Models
This guide will navigate you through how to edit Legend and Anniversary models, or make model replacements.
The guide will focus on lara.drm from Tomb Raider: Anniversary, however everything is applicable to any other Model type DRM.
This is what you will see upon importing lara.drm. Let's take it slowly and learn about the model components together. You might have some questions like, what are those weird spheres and pointers around Lara's body?
Those components are called HInfo, and they are used to store some important data about the model on a per-bone basis. All of these can be edited or created from scratch by selecting a bone in Pose Mode or Edit Mode.
This can be used for a multitude of purposes. For Lara, they are used to dictate the parts of her body that will actually trigger the game's signals, and also the parts of her body that can cause damage to enemies (For example, Lara's foot has an HSphere to cause damage when kicking - which is unused in Anniversary)
This is used by the game to define where things like weapons, gear, or items are stored on the model. These are used to place Lara's weapons, grapple hook and breathing effect when in snow. She has some additional HMarkers on her breasts - though their functionality remains unknown to me.
This is mostly used by the game to define a collision. For example, they are used by the pulleable platforms in Greece to allow Lara to actually stand on them.
This is mostly used by the game to define a damage collision. For example, It is used on the T-rex in Anniversary to make Lara take damage if she gets too close to it.
Alright then, let's get to it. Let's start by learning how to simply edit Lara's model and export it back to the game.
- The game does NOT support any more than 2 weights per vertex, neither for Old Gen or Next Gen
- The limit of vertex count for one full model is 21845 vertices.
Let's just say you want to make Lara's backpack bigger and red. Because... why not? A simple edit to learn how to approach the addon's functionalities.
First of all, you can head over to cdcEditor > Utilities > Toggle Component Visibility. This will hide any high-level asset data like HInfo, Cloth or anything else that's not strictly visual. We're only wanting to make a cosmetic change to Lara's model, so we don't need to tweak any of that.
Use any of your Blender knowledge to make Lara's backpack bigger. What I'm going to do is the following:
- Select Lara's model, head to Edit Mode, press 3 to switch to face selection mode, and select a random polygon of Lara's backpack
- In the Material Properties tab, Blender will have automatically selected the backpack's material for you, so click Select
- This will select every face that's using that material. Unselect anything not related to Lara's backpack by going in Wireframe mode with Z, hold Ctrl and include the geometry you desire to unselect in the bounding box
- Now hold Shift and also include the backpack's straps in the selection
- Now simply use S to scale the backpack up, or make any other modification you wish
Great job. Now it definitely looks big enough to store all those medipacks.
...But our job is not done! We also wanted to make it red, remember?
In order to achieve that, we actually don't have to touch anything related to textures. We can use vertex colors.
Vertex colors are prominently used in Legend and Anniversary to light and color models and levels.
The addon is able to import and export those, which means you can play around with them to your liking.
So, with the backpack's geometry still selected (however, unselect the metal holders! We don't want to color those), head to Vertex Paint and press 2, so that we will only color our selected geometry.
Select any shade of red that you like (or any color that you like) and simply paint on the model.
Awesome! We now have our fancy red backpack, ready to be exported to the game. With Lara's model selected, head over to File > Export > TRLAU Export, select the mods folder and hit the Export button.
And here we go! Our fancy red backpack is in the game!