Turn your high-poly mesh into a GAME-READY asset!
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 ก.ย. 2024
- In this video, I'll show you how to turn a high poly hard surface model into a game ready asset.
►► Our Blender courses & resources - www.blenderbro...
Website - www.blenderbro...
Gumroad - gumroad.com/th...
Links - linktr.ee/josh...
Biz inquiries - josh@blenderbros.com
Quick tip @4:24
To select any kind of patterns of edges, for example every two, or every three edges, or any other pattern, just select two edges matching that pattern, and then just press, ctrl+shift+'+' on your numpad
thank you
thank you!
HOLY SHIT thank you
Doesn't work for me. Do you use the default or the industry settings ?
@@TehAntares What version of blender are you using?
Excellent video on this topic! I would like to point out something for people who will bake normal maps using flat shading in the whole model. When baking with flat shading all of your normals are gonna be perpendicular to their respective faces and since that's the direction that rays are gonna follow when baking the normal map, you are going to create 'gaps' at the edges without rays being traced onto them, therefore you are gonna lose details on the edges and get seams on your normal map as each face will try to bake onto the hard line. The solution to this is to mark as UV seams ALL of your sharp edges, with the disadvantage of using many more UV islands. A better approach is to use smooth shading so as not to have to mark so many edges as UV seams, however using smooth shading will give you 'averaged normals'', not perendicular ones and that's going to create skewing on your normal bakes. To prevent this skewing effect you can add support edges, add bevels + weighted normals or manually cut geometry where needed in order to keep their normals perpendicular to the faces and avoid any skewing. This is VERY important in 'hard surface' bakes. Don't worry about the bad shading in your low poly since the normal map will make the low poly mimic the perfect shading of your high poly independently of its own shading. Remember to always triangulate your model before exporting it since Blender has the triangulation into consideration and it bakes the normal map specifically for that triangulation. If you export your model to, for example, Unreal Engine without previous triangulation, Unreal will do its own and if it differs from Blender's triangulation it will create the so called 'X-shape' errors in your normal maps when applied, specially at low resolutions. Thank you for your videos Josh, greetings from Spain ;)
Oh man thanks a lot! More helpful than a video👍🏻🔥
Nice tutorial, I work in the game industry, as a mostly hard surface artist. This method is good if your focus is on high poly models using your boxcutter and Hard ops style workflow... I mostly find it better to work my models up rather than back. So, I would model my low poly, until happy with the structure and polycounts etc, Then duplicate the low poly model to make the high poly, and continue working it up. Either way, very nice workflow Josh, Im sure it will help alot of people, you've definitely helped me while learning blender.
It would be really helpful if you could make a real-time video where you make a game-ready asset from A to Z. Going in-deep with UV mapping, texel density, maybe texture atlases, in-engine tweakings and all the things we rarely see.
Like your videos by the way, they're pretty useful.
Lightmaps too, they're a pain in the a** to understand.
As an aspiring game environment artist. This was so damn helpful. It's hard to find these type of tutorials that aren't behind a paywall.
Thats so true, awesome Stuff as always Josh !
dont do it that way please, its just wrong for games.
@@PrefoX Huh? Every big game company uses normal maps. Are you ok buddy?
@@FarQuZeDesigns Think he's referring to the bevelling part, which he would be correct, most game assets are triangulated and majority of 3D software don't do a great job at bevelling raw triangulated models. Bevelling is not optimized either.
@@bobross9370 Doesn't really matter either way. Anyone who leaves a troll comment with no clarification like they did can just be ignored outright. People worth listening to don't do that.
TLDW: remove half the edges.
Can also try using the Decimate modifier, this will remove Geometry depending kn the value you set in a ratio.
1 will remove nothing, 0.9 will remove 10% of the mesh, 0.1 will remove 90% of the mesh.
This works well and really quickly, although make sure before applying modified its exceptional, as using this method will probably make the shading of the object bad, but sometimes you can get good results by messing with the value.
Keep in note only do this method when the model is final, editing the model after applying this modifier is near impossible
Yeah the topology is ruined after applying it @@Auti3D
this is EXACTLY what i was waiting for
Super glad! I had a feeling you guys were.
Same
Modelling is one thing but UV perfecting is it's own beast. Project from view, project cube, project cylinder etc., can work very well for hard surface when selecting specific faces. If your normals are all good and you think about where to hide seams, things can look amazing once you get it into Substance Painter or other texturing methods. Great video, once again gives me confidence that I'm on the right path.
Glad to help! I have a video on UV unwrapping dropping tomorrow :)
the shape edge is because there is not enough padding in your UV island if you add more padding it should not show up. hope this helps someone wanting to do more bakes (also for hard surface baking marmoset toolbag has a lot better tools to make bakes look a lot cleaner )
Yeah Marmoset seems to be the best option all around. Good note - I usually do my 1 segment method so I am not as familiar with baked bevels.
@Tester 1 I have it, pretty good from using it so far, but I need to play with it more.
This thread is a good read about all things related to normal map baking:
polycount.com/discussion/107196/youre-making-me-hard-making-sense-of-hard-edges-uvs-normal-maps-and-vertex-counts
Any hard edge results in more vertices because normals are stored per vertex.
Adding extra 1-segment bevels to the edge of your mesh should not increase vertex count in the end because you smooth out those edges instead of making them hard as you would do with the "true" low poly version of your mesh. Thus the same vertex can be used to store normal information for adjacing faces.
But:
Overdraw caused by thin triangles might become a problem when many beveled edges are on screen but take up very few pixels. I will cite from humus.name:
"[...] whenever a polygon edge cuts through a 2x2 pixel area, that quad will be processed twice, once for both of the polygons covering it [...]"
www.humus.name/index.php?page=Comments&ID=228
As with most things - it's complex. :)
Do you mean the annoying edge in the bake can be avoided if there is more space between or in islands on the UV map? Also without marmoset? Sorry, I don`t get it, but I am also not a native English speaker.
6:25 whaaaaat that's an awesome shortcut that I wish I knew way sooner!
At 6:25 ctrl+alt click should select all the edges
Amazing, thanks for the tip!
"...bevel bakes, it's a normal thing."
I see what you did there and I love it
Hey Josh, thanks for this video, it was great. Maybe you could do a follow-up where you have an asset made up of a few objects, and/or a few materials? I have been struggling to build assets like this, then use SimpleBake to atlas them together, it's not very well described out there. Even further, adding decal machine on top and trying to atlas the decals and texture them is currently really tough going.. seems like most of the hard surface tutorials completely ignore the steps in getting to a game engine.
man you covered all the questions around the topic i really apreacaite that thanks a lot that was really helpful
Think you just taught me more in 30mins than my university has taught me in 3 months......
Thank you :3
Happy to help!
About duplicating the name from object to mesh: Most software only have one name for the same object, but Blender has two names.
When exporting, if the name of the object and the object data is exactly the same, it will get just that name; but if the object's name and mesh's name are different, they will be added, like "Amazing_Model_Cube.001".
There is usually no problem with that, except that if you bake maps in Substance using the match names option... the names will not match ;P And that's why it's important.
I remember making a little script when I used to work a lot with Substance to just run the script and automatically apply all the objects' names to their meshes before export :)
Finally found a video explaining this process. Really great stuff, thank you!
You can use Ctrl Shift Num+ to select next active on these rings or bevels.
Your videos are great Josh keep up the great work! Something I did notice though is you could have deleted 3 / 4 of your model did your editing work on the last 1/4 and saved yourself a mountain of time by mirrioring everything back later.
I can't give more than 1 thumbs up for this video... thanks a lot for this vid Josh!
thank you Josh！amazing videos！
Thanks Ollie!
Nice tutotial!!! you should paint the asset in substance in another video.
nice video. a lot of what you show I was already doing but I did learn a few things from this that I was not using. thank you for making and sharing this video.
Thanks Josh! For better polycount visualization in further tutorial videos would be appreciate to turn on *Statistics* in the *Overlay* options.
Yea, I realized my banner was covering it after the fact. My apologies!
Man i was thinking ok i will press one button and than the magic will happend, but the decimate modifier still sucks i guess xD...I must also say i'm so glad that there isn't an automated tool, because working on the 3d model is just so relaxing.
How did u get a color gradient on edges of selected object? Front edges are green , then yellow and back edges are orange.
I'm sure mine is a noob question, but why did you keep the faces where the barrels go? Wouldn't it be better to have a hole there?
honestly 2.3k is really good for current gen and PC, I guess depends on the fidelity you are going for
Hey Josh, great video, but I have a question, what symmetrization tool are you using. It doesn't look like standard blender interactive mirror or something like this
There is a better way to bake the bevel in so that you don't see the edge, there is actually a shader node for bevel and you turn the samples up to 16...
Do you mind using screencast keys? And pls.
nice workflow pal
Hi, great video and tutorial. Just have a quick question, how to you access that menu on screen for symetry when you can click on X,Y,Z?
When I select my mesh, then go into Mesh>Symetrize I dont get that at all, the only thing I get is a small menu to choose from -X to X for example, which result is breaking and deleting faces from my mesh.
Anyone has an answer, would appritate it a lot! Thanks :)
You can get rid of some of the normal issue especially the one on the top if you disable "average normal" in substance.
At least that is the source of baking issues for most of my bakes in the past.
I would like to know if you really use this workflow in a daily basis. What you do if you figure out you need to make changes to your model later? Do you need to repeat all the process of simplifying the model again?
What if you want to use a displacement map for example? Would you have to retopo the whole thing to have square-shaped quads rather than ngons/triangles?
What would be the workflow if one wants to sculpt organic scratches at the surface also? Wouldn't a quad topo be better? or instead keep it this way and sculpt with dyntopo and bake these scratches?
I wonder if Checker Select and Symmetry are available in 3ds Max? Probably on the modelling ribbon bar,
You are so helpful bro, greetings from Poland :)
Thanks man. Best wishes to ya
I have a question, should i join objects ( ctrl + J ) before or after applying modifiers?
What do you do after you bake it and texture it?
Curious, with the stretched UV situation, why not just separate the mesh in that area and create a face to the sides? Is there anything in practice that is against separate meshes?
Great video, thank you for uploading! If it doesn't take too much time, could you add some way to let us know what buttons you use? A simple overlay with the name of the keys is more than enough, just a way to let us learn some shortcuts, because sometimes you say you're doing something but as a beginner it's hard to keep up with experts like you.
There is something called screencast on blender and he uses it most of the time.. only that addon is bugged as hell and it turns off at random moments. Best piece of advice for shortcuts: watch a lot of Blender videos and try to do something with what you have seen. It forces you to repeat those steps and thus the shortcuts for it :)
Josh, how do you select the complete edges with just one click? Not the single ones but the ones with several edges
Ah which part? I assume you mean ALT click?
@@JoshGambrell Thanks. That was the one.
Thanks for the tutorial, by the way your patron paged says it’s moved and comes up with a not found. Also are you having any sales on your courses? Sorry to ask that but just curious, thanks
Thx. Now, what I really like to know is 1.: If you use the one segment bevel, you don't unwrap it again? Cause it causes nerves to deal with tris or unclean quads from the bevel mod. doing UV`s. And I ask myself do you avoid triangles then? And 2nd: Do you need sharp marked edges for the bake? I have contradictory informations about that like some say wherever a hard seam is you need a sharp edge. And some say: always deactivate "average normals" in SP. Is there an easy way out? Thx man :)
YESS josh did it this is just what i need
these are the tuts we like, keep up the great work.
Thanks bro, will do!!
do you have any dvideos or tips on retopology a female body in blender 2.79
Hi Josh, great video! I'm just curious what addon do you use for symmetry?
HardOps
really really good explanation!
Thanks Fabian!
you're awesome, i love your totorials
Awesome thank you thats so helpful & great to understand.
What did you use to do that symmetry?
Another amazing tutorial! No surprise here
Thanks!
I cannot wrap my head around it... How is it okay to have so many Ngons? It should be quads, or I misunderstand something? Thank you in advance for the reply!
Hi Josh , I followed this tutorial and got on pretty well but will probably need few more repeats to get it right. I do have a question on ellipses and hope you can help with your general expertise: how do you draw an ellipses inside a 30/30 60/30 degree parallelogram?
Substance painter is good, blender baking shit josh. Finally Ryuu helped me to the solve the problem.
thanks
How do you approach baking onto models that have submeshes? A robotic arm for example? BTW, Awesome tutorial!!
how do i know how many poly is ok for a game depending on the asset ? lets say a weapon
I am guessing this would be harder to do with organic mesh. Hardsurface seems s traightforward.
Is there not an automatic converter tool to bring a high polygon 3d Modell to an easier 3d model without to much lose from details? Maybe converts rounds in vetorgrafics, make the mashes bigger in flat big areals, kompress stuff. Offcourse you lose the individual flexibility after this step but you do design all with high poly and than converting for Unity oder other gameengine and only place it at the map (only make bigger the hole objekt but dont manipulate the details).
Is there not a automatic way to convert this high polygon blender Objekt in a easier 3D obpekt without bisg optical loses? (Eg. if I make a sphere in Unity its an very easy objekt, very smal and quick to load)
Man that was a simple way to UV unwrap that I have seen so far.
It is definitely straightforward but sometimes requires manual tweaking.
How do I make the object become rey-x in blender game
does nanite gonna help now ?
Excellent tutorial Josh! Thanks for sharing the knowledge :) How many segments does your bevel have on the high poly model? Does it even matter since that will be baked into the low poly model?
C - select edges - Cheker Deselect - ctrl +x = profit
I think the only thing I have issue with is that your models come out looking great, but I would say with 90% of the models I've made that have nGons always look pretty bad purely because some lighting engines don't know how to handle it. But also because UVs get weirdly stretched ad things of that nature. I would love to see the solution to that though.
Check my video on unwrapping, it covers ngon unwrapping.
how do you slide verices like in 7:49 ish?
Whats the shorcut for symmetrize?
Alt+x but with Hard Ops. You can find the same tool under Mesh->Symmetrize in edit mode. A bit more clunky, and takes longer to use
@@JoshGambrell thanks
The biggest thing i learned in videos is people dont apply modifiers, they just keep it and applies if necessary. So they are always able to change the object if they dont like it..
In my case, i always apply modifiers, otherwhise i just cant move on...
I watched for 22 minutes before you're like "now we're gonna go over to substance" and i'm like "fuck, that's 22 minutes wasted, i'm here for the Blender with no intentions of spending money on substance"
He shows how to bake normals in Blender in so many of his free yt videos, so what's the problem?
How does the switch to substance at the end invalidate the modeling portion of the tutorial?
you can crack it
dont we need to apply modifiers before export ? 23:00
No need to apply Modifiers, it works just normal
Great video, as always! One question though, is this workflow where you make a low-poly version of your model and use it to bake your mesh also required for non game-assets.
For example, could I just use my high-poly model to bake my maps in SP if I never intent to use the model in a game?
Yes
is this game ready topology?
What plugins do you have installed :D it looks so clean
Hard Ops, Boxcutter, Decal Machine, Machin3 tools, Power Save, Mesh Machine, Kit Ops and a few others.
these edges are too sharp for a game bake, and at this thickness the extra bevel on the bake is overkill, that would be great if you don't want to bake or skip the highpoly
The sharp line will not be seen from even a short distance. If you go face weighting like this then the normal map is basically redundant, like this you are getting the vertex count of a face weighted model with the effort of a full bake for virtually no benefit (well outside of getting the the textures for texturing)
I know this is 3 years ago, but are you saying he should just do mid-poly modelling instead of going through the trouble of making a high poly in this scenario?
@@GuestUser-jf8uj in this case he should not have a bevel on his lowpoly and either bake down the bevels from the high, or just export the beveled mesh as is and skip the entire bake as its basically redundant if you already have a bevel on the mesh itself (TBF you usually still want the bake for the texturing process in the standard pipeline, although most bakers could then just bake low to low)
In the end its fine what he is doing although his bevel is very small and sort of undermining all the work and making it not a big difference one way or another
The "zooming in on the edge" is not really an issue as you wont see the seam at any normal distance and the bake was perfectly fine already without the added bevel.
If you get real visible seams that means that the sharp edges splits are not the same as the UV splits simply and that is a user mistake
@@ShrikeGFX Thank you! I appreciate you taking the time to reply.
Or use nanite and add a zoom feature to your game😅
I was thinking the same thing
Please 🙏 increase font size
Nice
nice solution for a perfect flat surface but...try same on curved model -.-
Very nice, and aubstance make simple and better bake normal maps.......in blender you have, lot off steps and bake somtime dont be soo good..., very good video, i love more video for game asset, only that asset have value and this model can sell, i say that once again....great video keep going and good luck.......
Thank you Aleksandar!
Cool
You really make me think about Bob ross...
Next video he needs to wear an afro wigg xD
And gotta get him to say, And let's put a happy little mech right here in the corner
and whack his keyboard a couple of times against the leg of his desk
You look different from your thumbnail. I believe they call it, cat phishing.
Damn! NGons are wayyyy faster to turn into Low Poly Meshes
Does he reply?
Of course I do! :)
@@JoshGambrell Thank you so much omg!
Pretty good tutorial.
The way you're beveling at the end is very wrong however!
Youre wasting precious verts by doing it this way...
The correct and industry standard way to go over this is to shade your lowpoly smooth. you can do this by putting a weighted normal on your object without turning on "keep sharps"
It will look like dogfood when you export, but once you bake it out in substance, you will have the same, perfect bevels, without having to bevel your final output!
Why is all I see at the beginning angons…
Congratulations on a great video! 🙁 I know where you can get more than 167 free spins.Best choice.Thanks for the content. Great video! Its fun to watch. Good job.
Lol
It's sad to see so many questions and not one answer. People don't get it...nobody cares. I bet this video was only made for the money...someone paid and it was made into a little tutorial video for the client. Nothing in this world is free, pay Josh and he will take the time to answer you. I have questions too, lots of questions, but I don't mind playing dumb.
I would have probably been a lot more brutal with removing geometry but this was a great walkthrough of the process regardless!
If you'd like to select every 2nd, or 3rd, or any pattern, select 2 points, and press ctrl+shift+ '+' on the numpad. It's a smart select, works really well. Detects patterns from 2 already selected verts, edges or faces.
This will save me so much time! :O
Thanks for the tutorial. I'm a bit disappointed that you baked in Substance but I'll look for a similar video where Blender is used.
14:54 But smooth, beveled cube has, in teory, 24 vertexes in Unreal as well as flat, un-beveled flat-shaded simple cube. Only smooth un-beveled has 8 (should-it has 14 though) As far as I know that is because engine counts hard edge as double vertexes.
UV seams does that too but not on top of it. So after UV unwrap, beveled cube still has more vertexes, but not that much more (36 if nicely unwrapped, 26 really messy unwrap, compare to 24 of flat shaded cube). Unwraped beveled cube from Blender to Unreal somehow import as 50 vertexes-probably because the default unwrap.
If you do not have much or any seams, there is almost no reason not to bevel.
For some reason, Bevel option "Harden normals" unfortunately multiply vertexes too, in my experience at least, so Weighten normals seems to be better way for low poly.
Nice video. Just to point out, for hard surfaces, I mostly turn off "average normals" in the substance bake. That will get rid most of the blurry edges especially on panel indents. Try average normals on and off to see which gives the best result
So the Geo gets triangulated on export? I just feel like you should take care of N-Gons yourself instead of just triangulate them ... might also help with those janky UVs.
Flat surfaces man, it doesn’t matter at all. You can test the triangulation in Blender beforehand if you are not sure of the result. I’m working with a game dev now. He uses meshes with ngons all the time and they are fine. It simply depends on your pipeline
@@JoshGambrell AFAIK there is no problem as long as the same triangulation persists along all the packages in your pipeline, otherwise your baked normal map might give you shading artifacts under different triangulation conditions.
@@JoshGambrell the rule of thumb is to keep your mesh as quad as possible. Always. There's also another rule that says that when you have a hard edge you have to have a seam there in order not to have there an error/artifact + if there is an angle of 90deg. or more normal map won't work. We had lot's of discussions about it on the Polycount forum. I encourage everyone to check these sites as this is pure gold (even if this is 10y old stuff):
polycount.com/discussion/81154/understanding-averaged-normals-and-ray-projection-who-put-waviness-in-my-normal-map
polycount.com/discussion/147227/skew-you-buddy-making-sense-of-skewed-normal-map-details
wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Normal_map
I: watched half of an hour hoping to see how to bake LP in blender
Author: ok, lets bake in substance...
Must be infuriating...
It got me when he said "I'm gonna keep this video efficient"
Like mate you're wasting people's time with the stories and all unrelated shit you do in this video
We want to get to the point quick not to hear your every thought
Probably the first result on google: th-cam.com/video/mdcodiuIwXM/w-d-xo.html You guys are getting lazy...
you can crack it mate
@@vmirevi I don't like to use cracked apps( Sure i have some software from torrents, but as more i earn with it as more licences I buy
11:33 can u please tell, how did you do this symmetry ?