When the library is not enough

Everything you have exported so far, someone else decided the shape of. The knobs are generous, but they are a menu, and eventually you want something that is not on it.

This lesson opens the graph behind the sword you already know. You are not going to build anything. You are going to read it, and then change one thing.

Follow one knob#

Open Meteor Sword and switch to the node view.

It looks like a lot. It is not: it is the same asset you have been adjusting, laid out as the steps that made it. Find the knob panel entry for Crack Gap, then find the node it belongs to in the graph.

Follow its wire. It goes to exactly one place, and that place is the Fracture that pushes the shards apart. Every control you used in the last two lessons is a number sitting somewhere in here, wired into one step of the build.

That is the whole idea behind the panel. Someone built this graph, chose which numbers were worth exposing, and named them. The panel is the short version of the graph.

Read it backwards#

Start at the end instead. Find the node the whole graph feeds into, the Group Output, and work upstream, asking one question at each step: what did this receive, and what did it do to it?

You will pass a scatter of points, a hull wrapped around them, a fracture that split the result into shards. That is the entire sword in one sentence, and now you have seen the four or five nodes that carry it.

You do not need to know what every node does. You need to know that the graph reads in one direction and each step changes what came before it.

Change something no knob could#

Now make a change that was never on the menu.

Find the Set Material that colours the glowing core and change it to a colour you prefer. No knob offered you that, because the person who built this graph did not expose it, and it took you one click to do anyway.

Then try one more: find the Transform near the end and change its rotation. The whole sword tips, and every knob still works, because you changed a step in the build rather than breaking it.

Keep your own copy#

Save it under your own name.

You now have a variant that belongs to you: the original demo is untouched in the library, and your version has the change in it. Export it the way you exported the others and the change comes along.

This is the honest description of what the library is. It is not a catalogue of finished things, it is a set of starting points that happen to be finished.

Where this goes next#

Between the three lessons you have just done, you can get an asset, steer it, open it and adjust it. That covers most of what most people want.

If you want to make something that is not a version of something else, that is the building track, and it starts by stacking three snowballs.