To move an object, use the red, green and blue arrows for axis-locked movement, and the white square in the middle for screen space movement. To rotate an object, use the red, green and blue circles for locked-axis rotation, and the larger white circle for screen space rotation. Clicking in the empty space of the viewport will drop your current selection. Select an object by clicking on it in the viewport or in the scene list to pop up the widget. Objects can be moved and rotated with the universal widget. You can also disable back face culling for meshes that need to be double sided. If you created your model in one program, but baked it in another (like xNormal) make sure to select the tangent space of the baker. If your asset uses a baked normal map, select the appropriate tangent space for the application that you used to bake your normal map. In the mesh properties you will find a tangent space drop-down. Only one material can be applied per mesh, so make sure to separate objects that require different materials in your 3D application before exporting. These can be re-arranged anywhere in the scene.

Multiple objects or mesh chunks will load as child objects of the mesh group. A UV channel is no longer a requirement (though UV-less models can only use simple parametric materials), which makes Toolbag 2 a great platform for quick preview of high-polygon models. The OBJ loader is very fast which makes it the best choice for high-resolution models. Very dense meshes (millions of polygons) are supported. Most common 3D application formats are supported, such as: Meshes can be loaded from the menu by selecting “Add” -> “Mesh” (Ctrl+B). Materials, however, will need to be re-created for. mesh files created with Toolbag 1 can be loaded, but not saved out of Toolbag 2. Textures, however, are saved as references to external image files. The scene file format (.tbscene) now saves all objects, including meshes, materials, cameras, and lights. Protip: Parent a dynamic light to the sky object to make it follow the sky rotation (Shift+LMB). This can be very useful if you want one object to stay with another. For instance, you can parent a mesh or light to another mesh by dragging object A onto object B. You can also parent most object types to other objects. If no objects are selected, an empty group item will be added to the scene which you can drag objects into. Group objects by making a selection (Ctrl or Shift+click in the scene list or Ctrl+click in the viewport to select multiple objects) and clicking “Add” -> “Group” from the menu, or press Ctrl+G. Click on the eyeball icon to toggle visibility per object. Rename an object by double clicking on it in the scene list. Objects can be rearranged in the scene list with a simple drag and drop interface.

The scene system is new with Toolbag 2 and supports multiple objects including groups, meshes, cameras, and lights. There is much more hidden beneath surface, so be sure to experiment with everything that you find.

This article is meant to highlight the major points as a lot that has been added or changed since Toolbag 1. This tutorial will guide you through many of the awesome new features that we’ve added to Toolbag 2 to get your art imported and looking pretty in record time.

Hexels 2 import into gaming engine