AXE - Detailed game objects - P1 - Base mesh

hello and welcome to gabot media i'm grant abbott and in this series we're creating a detailed game ready axe we'll be going from the base mesh sculpting baking normal maps roughness maps and texture painting so going through all the steps needed to create detailed high-end game ready objects i'm trying to make it as beginner friendly as possible but it's possibly a more intermediate tutorial in this particular episode we're looking at the base mesh in this case bringing in a reference image and tracing around it ready for sculpting on more detail later if you like what you see here then check out the description for my website and playlist section of my channel for other free courses or you can follow the links to my character course where you can learn to make a full game ready detailed character from scratch so in this episode i use 2.92 alpha but i do switch to 2.91 later on due to crashes and things and the shortcut keys will be down in the bottom corner here but before we start the first thing i always say to people is go gather some reference images and inspiration and you can see the sort of inspiration i've got here lots of stylized weapons mainly axes of course some more realistic than others like this one here some more stylized like this one here and we're going to go a bit in between those this is obviously a really important step for giving lots of different ideas the next step is drawing out thumbnails with different designs you can of course if you have access to a concept artist team up with them i always personally really like that process though so i rather do it myself because you can be really creative and come up with all interesting ideas on that note if you want to learn how to draw concept art for your games or your models then keep an eye out for my new course learning how to draw creating game art so here we are back in blender and what i'm going to do is drag in my reference image so here's my reference image x reference 4 and i'll make this available to you follow the links in the description and just click and drag it into your scene i'll minimize this window make sure it's selected and you'll see it's an empty up here and if you ever need to hide it you can just press the i over here but we need to reset its location because it's sort of sticking out perpendicular to the camera so i can press alt g to remove any grabbing and alt r to remove any rotation now it's flat on the ground i can just press r x and then 90 and that will rotate it in the x axis 90 degrees then i can press g then y and move it backwards out of the way now i'm ready to trace around my object so i can go to front view with one on my numpad for this i'm going to delete the default cube and i'm going to use a cylinder for this section and a plane for this section which i'll then extrude out and make it thick okay so i'll start at the bottom here i'll shift right click so my 3d cursor moves to that point and then zoom in on that section shift a to add mesh cylinder now it's really important at this point you go to the dialog box at the bottom corner here and change the vertex count at the moment it's 32 which is far more detailed than we need we're going to go reasonably high poly for a game object and possibly a bit more than might be necessary for maybe a portfolio piece or something like that but these days polygon count isn't as important as it used to be and we can get away with a fair few but 32 is way more than we need so we can bring that down to something like 16. i'm always choosing something that's divisible by four then we can cut it into quarters if we ever need to and certainly something you want to be able to cut in half because the axe is fairly symmetrical across the y-axis so we can use that to our advantage so we've got 16 there that's good and that's all fine so let's scale that down and start moving it into position so r to rotate s to scale okay at this point i think the easiest way is to go into x-ray mode here let's zoom in on that a bit more and go to edit mode with tab so edit mode up here and face mode with three on your keyboard not your numpad and you'll select the faces up here i can then select the top face it's difficult to see it selected but it is highlighted and i can start moving this into position with g to grab so let's move it around here and extrude it out and then g to grab r to rotate and just follow the axe shape going upwards e to extrude r to rotate g to grab s to scale if you need to and just move them into position we'll have to do something slightly more different with the topology here perhaps but we'll see about that as we go now you can see from here the distance in between each of my edge loops it's fairly big at the moment i can always add topology if i need to just by pressing ctrl r and then maybe scaling it or moving it around slightly but for the most part start off fairly low poly and you can always add them later on now where there's a drastic movement in shape so you can see i'm not aligned with the shape here then you'll definitely need to add another loop cut so ctrl r in here i'll scale that down and move that into position more now remember when you press ctrl r you automatically go into edge mode so go back to face mode with three to select the top face and then keep extruding upwards we'll have to look at this from the other views and adjust accordingly okay so we've followed that up that's great and we'll just sort out the bottom here okay so let's have a look at that from other angles and of course when i move my 3d cursor it's snapped to my reference image here so i'm going to go back to object mode g and then y and move that forward slightly so it's out of the way and now let's have a look now where i've scaled in you can see it's a lot thinner and that probably doesn't really work so we need to adjust it from this side as well but before we do that let's add our mirror modifier so it mirrors across the y-axis like this now you can go in like this go to side view delete half your shape and then add the mirror modifier i find it much easier though to use the add-on auto mirror so if i go to edit there's the auto mirror options you need to press n to get to this menu if you haven't already then make sure you enable this by going to edit preferences add-ons type in auto and there's the auto mirror under mesh make sure it's ticked and then close this down and then you'll have the auto mirror options available under the edit menu over here so press n to get this menu up and then press edit and then under edit we want to mirror in the y-axis but the positive y as you can see from the cartesian coordinates up here is going in this direction so we actually want it in the negative so we see the front so we press one to go to front view we'll always see and be able to edit the front of it so y in the negative auto mirror and can you see half my mesh is deleted and if i go to the modifiers you can see my mirror tool here mirrored in the y axis and it's also got clipping enabled what it's also done is with the top faces as you can see here it's cut them in half for us so it makes it much easier to mirror objects okay so what we will want to do is just move this and adjust this around slightly so if i go to front view and this time go to vertex mode i can select vertex at the front here and use the proportional edit tool so that's at the top here and o is the shortcut so if i select the one right at the front and press g to grab you can see the circle of influence and it's affecting too much at the moment i can then use the wheel of my mouse to bring it down and then it just affects the ones around it and i can start almost sculpting the shape so once down here for example it doesn't matter if you grab more than one and just change your circle of influence so it's adapting the shape to your liking that's a bit better probably this at the top here as well and i might put another loop cut in here so we can bring that in a bit okay let's go to side view with three on my numpad and let's have a look at the shape i could probably pull these ones out slightly g them y so it doesn't have too much distortion between the shapes and remember to use the wheel if you need to and a bit of undulation like this is absolutely fine and like i say use the wheel to adjust the circle of influence as i call it anyway let's go back to front view and just see where the axe head is going into our piece of wood just make sure it's nice and wide so it starts at this point so we'll make these three a bit wider now i can press g then y here you'd think i'd press scale in the y but g then y because these are clipped together it's going to do the same thing it's working okay but i think this needs to go in a fair bit so this time i'll press scale in the y so you can see what happens when i do that can you see how it brings them all together apart from these ones here so scaling will sort of bring them in in the average point around here but if i press g to grab in the y then it will bring them all in hopefully that makes sense now we'll work on the actual axe head want to go to front view tab into object mode and let's bring in a plane so shift a to add mesh plane and we can't see at the moment because it's flat against the floor here so first we need to bring it forward g then y and just bring that forward a bit r rx90 to rotate it round and let's just make sure it's in the middle so let's go three to side view again we can't see it but we can see the object center there so g to grab and i'll move it up to the top as well okay so somewhere around there one to go to front view again and let's start editing it to our shape first of all we can scale it and i'll start in the middle here and let's go to edit mode and start moving these vertices around so i'm in vertex mode so one on your keyboard to go to vertex mode and i can move them around now notice i'm getting a circle every time i move that's because i've still got proportional edit on so make sure we turn that off we don't need that for the moment and let's extrude this edge out i can select these two here e to extrude and pull them out you can always go to edge mode to do this but it's actually a bit easier in vertex mode then you can just move the vertices once you've extruded them so select them both e to extrude and then select the vertices and g to grab e to extrude and we'll probably have one more extrusion out here and then these two notice i'm not doing the sort of dinks and notches yet i'll do the base shape and then do those later okay so at this point we'll need some more topology otherwise it's just going to be a flat line from here to here so we'll do one loop cut down the middle like this so ctrl r and then double left click and now i'll start grabbing these and extruding them out and then i'll add some more topology in a second okay so we need some more in here so i'll press k to get the knife tool so that gives me the knife tool and anywhere i left click it will cut into the shape it's best to do it from edges and vertices can you see how this green square snaps and it outlines red when you hit a vertex so that's helpful we know we're hitting a vertex there so i'll start from that point so left click and then you can left click through these different edges here if you're having any problems it may be that you have some doubles so just make sure you remove doubles once you've finished cutting you press enter to confirm and then we can move that into position and another cut from here and you can actually just go all the way to the end like this and press enter and it will cut for you between them okay if we want to keep this as quads go to edge mode with two select this edge and press delete dissolve edges now we've actually got a quad-based mesh and we can start tidying this up a bit i'll put these where the blade is here and we can make it look more quad-like if we want okay let's go back into object mode and just quickly see what that looks like come out of wireframe and we've got a basic axe shape there in the next session i'll be talking about how we can make this solid and add some details so thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: Grant Abbitt

Views: 70,544

Keywords: understand, texture, paint, learn, blender, tutorials, 3d, art, graphics, game, material, guide, easy, painting, how to, gamedev, sculpting, sculptor, gameart, game assets, blender tutorial, blender 2.9, game design, models, 3d models, stylised game art, stylised, stylized, game development, game dev

Id: wJ-Opn9ETC4

Length: 11min 39sec (699 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 04 2021