Unity Asset Modding?

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ddmx
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Unity Asset Modding?

Post by ddmx »

A question for people familiar with modding 'sharedasset' files from games created with Unity:

Using the Unity Assets Bundle Extractor (UABE), I export a singular mesh file as '.dae'

When opening in Blender, there are several separate objects with their own unique UV, materials, etc, in the single '.dae' file.

The process is then, import dae file into Unity empty project > build project > open shared assets file in UABE > export raw. It's at this point that you would then replace the mesh file in the original shareassets file with the newly created mesh file that you've modified.

That catch... when I build the Unity project, my dae object opens in UABE with 1 mesh file for every distinct object in the dae file. The original game asset exported as 1 mesh file which contained a single dae with all of the model objects.

May not be the best explanation, but I imagine if you know what I'm talking about then you may be familiar. My only thought is that the developers are grouping the mesh objects in the game programmatically for performance benefits (have read a little on this) but I'm unable to reproduce.

Any help is appreciated!

David
LKR47
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Re: Unity Asset Modding?

Post by LKR47 »

I'll do some testing on some of my Unity builds and see if I can give you some insight. There might be some sort of mesh obfuscation going on as that's getting more popular in the Unity community. I was able to stop UABE from switching out models in the past but it has probably gotten a little more sophisticated.
What game are you trying to do the mesh replacement for? I can try to look into some of their practices.
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ddmx
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Re: Unity Asset Modding?

Post by ddmx »

Thanks.

The game is Sailaway 2. The dae files also point to a tool called Assimp which was used to export the meshes. This is odd to me because I downloaded that open source software and it's janky as all get out. Maybe it's just a way to hide the meshes being created in a torrented software for a commercial game.

Anyways, I tried this in Unity and didn't have any luck but my implementation could have been wrong. There are also free and paid tools that appear to do this same thing.
https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReferenc ... eshes.html
cpt_Slow
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Re: Unity Asset Modding?

Post by cpt_Slow »

I'm afraid I can't help with your original question but in regards to Assimp, my bet is that it's part of a custom pipeline the studio uses. Not the actual application per se but the Assimp libraries. I've used the libraries myself in my own data pipeline tools at work because it's a quick and robust way to support a whole heap of formats. They are potentially using that to group the meshes and export a single dae file as you can have multiple meshes in a single scene.
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