A pile of suggestions needed for Tower unite Workshop

Suggestions Workshop Feature Suggestions
1

So me and alot of other model uploaders have been kinda tired and frustrated of the tower unite model uploading, so here is a few suggestions / requests that we can want and need.

  1. better shader support or atleast proper full bright texture option that doesn’t blow out the texture.

  2. Custom armature support of proportional sliders that allow for a wider range of a model shapes with out janky rigging.

  3. a better way to handle how texture work ingame and normal map support for models. as far as I can tell, normal maps are not currently supported in tower unite.

  4. a proper rework of importing models that gets rid of the extra verts that get added on upon import.

  5. custom collisions for prop imports that you can set up yourself, far too often the collisions are broken on custom workshop props, making them unusuable.

  6. Dynamic bone support of some kind would be greatly appreciate but not required.

  7. I hate to dread back on previous points but please for the love of god give us more shaders, the current toon shader sucks.

P.S People often say the reason for the lack of custom armature is the animations, but VRCHAT uses the same animations, and it has a far more free system, and frankly, I call BS on engine limitation.
I see no reason why unreal enginge would struggle with atleast custom proportions.

2

VRChat uses Unity, which tolerates dynamic loading much better than Unreal Engine does.

3

Sorry, but which one did you respond to? there was a lot of points.

4

This one.

5

They are supported, just that modern versions of Blender (which I’m assuming you’re using) don’t actually include the normal maps in .dae export. Make sure you’re using the Blender tools here:

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6

Normal maps are supported in Tower, you will need to set them up in Blender properly, but they do in fact function.

This is not possible, as another developer explained in the past, there is a process when importing the model from Blender to in-game which has to recalculate the the verts on the model as it gets converted. Smoothing groups tend to be something that comes up with these calculations. We find the current very limits we have set to be on the high side.

We planned to have a custom collision system for workshop models, but it’s a bit out right now as we’re occupied with the rest of the game. You can create custom collisions, but it’s a strange setup, you’ll have to ask around in the Workshop Discord for advice on best practices.

We are not using the same engine or the same animations as VR Chat. We are on Unreal 4, which is a completely different engine.

Unreal 4 is designed to “cook” content, which means it packs it up in a binary format when importing using their editor tools. There is no official way to dynamically load player models in Unreal 4.

We have created our own proprietary software for importing and managing player models for Unreal 4. As far as I’m aware, we’re the only developers who have pulled off real-time loading of animated player models for the Unreal 4 engine.

The difference between Unreal 4 and Unity is quite vast, but with just player models in discussion, Unity was designed to be real-time and has a better player model importing system than Unreal 4 does. However, Unreal 4 has better other systems. VR Chat uses Unity to import player models. You have to download the Unity editor, then import your player models into Unity, which gives you more control. VR Chat then uses Unity to power how the models are animated within VR Chat.

None of this is feasible with Unreal 4, at least not in real-time. That is why we have made our own custom proprietary method. If we want to add custom animations, we will have to personally code real-time implementation of such a feature, which is currently not within our abilities as a team and would take quite a lot of time.

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7

Aight, so you dont want to change it then or improve it, good to know, thats all I wanted to ask and I got what I came for. :slight_smile:

8

In defense they never said they didn’t want to change or improve it.
In fact if you took 5 seconds to look at their trello you’d see improvements and fixes are planned specifically for workshop.

To do so is a massive undertaking however, one I don’t think you care to understand.
As explained by two developers now, UE4 doesn’t have the ease of support for dynamic models being downloaded and loaded on the fly like Unity does. UE4 does it completely differently, which requires custom work arounds and systems to get it to work, which is what TU does.

To say they don’t want to improve the system they have now, is honestly being quite ignorant.
The rig, and the system to upload models is finnicky and flawed, but can and will be improved so it is easier to work with and has more available for uploaders to work with.
It’s not like the devs are ignoring the issues of the workshop uploader, or the system it uses to load models in. The problems have potential fixes, it’s just finding time to figure out and make them.

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