Basic YDR Creation Tutorial

Franklin has just modeled himself a beautiful vacation cottage in Blender. Now he wonders, "HOW DO I GET MY BEAUTIFUL COTTAGE IN LOS SANTOS?" Drawables allow him to do this.

In this tutorial, we will create a YDR from this cottage model

1. Converting the model to a Drawable.

To do this, we will open the Sollumz Tools > Drawable Tools > Create Drawable Objects, select the model, and click the Create Drawable button.

2. Converting Materials

Sollumz will be able to automatically convert most basic shader node setups.

If not, the materials that were applied will be deleted and replaced with "default" shaders. If you want to use these shaders you can assign the textures in the shading tab. If not, you will have to use the Create Shader Tool. Select the object, then select the material you would like to create, and finally click Create Shader.

Next, go into the Shading tab and assign the textures you would like to use accordingly. (note: Codewalker will not import any other image file format other than .DDS)

To edit the shaders parameters, go into the material properties tab and open the Sollumz dropdown menu.

To make the textures embedded, go into the material properties tab and then open the Sollumz dropdown menu. From here you can select each image node and enable the embedded property as well as adjust any embedded texture properties (note: most of the embedded texture properties will be overwritten with the exact data on import with Codewalker).

3. Apply all drawable extras (LOD level, LOD distances, vertex colors)

You might also want to edit some other properties. You can adjust the LOD levels by selecting the Drawable object, clicking the object properties tab, and opening the Sollumz dropdown menu.

You can also adjust the LOD level of the object by clicking on the Drawable Models underneath the Drawable object. The LOD level of a Drawable Model will apply to all of its child geometries. While it is possible to have multiple Drawable Models with the same LOD level, it is not recommended.

If you want to change the vertex colors to a custom color, you can either use Blender's default vertex color paint mode (note: the conversion tool will create a vertex color layer if one is not already on your model). If you would like to just paint all of the vertex colors a single color, you can also use the Vertex Painter tool

3. Export

This is all that's required to create a Drawable in Sollumz! Congratulations on making it to the end!

4. Troubleshooting

Before you begin

• Update to the latest version of sollumz

• Update to the latest version of code walker (The discord one not the 5 mods)

• You are using the latest stable version of blender

Exporting

RuntimeError: Error: Tangent space computation needs an UVMap. "null" not found aborting

• A mesh with no face or your mesh has no UV map.

• Check all the geometry objects to make sure they have polygons, and that there's no floating verts or edges with no faces.

No object of type: drawable or bound or drawable dictionary to export

• Your hierarchy is wrong and should look like this Drawable Dictionary > Drawable > Drawable Model > Geometry

• To solve this make sure you used the drawable tool in sollumz menu

Runtime error Operator bpy.ops.object.select.all.poll(). Context is incorrect

• You have to be in object mode when exporting.

AttributError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'sollum type'

• Apply a sollumz shader to your object.

Code walker

The model can be previewed with rpf explorer but is invisible in a code walker project

• Names shouldn't have any capital letters. Especially materials and Asset names.

• Textures must be exported to .dds format. Gimp, photoshop and paint.net have an exporter for that.

• Texture sizes must a power of 2: 16, 32, 64, 128, 256...

The archetype is not found in code walker

• Import the .ytyp files alongside your .ydr .

• All the files you need must be in an RPF archive.

The model does not have texture when I import it in code walker

• Make sure your texture is set to embedded in the material.

• Make sure you have a folder with the same name as your model (Avoid capital letters). It should be autogenerated when you create your drawable object but if you changed names you also need to rename it.

• If you don't want to embed it in your YDR file you need to create a ytd file in your RPF archive and manually linked. In that case you will also want to add a texture dictionary in your ytyp file.