📥Importing assets into Mutate

Hello, hello, hello! 👋

This is a quick introduction for you to get started importing your own assets into Mutate. It’s super easy so let’s dive in!

1. Simply drag and drop a .vox or .obj file from your documents into the Mutate creation window

WHY CAN I ONLY IMPORT THESE KINDS OF ASSET? Mutate is built on an art style called voxels — think of it as taking square pixels from 2D to 3D. Everything you see and play with in Mutate is created from voxels, and we make a lot of our own assets using a piece of software called MagicaVoxel, which automatically exports creations as .vox files.

2. Once the asset appears onscreen, it’s going to look totally flat and grey, so we need to change its materials in order to spice it up. Select the Visuals tab on the top right, and mess around with assigning colours and textures 🎨

You can speed up texturing by searching material keywords, like ‘metal’ or ‘fabric’

Tip: Some assets only have one material ‘slot’ assigned in the base object — known as colors for .vox, meshes for .obj — so the whole asset will be a uniform colour and texture, whereas others have lots of slots for details you can bring out by choosing all kinds of materials.

3. In the Settings tab, click the Camera icon to create a preview image for your asset. This is so you and everyone else knows what the item looks like when browsing the asset window.

You can now also give your asset a name, description, and appropriate tags, so it can be searched for and found effortlessly.

An asset can be posted in two different ways: Local asset: available only in the community you are currently creating in Public asset: available to anyone using Mutate

When you're ready, simply click 'Save' and that's basically it!

4. Access your newly saved asset from the "Asset Browser"

Tip: Something to note is that each color in your base .vox object will be able to be assigned a unique material in Mutate. However, for an .obj file you only get one material per mesh. Whatever file you import though, you can always edit materials on every single asset in the game whenever you like for maximum customization.