Costume & Decal Instruction

Here you’ll find all the technical information needed to create your own in-game item. Creation of a successful item also requires well designed assets that match our specifications. Click some of the links to see how we create our goggles, hats, and decals.

Guides

• Item Texture Guide
• Dye Map Guide
• Normal Map Guide
• Placement Guide

Examples

• Character Base Mesh Examples
• Decal Examples
• Goggle Examples
• Hat Example

Decal Requirements

• Submissions must be in .png
• Images are 1024 x 1024 pixels, 72 dpi.
• Designs should be 80% white grayscale images. Decals work as a cutout and all pixels must be either 100 percent opaque or fully transparent. The design’s edge pixels may be anti aliased, meaning that these pixels will fall somewhere beetween 100 percent opaque and fully transparent. This exception is for edge pixels only. Interior fill must be 100 opaque, 80% white.
• In favor of consistency and overall aesthetics, we do not support colored images at this time. Images submitted with color will not be considered.

General Requirements

• Geometry budgets listed are in triangles
• Mesh submissions must be .obj
• Texture submissions must be in .tga

Geometry Requirements

• Every customization item has different geometry budgets. Goggles should posses no more than 5000 tris, and hats must have fewer than 8000 tris (including hair geo).
• Hard edges and smoothing groups can be used, but best kept to a minimum as they add to an items vertex count. Items are best authored with softened normals while edge definition is defined through the normal map.
• Items do not support double-sided rendering, with the exception of the character’s hair. All other geometry will only render on the side possessing the normal; it is best to add a backside to the geometry where necessary.

UV & Texture Requirements

• Hats and goggles have texture sizes of 512 x 512 pixels. Even if maps are authored at a higher resolution, checking the resolution at 512 x 512 ensures the item will display its best within the game.
• Overlapping UVs are recommended for symmetrical or repeating parts of the model.
• Shells and texture seams should be kept to a minimum as they contribute to the objects vertex count. Shells and should also be at least a 3 pixel buffer between other shells and the texture edge to prevent color mixing during down sampling.

There are a few rules the textures must follow:

• All textures maps must be present: color, normal, dye, tone
• All textures must be the same resolution for the particular item
• Color textures can be 24 or 32 bit in the case of hair
• At the moment, we do not support transparent materials on character items with the exception of character hair
• The normal texture is a 32 bit image, RGB channels are reserved for normal direction information and the alpha channel is the items specular map.

Overly complex designs with a high detail frequency are not desirable in game. If you cannot see the desired detail in the character viewer, it is probably not worth doing. It’s also a good idea to avoid using pure white or black values, as the in-game lighting will always push your texture in one of these directions naturally.

Materials