This tutorial might look long, but adding models to the sandbox is a fairly trivial task once you’ve done it once. It shouldn’t take more than 5 mins. Ive been very verbose in the tutorial because i want it to reach the widest audience. Overall it’s a 3 step process:

Find the model you want to add Import the model to unity Export the model and a config file to the sandbox

I’m not going to cover 1, because it really varies greatly depending on the type of model you have. I will write a tutorial on where to get models and how to convert them effectively. I’m also only going to cover the simplest part of 3, because again it’ll get more complex depending on our model.

Before we start, software you will need:

Unity (https://store.unity.com/download?ref=personal)

Unity Asset Bundle demo (https://bitbucket.org/Unity-Technologies/assetbundledemo/downloads)

Some kind of a text editor. I personally use visual studio which comes with Unity as it formats XML for me.



You will need the model you want to add in either FBX or DAE format. Almost all the various model formats convert into those standards, so it shouldn’t be a limiting factor. For this tutorial I’m going to use the actual D.VA game model from overwatch, which is obviously completely SFW(this is the XPS model converted to FBX using blender).

1) Open up unity, create a new project. Your screen should look something like this:

Go into the menu Assets > Project Settings > Player. Then scroll down to the Rendering settings and select ‘Virtual Reality Supported’ on and set Stereo Rendering Model to 'Single Pass’.





2) Copy the model file+textures into the project asset directory. The model file structure probably looks like this, it’s safe to just drop this entire thing into unity.

3) Unity will chug a bit and import the model. It may ask you if you want to fix the normal texture, select fix now(looks like this:)

4) Now you should have a directory in unity containing your model, the hierarchy probably looks like this.

Go into the Model directory and select your model. This brings up the inspector panel on the right for your model importer, looks like this:

5) Select the model tab on the inspector and change the ‘keep quads’ value to ticked.

6) Goto the rig panel and click the animation type drop down. Select humanoid and press apply. The game will try and figure out what the humanoid model looks like for this rig and set it. Sometimes unity gets this wrong, but i’ll cover how to fix that in another tutorial. For now if you get a tick next to configure you’re good(ish).

7) Now we have to fix the materials. Drag the model you’ve selected into the scene window. Change her position to 0,0,0. Then select the model in the left handle panel and press F to focus on it. Now zoom in. You may want to change to orthographic view for this as it’s easier(done by pressing the square in the middle of the arrows in the view window).

8) You may find your model looks a bit weird, like this bald headed DVa.

This is usually because unity is taking a guess about how your materials are setup. I’m going to be very lazy and just gloss over how to fix materials, its a huge topic and something that will require its own tutorial. For Dva, i’m just going to open the materials directory. Select all her materials and give them the same values.

9) Now Dva looks a bit more like herself, but she’s got this weird green suit on.

This is because one of the materials is actually transparent. So i need to fix that too. Like this:

I’d advise everyone to learn and understand how materials work and how to edit them. Unity have loads of good tutorials on this. And frankly just go play, worst case you can just create a new project and start again.

10) Ok that’s the hard stuff done. Now we need to put DVa into an asset bundle. We do this by selecting dva in the assets directory, selecting the drop down under her inspector window and writing in an asset bundle name.. like say dva. You don’t have to add the materials unless you’ve made new ones which aren’t linked to the models. Unity will figure it out for you.

11) Now find where you downloaded the asset bundle demo, unzip it and find the directory called ‘AssetBundleManager’ and drag the whole thing into your unity asset directory.

Unity will chug and do a few things. But now you have a new menu under Assets called asset bundles.

12) Select the Dva model and pick ‘build asset bundle’ from selection. Unity will start a progress bar and begin doing things. It’s effectively compiling all the model data into an archive(bundle) that can be used within any unity game. The bundle will be located in the project directory(the one above assets) in a folder called asset bundles.

13) Final step, we have to write a config for this model so the sandbox knows where to look for stuff. The configs are XML based and for a basic model we need to very little. We need a :

Name, what should we call this rig in the game? DVa

Bundle, this is the bundle we just made, lets assume we put it into the rigs folder in the game so the value is rigs/dva

Model, the name of the model file itself, in this case dva.fbx.

Mesh, this is a tougher one. It’s the main mesh of the model. to find it select the model twice in the view menu and the game will tell you which mesh you have selected. In this case dva

LocalScale, this is when models are very large or small. DVa is already at human scale so it’s 1.0

Gender, she’s female.

That’s it. Put the bundle in the rigs directory and the rig config in the streaming assets directory and start the game. DVa should be waiting for you in VR. This is the most basic model import tutorial. There’s a ton of other things that you can do which i’ll cover in later tutorials. However, if you’re curious take a look at the configs of some of my other models.

p.s i’ve not provided the dva bundle for download as it belongs to blizzard and they tend to get upset when their models are used for anything that looks like porn.