppVeyor , then just extracting the zip and running the exe will start up the application.

Extracting the planes

For this, we will be extracting the AV-42C but the names and steps will be the same for any other plane. You'll be using Asset Studio for this section.

Once Asset Studio is open you want to open the file resources.assets which is located in VTOLVR > VTOLVR_Data > resources.assets.

Once it's finished opening, you'll want to search for the name of the vehicle you want to create a skin. It may take a few presses of the Enter button to find it. 

VTOL4 = AV-42C
FA-26B = F/A-26B
SEVTF = F-45A

When you have found it, select the checkbox and press Model > Export selected objects (merge). This will export it as an fbx and the textures used by that model.

I would recommend exporting this into a new folder as it creates all the texture files as well. (Example of VTOL4 exported below)

If you open blender and import the model (File > Import > FBX), the final result will look similar to this.

There is a downside to this export process. As we are exporting it from a Unity prefab there is a lot of junk which we don't need such as the user interface on the plane and empty game objects. You can delete these to give you a clear view of the model or leave them in and just zoom in, don't worry if you break the model, you won't be using this for publishing your skin and you can just reimport the fbx.

Once you're happy with it, I would recommend saving the blender file so every time you don't have to keep deleting the junk off it.

Seeing your skin in-game

To view your skin in the game, you'll want to create a folder inside of your skins named the name what you want your skin to be called in-game.
Then you need to place a preview image with you can view before loading the skin. This is named 0.png, 1.png or 2.png which link to the vehicle. 

0.png = AV-42C
1.png = F/A-26B
2.png = F-45A

Then you'll want to name the texture to the material you'll want to change, in most cases, this is renaming the tex_ at the front to mat_ and then it should work. If you are unsure of what to name it, try looking at someone else skin for the same vehicle or feel free to ask in the modding discord.