The software this tutorial will focus on is Blender, a free tool for creating 3D objects, but you should be able to follow all of the necessary steps in any 3D software you’re familiar with.
Download Blender

To start making items, you should already have basic knowledge on the software and how to use it.
If that’s not the case, there is a lot of documentation and tutorials for Blender out there which you can use to gain the basic knowledge you need starting out.
I personally recommend this tutorial series if you have absolutely no knowledge on Blender whatsoever.

To make 3D objects for Toribash, you’ll want to have a base to model on so you don’t have to export the model each time you want to preview it on a Tori.

This .blend file contains a full Tori that you can start modeling your objects around.

For all the non-Blender users, here’s an .obj containing the same Tori model, although if possible, you should preferably use the .blend file.

Mind you that this model has all its joints in the size of their forced state.

When making your model, there are a few things you should look out for, namely the polycount, meaning the number of tris your mesh is made from. To display that data in Blender, right-click the bottom bar and select “Scene Statistics“.



The bar will now display some data, the polycount being labeled as “tris”



(remember to hide any other meshes that are not your item (such as the Tori) so you actually get the polycount of your item alone). You should try keeping the count under 3,000 if possible if you want it to be added to the game, and generally somewhere in that range for it to even work; an object with like 30k tris won't display in game.

Another thing to look out for is inverted normals (the normal of a face specifying its orientation). Blender doesn’t really care and displays faces from both sides, but Toribash only shows the faces in the direction their normals are facing, meaning your object (or parts of it) will be invisible if its normals are the wrong way round. To verify your normal orientations, go to the viewport overlays and check “Face Orientation”.



If any part of your model is red, it means the normals are facing away from you (not good). To fix that, select the red faces in edit mode and press Alt+N > Flip, or alternatively select the whole model and press >Recalculate Outside.



Other than that, you should just keep your Topology Clean And generally avoid N-Gons (Faces with more than 4 Vertices)



(Example of good vs bad Topology)

Now you have a nice looking, semi-low poly Item, but you still don’t know how to preview it in game.
Before you can get to the previewing part however, you must set the origin of your Item to the origin of its corresponding body part, the origin being the orange dot you see when selecting a model which you can view as its center.



If you used the .blend file from earlier on, you only need to select your model and then the object of the body part you want the item to be on and press Ctrl+J. The model will now be joined to the body part, meaning it now also has the origin and name of the body part. Now go into edit mode, select a vert of the body part press Ctrl+L to select it entirely and delete it, so that you have your isolated body part again, only this time with the right name and origin.

→→→→

If you’re not using Blender and the .obj it’s a little more complicated, as you first need to isolate the body part you want from the full Tori mesh, reset its origin to the center point of its geometry and then join your model to it, so it takes the body part's origin. Now just delete the geometry of the body part, and you have your model with the correct origin.

Unlike the Blender users, anyone who uses the .obj also won’t have the right name for their model set automatically, which will be important when exporting the file itself, so here’s a little overview of what all body parts are called as models.



(I removed all the left parts of the model so it’s easier to read, when naming the models yourself and you have a left object just replace the “r_” in the names with “l_”)

The next thing you’ll want to do is reset your model’s position so that its origin is at your world origin. In Blender you do that by pressing Alt+G.
This step might be specific to the software you’re using, but in Blender before exporting you’re going to have to rotate the model on the x-axis by 90 degrees, since that’s just the way Toribash reads models.

Now you can actually export your model. Classically you do that by going to File > Export > Wavefront (.obj),



but I suggest you use this add-on

With this, you’ll be able to export multiple objects at once which will come in handy when you make an item set, why I suggest you use it though is because it will automatically set the exported obj’s name as the name you set for the object in Blender which can save you quite some time, both when exporting multiple and single objects.
You will see, that with this add-on installed, you get a new option in the export types called "Wavefront Batch (.obj)"



Make sure to check the option "Write Normals" which isn't enabled by default when you're exporting objects using this addon.

You’ll want to export the model file into a custom folder, custom folders being the folders where Toribash stores the Item data of all players you encounter. They’re located in your Toribash directory, specifically *\Toribash\custom\[player name].

I recommend making a new custom folder specifically for previewing 3D items. Name the folder something easy to type and remember, like “ItemPreview”
and put this file in there.

This item.dat file stores all data that is not items, textures and sounds, so naturally there’s going to be a lot of stuff in there. The only thing that matters for this tutorial though are the OBJ lines, but that’s something we’re going to work with later and that doesn’t matter right now, right now the only thing you have to know is that you need this file setup for your items to display in game.

Now that you have a custom folder with an object named something like “head.obj” or “j_r_shoulder.obj” and an item.dat file, you’re ready to preview the item in game.
To do that, all you have to do is go in free play and type

/lp 0 [custom folder name]
(/lp being the load player command, 0 specifying that player 0 (Tori) should be the player replaced by [custom folder name])

In the chat.

In this case with the example model I used, the command would be /lp 0 ItemPreview



and this is what I would see.

To export a texture you made in Blender, in the Texture Paint tab go to Image > Save As.. and change the file type to .tga.



The directory for the file is also the custom folder you made. The file name has to be the name of the body part with a “_obj” after it, so if you made a head item for example, the model file would be called “head.obj” so its texture would have to be called “head_obj.tga”.
Keep in mind that Toribash Items don’t support any type of maps and advanced materials, so if you’re using something like normal maps, roughness maps, or metallic maps, all that data has to be baked into a single texture file to be compatible with Toribash



If you're only using a regular image texture you don’t have to worry about that though.
Now you should have all the knowledge you need to make basic items with textures.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m going to dive deeper into the item.dat file and what you can do with it. The only thing that matters for making items are the OBJ lines, with each line corresponding to a body part. For the regular OBJ lines, these are

0 || head
1 || breast
2 || chest
3 || stomach
4 || thorax
5 || r_pecs
6 || r_biceps
7 || r_triceps
8 || l_pecs
9 || l_biceps
10 || l_triceps
11 || r_hand
12 || l_hand
13 || r_butt
14 || l_butt
15 || r_thigh
16 || l_thigh
17 || l_leg
18 || r_leg
19 || r_foot
20 || l_foot

And for the OBJJOINT lines, they’re

0 || j_neck
1 || j_splex
2 || j_lumbar
3 || j_abs
4 || j_r_axilla
5 || j_r_shoulder
6 || j_r_elbow
7 || j_l_axilla
8 || j_l_shoulder
9 || j_l_elbow
10 || j_r_wrist
11 || j_l_wrist
12 || j_r_glute
13 || j_r_glute
14 || j_r_hip
15 || j_l_hip
16 || j_r_knee
17 || j_l_knee
18 || j_r_ankle
19 || j_l_ankle

The numbers after the semicolon (In the premade file "1 0 255 1 0 0 0") are all settings you can change.

The first number specifies if the item is enabled (1) or not (0).

The second number is the color ID. With this setting, you can change an object's color without a texture, if you use a texture with this enabled however, it's going to act like a joint with a force/relax color and multiply the texture over the color.

You can check color IDs in this thread.

This feature is barely used, except for when you want to make an item’s texture more saturated, which you can achieve by not using the default 0



which looks like this

but color ID 50 (pure)



which looks like this

The third number is the object's alpha value or transparency, which ranges from 255 (default, fully opaque) to 0 (fully transparent)

The fourth number specifies if the object has a texture (1) or not (0).

The fifth number specifies if the object has a custom texture. This is useless to anyone who isn’t an Item Forger, so just ignore it.

The sixth number is rather advanced and you shouldn’t worry about it too much. It specifies if the object is dynamic (1) or not (0). Dynamic objects are able to scale with the body part when they’re used in mods with custom Bodies. For this to work, their scale has to be reversed, as the default Tori is made up from sphere, cube and capsule primitives. To reverse the scale in Blender
First scale objects by 2.5 on all axes and then scale them separately corresponding to their body part.

breast: 2, 1.33, 4
chest: 0.8, 2, 2.66
head: 1, 1, 1
biceps: 1, 2, 2
foot: 2, 5, 0.8
hand: 1.78, 1.78, 1.78
pecs: 2, 2, 2.66
triceps: 1, 4, 4
stomach: 1.142, 2, 2.66
thorax: 2.5, 2.5, 2.66
thigh: 1.8, 1, 1.8
leg: 1.8, 1, 1.8
(Some of these values might not be fully correct)

The seventh number specifies if the model is partless (1) or not (0), with it enabled, the item will replace the body part rather than being added on top of it.

Finally, the eighth number specifies if the item is shaded (1) or not (0), shaded meaning if the item's corresponding body part is bruised or fractured, the item will also have the corresponding visual effect.

Now that you know everything you could know about making items, you might wonder how you can get your items actually added to the game so that other people can see it as well. There are multiple options you have, the first and easiest option is to buy it with real money, more information on that here.

The second option is to pitch the item/idea to any Item Forger/Sir and it might be added.

Your last option is applying to be an Item Forger yourself, meaning you can release your own items and profit off them. To apply as an Item Forger, send an application to any Item Forger.