I know we brought up Texel Density a lot, and it just so happens that Nate has a tutorial on texel density and the grid on his Gumroad: natestephens.gumroad.com
I wanted to make this free, since it is a fundamental concept but and everyone should understand it. But Gumroad won't let you do that if it is over a certain size, this the $1 price.
Literally the best one hour video for advanced Environment Artists. Watching two highly experienced environment artists discussing techniques is super beneficial, much appreciated
It's annoying that it's a topic no one really wants to talk about, especially for environments, I can find an ok amount for characters. Still, I always have trouble with environments, especially if it's about a modular environment.
I learned a lot about topology. I always try to go really low in poly count after sculpting because people say to keep it low. However, now I know having a decent poly count is okay. Thanks to this video.
As someone who aspires to become an environment artist, 1) this channel has brought me a ton of knowledge 2) it was a bit of a shocker to know that levels sometimes take more than a year or 2 or even 3! Makes me wonder how much time will it take me to work as an environment artist
Interesting take about the grid size I think that's why Valve's Grid in hammer editor works in power of 2, so you can always divide it in half until the units becomes 1. 1 floor being 1024 units tall
You can use a power of 2 grid in UE aswell, you just need to enable it in the editor settings (Level Editor - Viewports : Use power of two snap size). This changes the grid to be power of 2 based
That was a great talk! I think you did an amazing job relating your questions to Nate back to what a student's or junior artists' questions and concerns might be!
A small correction about hard/soft thingy. If you have a UV seam - you can do a hard edge. It will will make no difference because the verts are going to be duplicated anyway so why not improve the bakes by reducing the amount of normal compensation that will be baked into texture? BTW if you work with unreal you can see the 'real' amount of vers in asset edtitor window.
The mystery pillar: if i saw that image of a wireframe, i would assume that pillar is exported as three separate objects for some culling. The AO in vertex-colors is fascinating. Man, all of it is. I wish my day had more hours.
Putting AO/lighting in vertex colors is something that HAD to be done in PSP/PS2/PS3 days. It's still a good technique to use. You already have verts, use 'em :D
As someone who has only worked on indie games there s a lot of interesting information here. Mostly surprised I am by the info about soft edges everywhere. In my personal experience soft edges and letting the normal do the work would throw up artifacts at lower texture resolutions. So we usually opted in for the lots of uv cuts and hard edges on uv borders that are on close to 90 degree angles to solve those issues. When it comes to being more lenient with the amount of polys is something I still am getting used to. Having worked in 3D outside of games where polycount and texture sizes rarely are an issue I felt in the realm of overcompensating by being more conservative on polycounts.
Brilliant live stream, and tons of invaluable information. Learned a lot, especially about the Gen 4/Gen 5 topology differences. Though might be difficult to convince some of my Tutors about that Gen 5 density count 🤣
Thanks a lot for livestream! There is plenty amount of information about how to start building things but so lack of them how to make it production ready, you do a great job! I have a one question About 9 min Nate mentioned that the reason to using dense mesh grid is baking light, AO on vertex. Is it related to some internal stuff in engine or it is still applicable to Unreal?
I think that's old school, or maybe some studios will use it for other trickery such as ambient occlusion, you used to be able to bake AO to vertex colour in Maya using Turtle but I honestly don't know what the method would be nowadays in Blender/Max to bake AO to the verts.
Fun fact: With nanite it is much cheaper to force a entire mesh to soft shading and add additional support loops for baking . This is due to the way nanite uses vertex data to create geometry clusters More clusters = More cost on nanite base pass
I was under the impression that if you don't have hard edges on certain UV-borders you get gradient variation of colors (on flat surfaces) when baking normal maps?
In this context they're doing a lot of 'environment' modelling versus say 'hero prop' modelling, so you can just add extra geo, soften the normals, then wrap trims/tilables/masks across the surface. You can have fully soft normals for a prop too if you have enough geometry to reduce the gradient on harsh corners, which organic looking games often do, but yeah, if you were working on a super angular/sci fi hard surface game and it was a 0-1 uv unwrapped prop, you'd harden them where you need to for sure, because the low poly will most likely have harsh transitions in some cases. Either way, you can still harden normals on 0-1 prop uv bakes where needed to reduce gradients, it'll be smoothed out by the bake anyway.
@@EMC3D Thanks for the recommendation. Seeing the process, I'm a bit confused about the benefit. I understand that it allows you to scale an object and maintain texel density. But if you know in advance how big an object will be, is there really a significant performance improvement from using a dozen smaller textures as opposed to 3 larger textures? Do you have to expect to reuse the noise textures for many objects to see a savings?
@@troll_kin9456 That's it, yep! :D You use 'generic tiling' noises across the RGB mask and then you can use them across a whole game and save yourself a lot of drawcalls and flexibility.
Please someone explain this for me, if texel density is 1024 px per meter which is 10.24px/unit if a scene is set to metre in Maya, then how would one unwrap say a wall for example which is like 45 metres in length. Even with texture tiling in mind, I couldn't grasp it
Nate has a good TD tutorial which is near enough free on his Gumroad: natestephens.gumroad.com/ In your situation you would just use a tilable texture, make a 2-meter wide piece and then map a 2048x2048 to that section and repeat it horizontally until you get to 44 meters.
@@EMC3D yup bought it and went through the video. But I just couldn't understand how to do UVs, the scale of a uv shell for 1024 resolution texel is pretty huge even after cutting the pieces.
Now I'm confused. He said they don't harden edges unless absolutely necessary? but you need to harden the edges around UV shells if a custom normal is baked otherwise there will be visible seams. maybe that's what he meant though
Yeah I believe for a prop context/hero asset that's true. For environment modelling you can just soften away (always check with your lead/studio workflow first) and add some extra geo to harsh corners.
I know we brought up Texel Density a lot, and it just so happens that Nate has a tutorial on texel density and the grid on his Gumroad:
natestephens.gumroad.com
I wanted to make this free, since it is a fundamental concept but and everyone should understand it. But Gumroad won't let you do that if it is over a certain size, this the $1 price.
Literally the best one hour video for advanced Environment Artists. Watching two highly experienced environment artists discussing techniques is super beneficial, much appreciated
Yeah... we want a series. Absolutly no one is talking about topology on youtube
Agreed. Signal boosting another rare expert on topo - th-cam.com/play/PLX8KxHzbdeSdgOwKUb1O9QWy1w4Gpn96b.html&si=Z1QoblPnRbY76vJ2
It's annoying that it's a topic no one really wants to talk about, especially for environments, I can find an ok amount for characters. Still, I always have trouble with environments, especially if it's about a modular environment.
Dude this is one of the greatest youtube pages for game-artists, you defo need more attention
Cheers chap!
I learned a lot about topology. I always try to go really low in poly count after sculpting because people say to keep it low. However, now I know having a decent poly count is okay. Thanks to this video.
As someone who aspires to become an environment artist, 1) this channel has brought me a ton of knowledge 2) it was a bit of a shocker to know that levels sometimes take more than a year or 2 or even 3! Makes me wonder how much time will it take me to work as an environment artist
This channel is a gem.
Thank you so much for this. Getting to know the latest industry techniques is so important and we can apply this to our own work.
Interesting take about the grid size
I think that's why Valve's Grid in hammer editor works in power of 2, so you can always divide it in half until the units becomes 1.
1 floor being 1024 units tall
You can use a power of 2 grid in UE aswell, you just need to enable it in the editor settings (Level Editor - Viewports : Use power of two snap size). This changes the grid to be power of 2 based
This was more than helpful! Please do more of these interviews. I learned so much from this.
This is a goldmine! You guys are awesome.
That was a great talk! I think you did an amazing job relating your questions to Nate back to what a student's or junior artists' questions and concerns might be!
Cheers chap!
This was actually perfect, so many impirtant things in such a short video. would love more.
very interesting 🔥 need more videos
A small correction about hard/soft thingy. If you have a UV seam - you can do a hard edge. It will will make no difference because the verts are going to be duplicated anyway so why not improve the bakes by reducing the amount of normal compensation that will be baked into texture?
BTW if you work with unreal you can see the 'real' amount of vers in asset edtitor window.
Dang, this is Gold.
The needing to stitch everything into each other part brought up flashbacks of my first year of blender, the horror...
I absolutely love it! Huge amount of knowlege - I've learned a lot. Thank you!
Dude, this was good. Thank you.
Thanks chap!
This was awesome and super informative. Thank you to you both!
Thanks for watching chap!
The mystery pillar:
if i saw that image of a wireframe, i would assume that pillar is exported as three separate objects for some culling.
The AO in vertex-colors is fascinating. Man, all of it is. I wish my day had more hours.
Putting AO/lighting in vertex colors is something that HAD to be done in PSP/PS2/PS3 days. It's still a good technique to use. You already have verts, use 'em :D
As someone who has only worked on indie games there s a lot of interesting information here.
Mostly surprised I am by the info about soft edges everywhere. In my personal experience soft edges and letting the normal do the work would throw up artifacts at lower texture resolutions. So we usually opted in for the lots of uv cuts and hard edges on uv borders that are on close to 90 degree angles to solve those issues.
When it comes to being more lenient with the amount of polys is something I still am getting used to. Having worked in 3D outside of games where polycount and texture sizes rarely are an issue I felt in the realm of overcompensating by being more conservative on polycounts.
I didn't know that hard edges cost more! Amazing Info
I'm really loving your channel man, keep up the great work!
Thanks chap!
Brilliant live stream, and tons of invaluable information. Learned a lot, especially about the Gen 4/Gen 5 topology differences. Though might be difficult to convince some of my Tutors about that Gen 5 density count 🤣
For sure, it was very organic though, so was even more justified to help sell the shape of the game-res mesh, even with/without Nanite.
Great talk! I learned so much.
Thanks chap!
Man what a interview awesome.
.. I'll love to see a more detailed video on texel density if possible 🔥🔥🔥
Cheers chap!
Nate has a really good fundamentals video on that topic here:
natestephens.gumroad.com/l/oupfyh
Amazing channel. Nice work.
thanks a lot!
thank you!
Thanks a lot for livestream!
There is plenty amount of information about how to start building things but so lack of them how to make it production ready, you do a great job!
I have a one question
About 9 min Nate mentioned that the reason to using dense mesh grid is baking light, AO on vertex. Is it related to some internal stuff in engine or it is still applicable to Unreal?
I think that's old school, or maybe some studios will use it for other trickery such as ambient occlusion, you used to be able to bake AO to vertex colour in Maya using Turtle but I honestly don't know what the method would be nowadays in Blender/Max to bake AO to the verts.
Tutorial on geo tiling would be sick
Fun fact:
With nanite it is much cheaper to force a entire mesh to soft shading and add additional support loops for baking .
This is due to the way nanite uses vertex data to create geometry clusters
More clusters = More cost on nanite base pass
What a dude!
Peak Thx a lot
I was under the impression that if you don't have hard edges on certain UV-borders you get gradient variation of colors (on flat surfaces) when baking normal maps?
In this context they're doing a lot of 'environment' modelling versus say 'hero prop' modelling, so you can just add extra geo, soften the normals, then wrap trims/tilables/masks across the surface.
You can have fully soft normals for a prop too if you have enough geometry to reduce the gradient on harsh corners, which organic looking games often do, but yeah, if you were working on a super angular/sci fi hard surface game and it was a 0-1 uv unwrapped prop, you'd harden them where you need to for sure, because the low poly will most likely have harsh transitions in some cases.
Either way, you can still harden normals on 0-1 prop uv bakes where needed to reduce gradients, it'll be smoothed out by the bake anyway.
I don't know that I'm familiar with layered shading. I'll have to look into that.
Here's a good place to get started:
www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/BqV6/aaa-rocks-for-games-rgb-masked-workflow-tutorial
@@EMC3D Thanks for the recommendation. Seeing the process, I'm a bit confused about the benefit. I understand that it allows you to scale an object and maintain texel density. But if you know in advance how big an object will be, is there really a significant performance improvement from using a dozen smaller textures as opposed to 3 larger textures?
Do you have to expect to reuse the noise textures for many objects to see a savings?
@@troll_kin9456 That's it, yep! :D You use 'generic tiling' noises across the RGB mask and then you can use them across a whole game and save yourself a lot of drawcalls and flexibility.
Oof. All that stitching in is so much work XD
Please someone explain this for me, if texel density is 1024 px per meter which is 10.24px/unit if a scene is set to metre in Maya, then how would one unwrap say a wall for example which is like 45 metres in length. Even with texture tiling in mind, I couldn't grasp it
Nate has a good TD tutorial which is near enough free on his Gumroad:
natestephens.gumroad.com/
In your situation you would just use a tilable texture, make a 2-meter wide piece and then map a 2048x2048 to that section and repeat it horizontally until you get to 44 meters.
@@EMC3D yup bought it and went through the video. But I just couldn't understand how to do UVs, the scale of a uv shell for 1024 resolution texel is pretty huge even after cutting the pieces.
Now I'm confused. He said they don't harden edges unless absolutely necessary? but you need to harden the edges around UV shells if a custom normal is baked otherwise there will be visible seams. maybe that's what he meant though
Yeah I believe for a prop context/hero asset that's true. For environment modelling you can just soften away (always check with your lead/studio workflow first) and add some extra geo to harsh corners.