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Blender Editing

Mesh Seperation

Starting out, your Frontier models are going to be joined in odd ways. In order to separate them out, you first need to select your object you want to edit.

Then enter edit mode,

and press "P". Once you press "P" a menu will appear with 3 different options. Select "Separate by Material".

Looks like everything separated out into their own objects, seeing as they're all highlighted with a deep orange color now. From here, exit edit mode.

Here's what the act of separation looks like in the Outliner window. Note how the separated meshes retain the same name as its parent mesh, but add numbers on the end to avoid using identical names.

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Just in case you don't want to do it manually, here are 2 scripts Pitt worked on that automatically separate these meshes, and the the latter will merge similar materials together that use the same textures.

In order to use them, load the script into the Text Editor window in blender and select "Run Script".

No Merge Script: Download

Merge Script: Download

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Tail Reattachment Surgery

All monsters with severable tails load in with them severed. This is incredibly inconvenient, but there is a way to re-attach them.

First, select the armature object, and select the armature tab in the Properties window, as shown.

Then select the "Names" checkbox under the display tab.

This will allow you to see the names of an armature's bones using the model viewer.

From here, navigate to the Outliner window and open up the bone parent/child hierarchy until you find the bones used on the tail.

You may notice, there are 3 extra bones at the bottom here, parented under the Armature bone. These belong to the severed tail, which is currently inside Espinas's body.

From here, we begin the re-attachment process. While the Armature Object is selected, navigate to the model viewing window and switch to "Pose" mode.

Select the first bone of the severed tail (In this case, Bone.045). From here, navigate to the Properties window again, select the Bone Constraint tab, and select "Add Bone Constraint".

From here, begin with selecting "Copy Location". "Copy Rotation" and "Copy Scale" will be applied afterwards.

Here's what a Bone Constraint modifier looks like. You won't need to make any changes aside from the parent object, which would be that box icon right there.

Select the name for the Armature, which would be "Armature.001" in this case.

Then, select the bone you want to be constrained to. In order to keep the tail synced, select "Bone.042".

From here, add the other two modifiers, "Copy Rotation" and "Copy Scale". To speed things up, you can hover over the previous variable lines with your mouse and copy their contents using Ctrl C into the other fields for these new modifiers.

Once you've done this to all 3 tail bones respectively, it syncs up with the main body armature! Voilà!

Emission Materials

The importer for Frontier models makes no distinction between regular solid materials, and ones that should be glowing. You can easily identify textures used as an emission by their distinctive black background, with colored detailing on top. Usually lacking of any alpha channel, editing is required for it to look right in blender.

Here's what the material node setup looks like by default. We're going to edit it to better work for an emission texture.

Here's a simple setup that works better. You may note how the Emission Shader node is added to the Principled BSDF node output before being sent through the Mix shader node for transparency. Since the original texture had no alpha channel, you can use the RGB texture as a mask for the transparency Mix shader.

Without any additional edits, here's how the model appears. Good, but the color is lacking in strength. Lets fix that.

Going back to the Texture node, click the "Color" tab, and select "Non-Color Data" as your color option.

See how those colors pop? Looks much closer to how they appear in-game.

Eye Emissions.

This is a personal thing I enjoy doing, since it helps with the way they look in blender. First, lets identify the object that contains the eye mesh - in this case it's Espinas's head.

From here, select the mesh of the eye. Vertex, edge or face selection work for this.

Then press Ctrl + L. This will automatically select any geometry attached to what you've selected.

Make sure you've selected both eyes, and press "P" once again, this time selecting "Separate by Selection"

In order to make sure its material is kept unique from the mesh you just separated it from, go into the material window and click the number next to its name right here. This will assign a copy of that material to the mesh you currently have selected.

From here, quickly edit the node setup to something like this. That little yellow dot there is called a "Reroute". Very handy for cleaning up node setups.

And Presto! Glowing Eyes!

The glowing effect isn't going to look very good in your default material viewing mode. Quick fix coming right up.

Click on the Viewport Shading tab and select "Rendered".

Aaaand there we go! Looking good!