Animating StS2 models with Blender ‐ Introduction

Welcome!

This guide aims to help with setting up assets for custom characters and enemies in Blender. It will not cover every detail of how to draw, rig, animate, or generally “make stuff”. Instead, it focuses on the broader workflow and the technical details that are useful to know when preparing assets for the game.

This means you will need to learn the basics of those tools on your own, but there are plenty of guides online, and you really do not need a deep understanding of everything. A lot of it can be looked up as you go.

This guide specifically covers the workflow I used, but there are a lot of alternative approaches you can take. As long as Godot can load your assets, it does not really matter how they are made. You can technically do everything fully within Godot.

Even if you decide not to follow my exact approach, I believe this guide should still contain useful information for anyone looking to get into custom character or enemy models.

Tools Used

• Krita
  Or any other art program of your choice. Ideally, you want something that can export layers or groups into multiple separate images.

• Blender
  Used for rigging and animation. You can skip it if you really want to and do it directly in Godot instead.

• Megadot
  I mean yeah, it is necessary for modding the game, so you should already have it.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
   The page you are reading right now. Covers the goal of the guide, the tools used, and the basic idea behind the workflow.

2. Planning Your Asset and Technical Constraints
   Covers how to prepare your character or enemy before bringing it into Blender. This includes canvas size, splitting the art into parts, deciding what needs to move, keeping texture sizes reasonable, and avoiding unnecessary complexity.

3. Rigging and Animating in Blender
   Covers importing image parts as planes, setting up materials, organizing the model, rigging parts to bones, creating basic animations, and dealing with common Blender-specific issues.

4. Optional Helper Scripts
   Covers optional Blender helper tool which can make some parts less annoying.

5. Setting Up the Godot Scene
   Covers bringing the exported asset into Godot / Megadot, checking that textures and animations work correctly, and preparing the scene for use in-game.

6. Troubleshooting
   Not made yet, plant to add a list of common issues/jank i ran in to

Basic Workflow

The workflow covered by this guide is roughly:

1. Draw the character or enemy in separate parts.
2. Export those parts as transparent images.
3. Import the images into Blender as flat planes.
4. Set up materials and transparency.
5. Rig the planes using bones.
6. Animate the character or enemy.
7. Export the result.
8. Import and test it in Megadot.
9. Fix whatever inevitably breaks.
10. Repeat until it works in-game.

This workflow is mostly based around simple 2D cutout-style animation. Most parts are treated as flat image planes that rotate, move, or scale. More advanced deformation, like bendy robes, ribbons, tails, or tentacles, are possible, but it require bit more setup in Blender and wont be covered in this guide.

If this is your first time making a custom character or enemy asset, I strongly recommend keeping the first version simple. Get a basic model moving in-game first, then worry about polish and extra details.