One graph, many assets

A sword is useful. Twelve swords that belong together is a weapon rack, and you are about to get one without adjusting anything by hand.

Open Meteor Sword again, the same demo you exported last time.

Roll it#

Find the dice button at the top of the knob panel and press it.

Every control moves at once, each one landing somewhere inside the range the asset guarantees. The rock reshapes, the break pattern changes, the glow shifts. You get a new sword, and it is a sword rather than a mess, because none of those ranges can produce something broken.

Press it again. And again. Each roll is a different weapon from the same graph.

Keep the parts you liked#

Rolling everything at once is blunt. Usually one thing is right and the rest is not.

Next to each knob is a lock. Find a roll where the blade's proportions are what you want, lock those controls, then press the dice again. The locked knobs hold while everything else moves around them.

This is the loop most people settle into: roll until something is close, lock what works, roll the rest. You are steering rather than deciding.

Seeds are how you get back#

Two of these controls are seeds: Meteor Seed and Break Seed. A seed is not a shape, it is a number that picks one. Seed 41 gives the same rock every time you type 41, on any machine, forever.

That is worth knowing for two reasons. You can go back to a variant you liked by writing its seed down, and you can hand someone a seed instead of a file.

Set Meteor Seed to a few different whole numbers and watch the rock change while everything else holds still.

Export a set#

Now do this three or four times: roll, adjust anything you want, export.

You end up with a handful of files that are obviously siblings. They came from the same graph, so they share proportions, silhouette and material, which is exactly what makes a set look deliberate rather than assembled from separate downloads.

Give them names as you go. The variety in a rack of weapons is not usually a modelling problem, it is a patience problem, and this is where the tool takes that off you.

Where this goes next#

Between them, the last two lessons are most of what a lot of people need: pick an asset, steer it, export as many as you want.

The one thing you cannot do yet is change what an asset is made of. Crack Gap moves the shards apart, but nothing in the panel makes the blade longer or gives it a different guard. For that you have to open the graph, which is the next lesson and much less frightening than it sounds.