¶ 1. Find assets to use in your mod
There are plenty of places to find free and high quality assets for personal use (which modding is, as long as you’re not asking for money for your mods).
- https://www.fab.com/ - great for Unreal Engine, since you can import whole packs of assets with everything already set up.
- Selecting Unreal Engine in formats will show fully set up assets and packs that you can import and instantly use. Other formats will require manual setup.
- https://www.turbosquid.com/
¶ 2. Import new assets into modkit
Note: It’s a good practice to keep all of your mod assets in its dedicated folder: “/Game/Mods/YourMod/”
- In a Content Browser, navigate to the folder where you want to import your assets.
- Click Import and select all the files
- They might be spread across multiple folders like Source and Textures.
- It can be useful to unpack all of them in the same folder and select all at once when importing.
- Ignore the import settings, unless you know what you’re doing and click Import again.
The asset used for this guide is here:
https://www.fab.com/listings/a9e9421f-085e-4c8e-aadb-f72cc2502d8b
¶ 2. Set up the material(s)
This step depends heavily on what assets you're importing and the way the artist created them. Some have extremely basic material setup and come with materials, where all it takes is dragging textures into a window and some are more involved, requiring some knowledge of how materials work overall.
You can find official tutorials to learn what materials are and how to use them here: https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/unreal-engine-materials-tutorials
- The asset used in this tutorial didn’t come with a material, so we’ll need to create it by right clicking and selecting Material.
- Name it and open.
- Drag and drop all the textures into the opened window.
- Connect all the textures into the output pins on the right.
- You can almost always tell which texture is intended for which pin by their names.
- Click Save and Apply.
- You should see the preview sphere get the new material applied.
¶ 3. Apply the material
- Open the asset (static mesh).
- In Details select the materials for each element.
- Save the asset.
¶ 4. Adjust the asset
Every asset varies in its setup from one artifact to another, so it’s often advisable to adjust them before use.
Some things to look out for are:
- Pivot point - most often
- Scale
- Rotation
- Click on Selection Mode and switch to Modeling.
- Drag and drop your static mesh asset into the level and click on it.
- Click XForm -> Edit Pivot
- Adjust it so the pivot is roughly where the handle is with the X axis pointing at the weapon tip.
- Click Accept.
If you need to do other simple changes like scale or rotation:
- Click XForm -> Transform.
- Modify the asset in any way you want.
- Click Complete.
- Click Bake Transform.
- Accept.
¶ 5. Set up sockets
Sockets are used for attaching assets to each other, specify points for things like spawning particles, and so on. In weapons, sockets define where characters grip the weapon, how it’s attached when sheathed, displaying weapon trails, and establishing actual weapon length.
- Open your static mesh asset.
- Click on Socket Manager
- If you don’t see it next to Details, you can enable it in the Window menu.
- Add 4 sockets with the following names:
- RightGrip - On the handle, where character holds the weapon
- Carry - Where weapon will be attached when sheathed
- Trail - Usually around the middle of the weapon to display the trail when swinging
- weapon_tip - At the very tip of the weapon
- Once the rest of the weapon is set up and usable, it’s a good practice to come back to sockets and adjust them as you test your new weapon.
¶ 6. Set up a weapon template
Weapon template is where you define what the weapon is, which mesh it uses, and all the parameters needed to use it in-game.
- Right click where you’d like to create the template and select Blueprint.
- Choose MistWeaponItemTemplate from the list.
- Open the new file and start filling it out.
- It’s best to open an existing weapon to check what values can be kept default and what should likely be changed, and also to see which options are used across different items of the same type.
- Alternatively, you can always copy an existing template and edit it.
- Some important fields are:
- Name
- Category
- Sound Category
- Tier
- Icon
- Max Stack Size
- Volume
- Mesh
- Activated Mesh
- Sheath Mesh
- Max Durability
- All the damage fields
- Carry Type
- Phys Material
- All the combat parameters
- Save the template.
- if you’re missing an important value, you’ll see an error message explaining what you need to do.
- A broken version of the weapon will be automatically generated. Make sure to save it and resave the template.
You can test your weapon with a cheat:
- Press ~
- Type: GiveItem ItemTemplateName 1
¶ 7. Adding a crafting recipe
- In the Crafting category of the template, click Add Element under Instanced Recipes.
- In the dropdown, pick Mist Item Recipe.
- Fill out the recipe that you want:
- Select a category, which decides where the item is crafted.
- Add inputs, which will be used for crafting, and their amounts.
- Set crafting time
- Set which skill is required to craft it (if any)
- Set output, which is how many items will be crafted at a time
- Skip the technology for now
Congrats! Now your new item can be crafted and is fully usable as a weapon!
