Creating Blade-and-Whip Skins

With the way our melee weapons are set up, we are able to do complete mesh swaps for them per weapon type! This lets our players use these skins for a variety of melees, unlike our weapon-exclusive primary and secondary skins.

Blade and Whips are one of the more complex melee weapon types, and as a result it needs its own guide to make creation and implementation as easy as possible!

Technical Guidelines

Blade and Whip weapons are made up of 3 parts: the sword, the chain, and the hook.

The Sword can have one point of articulation -- this is optional, but some melee combos do make use of it. The movement mechanism should be limited to one moving part, with the goal of creating a shearing motion like the Lacera or Mios.

The Hook is held in the off-hand during the idle animations. This piece should be small enough at its connection point to the chain to be able to plug into the sword handle.

The Chain mesh cannot be edited but can be retextured.

Technical Specifications

• Triangle budget: 7500
• Maps: Authored at 2048 x 1024. In-game will be 1024 x 512, so please keep this in mind with the fidelity of your details.
• Requires one full set of textures (both shoulders share the same texture set) as per our texturing guide here.

Some tips:

• Keep the original model visible as you work on your concept. You will need to have the cord and blade in the same positions and be at the same scale, so design with those constraints in mind.
• If you want to add a special scrolling texture to your emissives, you need to provide us with the file!
• For custom FX, please make sure it’s set up on a separate mesh that fits within the triangle budget, with its own material set/UV unwrap.
• You can take your piece and change the faction and art style quite heavily.

Checklist:

Prior to submission, please refer to the handy checklist below to make sure your Whip skin meets all the TennoGen criteria: