Making Wearables for Decentraland

The Mission

With the recent changes in Decentralnad taking place, now is possible for everyone to make their own wearables!
​
This opens new opportunities to create your own styles or promote your ideas. In this article, we will explain the basic process to create a wearable, rig it and upload it into the Decentraland builder.

Resources

• Blender 2.8 or superior
• Decentraland Builder
• Resources for wereables

Main Parts of the Wearables

---

A wearable is an item of clothing, accesory or body feature, that are used to customized your avatar inside the world of Decentraland. Although there are some wearables that you can use already once you create your account. Now you can create your own custom wearables.
​
However before you proceed in creating your own clothes, you need to know several things. First things first, each wearable is organized in different categories such as:

• Upper and Lower Body
• Feet
• Hat
• Helmet
• Facial Hair
• Head
• suit (lower, upper body and feet together)
• Body Shape (The whole avatar)

​
This wearables can also include accesories, like:
​

• Mask
• Eye wear
• Earring
• Tiara
• Top-head
• Items (held in the avatar hands)

This divides the wearables in different categories, that determines which body part of the avatar will be applied to, some wearables will have to replace others completely to work. The categories that appear in the builder are these:

• Body_shape: Replaces the entire avatar’s body.
• Suit: Replace the avatar’s upper body, lower body, and feet.
• Hat: Replaces the avatar’s hair. For hats that leave some hair exposed, it must be attached to the hair in the mesh to prevent the avatar from going bald whenever they put on their hat.
• Helmet: Overrides the avatar’s entire head, replacing both hair and facial hair.
• Hair: Replaces an avatar’s hat.
• Facial_hair: facial hair won’t replace or override any other wearables.
• Head: which contains Mouth, Eyes and eyebrows

• Upper_body
• Lower_body
• Feet
• Mask: Replaces helmet, tiara, eye_wear and it will override facial_hair.
• Eye_wear: Replaces helmet and mask.
• Earring: Replaces helmet.
• Tiara: Replaces mask and helmet.
• Top_head: This is rendered on the top of an avatar’s hard. For example, an angel’s halo.
• Item: these are rendered within the avatar’s hand.

And last but not for that less important, we have to talk about the limitations for the 3d models and those are:

• No more that 1k triangles per wearable, except in accesories that have to be 500 triangles.
• Two textures per wearable, with a resolution of 512x512

Now we know all of this, we can start creating our own wearables.

Starting to build

---

Once you have clear the division between the parts of the wearables, you can start modeling. In this guide I'm going to do the basic wereables, such as feet, lower body and upper body. So you can know it as a reference, however you can follow this same progress to create all the wearables following the limitations I wrote before.

Before start I recommend to download the basic avatar male and female from the link below, so you have a reference of where to start. Inside you will also find a Blender file with the armature, that we will use later on to rig the models, as well as some references of other wearables.

Wearable Reference Models - Google Drive

Inside the Drive folder and where to find the basic resources

In my case I'm going to download the fbx model of male and female avatar to load them in my maya scene to start modeling, but you can use your prefered 3D software.

Modeling & Texturing

---

In this section on the article I'm going to comment on three ways in which I take on making the wearables together.
​
First one, is taking one part of the model duplicate it, and modify the vertex and faces to create the new model. making sure that connects correctly with the other parts. In this case since I'm making the feet this model can be for male and female, so I only need to make this wearable once.

Making the feet from the base feet of the model.

The second one, is to create the model from zero from a basic shape and model the vertex to create it. In this case the skirt, while I use the female legs as the base the skirt is created from a cylinder, and increase the triangles conforming I'm modeling. Also in this case I create a variant for male avatar, that are pants, following the first method.

Skirt for female avatars

The third one, consist in model the wearable without taking into account the number of tris and when we have the final shape, make a new retopology that fits on the criteria. In my case, I use Zbrush to create the shape of the model and then I make the low poly in Maya. The model of the upper body is the same, but it changes the body shape, so I duplicate the model and change the shape a little to create the variation.

Creating the Upper body jacket

Before talking about the texture, I want to talk a little bit about the materials. There are two basic materials specified on the image. The wearable material is useful if you want to use flat colors while painting your model, but you can change that material for a custom one, in my case I called it Mat_clothes, which I assign it to every model that is going to have a custom texture. While I use the AvatarSkin_Mat to the skin texture. This way when I load the model the skin loads the one from Decentraland.

For the textures, since is such a small resolution texture I recommend to made UVs symmetrical so that the UVs can be a lot of bigger. I don't touch any part of the AvatarSkin material UVs because I can break the texture when loading in Decentraland.
​
For my models I paint them in Substance Painter, and I can only put two textures in the model so I only paint on the Base color channel. Don't forget to change it also in the viewport in Substance to see the final result. Also when you create a new project remember to put the resolution in 512 px.

Painting all the models

Rigging & Exporting

---

Once we have all the models, materials and textures done, is time to rig them and export them in GLB. For that purpose you need to have Blender 2.8 or superior, you can rig the models in other softwares however when exported, the models tend not to work correctly.

First we have to import our model into the scene, armature.blend in the drive folder, if you have modeled it using the original models as a reference you will have not problems in the placement of the model, nevertheless I recommend to apply the transformations on the move and scale.

When I have the transformations applied I rig it selecting the armature and the model, pressing P with automatic weights, check the weights and if necessary correct them.

Finally, it's time to export it. I select the models just in case, click File → Export → GLB. Check apply modifiers, and skinning in the extra options in the exporter.

Then repeat this steps with the rest of the models.

Rigging the model and exportin it from blender

Decentraland Builder

---

Finally when we have, all the models it's time to enter the Builder, so log in your metamask account and then in Decentraland. First we will need to create a new collection that encompasses all af our wearables. Go to collection, press the plus sign and new collection.

From there you are ready to add your items, press add items and drag or select the models, in the new panel that appears we can select the basic options for our wearables. You can select the body shape and select the male or female options and then add the counterpart. Change the name, the rarity which determnines the number of wearables that will be created, and the category that configures which part will replace.

Wearable's menu

On the three dots in the wearable you can add another represantion if you didn't select both.

If you press EDIT, you will enter a menu where you can view the wearable in the avatar, and complete the rest of the options.

You can change the name, add a description and change the category or rarity.

On the three dots, you can add another representation, if you didn't do before, remove from the collection or delete.

If you click on the pencil you can reload the 3D model of the wearable, in case you made some change or correction.

On the overrides section you can add more options to replace or hide. For example on the hat, you have to put hair, helmet. That way when the player loads the hat, it will replace the models that have that category.
​
Finally you can add tags, in order to search your wearables when you mint it.

Once we have all the wearables, we can return to the main menu in the collection. Click on set a price, where we can put a price or make it free, put our address and finally submit it to the curation commite.

Conclusion

---

Here is a general guide that can help you create your own wearables. In the decentraland guides you can find more information about the curation process, and the textures of the skin and the standard texture, if you need them.

I believe the builder is a great tool to check this wearables, and test them pretty fast. With this models I think it is time to say; have fun and can't wait to see what you make.
​
See you!

​Laura Usón

​​​3D ARTIST

​Passionate about videogames, movies and creatures. artist by day and superhero at night

CENT