Become a Non-Destructive Modeling MACHINE with MESHmachine and DECALmachine - CGC Live Event

hi everyone and welcome to another livestream today we're gonna be talking about mesh machine and decal machine both of which are super cool so I'm definitely excited to get started in this yeah hi and I like looking through the chat earlier check out what everybody's up - thanks for coming this should be a lot of fun so last week we talked about specifically box cutter and hard ops and it was cool because we had Jerry on to talk about his own add-ons and both of those were really neat but one of the big complaints or I guess issues that I had with the workflow of hard ops and box cutter is that it tends to be very destructive when you cut into meshes using boolean's and whatnot you tend to add end up with like a lot of weird geometry and in the case of beveling after those it ends up being very destructive because you can't really work with bevels after they're completed well this first addon that we're going to be talking about mesh machine is pretty specifically made for that and it makes that workflow something that's actually non-destructive so whereas hard Ops basically automated a lot of processes that were already available to you in blender it just made them much faster mesh machine actually does some new stuff that you couldn't really do before at all and so that makes it a little bit magic so before we get started I have a little presentation here just to talk about the add-ons and kind of give you a heads up of where we're going so first off these are made by machine you can follow him on Twitter or on arc station and I reached out to him asked him if you wanted to come on the stream him or her you don't know but they said that they'd rather not they wanted to remain an enigma for the time being so I can definitely respect that but they make some super cool artwork here's a few examples of their stuff and you can tell they obviously know exactly what they're doing I mean this is just gorgeous modeling and what's even cooler about this is unlike some of the art ops fenders and stuff that you'll see that also looks similarly awesome this is low poly stuff this is stuff that you can put in a videogame and actually use in a game creation pipeline it's not super high poly so it's pretty awesome so they definitely know what they're doing and these add-ons kind of help them go through that process a bit quicker so first up or I'm talking about mesh machine and this is what makes the bevel modeling workflow much less destructive I won't say it makes it completely destructive or completely non-destructive because there are still a few edge cases where you can kind of get yourself into trouble but for the most part it makes beveling something that's actually non-destructive and a really easy to undo at any point so mesh machine he calls it the missing essentials and I would totally agree with that after using this quite a bit and kind of trying to dig into exactly what's going on this is stuff that I feel like really should have been in blender for a while and I haven't really seen in other programs either maybe they are and I just haven't found them but yeah this is stuff that makes modeling so much easier and more efficient so what exactly are these different tools well here's an overview and I'll demo each of these as we go but just to list them out first of all it can turn chamfers into bevels and back it can unbel and uncheck fur to go back to a hard edge it can change the width of a chamfer or bevel change the segments of an existing bevel resolve some tricky geometry overlaps where two bevels meet flatten polygons based on another polygon or three vertices flatten along a normal or flatten along edges turn chamfered corners convert triangular bevel corners into quad corners and a few other things so that's kind of a long list to go through and kind of hard to picture in your head so let's go ahead and take a look at exactly what all of that is so here I am in blender and to get to the mesh machine menu first you just need to be in edit mode and then you press Y and that'll bring up all of these different options and there's not really that many there's just a few N but they are quite powerful so the first one that's probably the most important is turn chamfers into bevels and back and this one is just really cool so but in order to show that you kind of have to need to know what's the difference between a bevel and a chamfer and it's very much a technical detail mostly used in other software I know 3ds max calls bevels chamfers and blender calls everything bevels and it's can get a little weird but it's like a technical like wood cutting term or at least it's from there and the difference is I just duplicate this if you select an edge hit control B and you just have that you know there's no edge loops in between it's just that one flat edge that would be a chamfer and if you hit control beef scroll up now you're making a bevel so not a massive difference between the two but in terms of usability and how you work with them they can be a bit different so in case you're wondering that's the difference between a bevel and a chamfer and as you're going definitely let me know in the chat if there's any questions yeah so the first thing is you can turn chamfers into bevels and back and this is just way too much fun I could spend a lot of time doing this but let's say you have a chamfer like this and you hit Y you can then hit fuse which is going to turn a chamfer into a bevel and then you'll get these options down here to change the number of segments you can change the tension make it either flatter or more pointy whatever you want to do and you can also change the way so that's kind of nice but what's also interesting is that you can then take something like this and then just turn it back into a chamfer so if we select this hit Y and then go let's see unfuse it we fused it first that's going to turn it right back into a chamfer so as definitely magic and you can see this if we do this a lot so with just that one example if you wanted to turn this back into the chamfer you could probably just select all these guys and it's like dissolve edge loops or something let's delete edge loops like that and so we can get back to it that way but that's not that hard but if we have a lot of bevels say you bevel this bevel this side then it's much more difficult to actually go back and do that because we don't have those supporting edges that we can kind of snap back to so it would take quite a lot of work and frankly it's not even worth it so at this point if I was modeling regularly I would just kind of have to commit to this and go for it like there's not really any going back from this point and that's what kind of frustrated me about the kind of the hard ops workflow but now you can just hit y unfuse and there you go so it makes it very very simple and I can also unbel which is similar except it'll bring it straight back to a hard edge so if you select these guys and the quick way of doing that that I love to use is just select one face hold ctrl select the last one it'll select the shortest path between the two and then you can just hit Y and then I'll go on bevel I'll bring that right back to a hard edge so I can actually bring this all the way back to just a normal cube by selecting these and it'll automatically do it for all of the edge loops for these faces so I only need to select those hit Y and on bevel I'll do the same over here hit Y on bevel and we're back to our cube and what's really cool is that these are still exactly where they were before a lot of the other ways of doing this would kind of like tilt the face a little bit or maybe it won't be exactly maybe it'll be shifted one way or the other but this is actually going to bring it back to exactly a cube which is really really cool you yeah home are its it's extremely useful yeah so I mean just that alone is probably useful enough by itself but there's actually a lot more that I can do so let's see what's next we can change the width of an existing chamfer a bevel so let's say well actually another thing that's that's kind of cool is that he gives you a tutorial blend that's like right in the menu so let's open this up and this is kind of just a fun little playground for playing with all these different options and they give really good examples of what's what and make this a little bit brighter there we go so yeah we can play around with some of these let's go with this one if we tap into edit mode give the sky some bevels i fuse that up select let's see maybe you the stop face shuffle that select this whole area that we can also fuse it like so so if we wanted to normally I mean we wanted to change the width of this good luck like I don't think you're really good so now if you just hit Y you can hit refuse and that's going to select all that and you're gonna you're going to have more options in this little f6 menu we can now change the number of segments here we can adjust the tension and we can also adjust the width now it gets a little bit weird if you're doing some different stuff you can see that this vertex right here isn't exactly going in the right way but it's still a work in progress but overall the fact that this is even possible is very very nice and it still keeps this face flat and this face flat which is the most important part let's see yeah basically everybody so far is saying that it looks awesome and it is indeed awesome Omar's question does that functionality work seamlessly with hard ops and box cutter order they cancel each other and all hell breaks loose no they do work very well together in fact they work so well together that Jerry actually put this into the hard ops menu so if you have mesh machine and you're using hard ops you can hit queue go to operations and find out the mesh machine stuff right in here so he used it so much that he put it into his own menu so it's definitely works very well together and I'd say a perfect complement yeah but that's not all now let's see what's next so after you can already change the width and segments and stuff after you've already made a bevel you can also resolve some tricky geometry so I don't know if I've made any tricky geometry yet let's see if I can mess stuff up a little bit maybe selecting these guys it's really easy to make a mess when I'm not trying to but I'm not sure exactly how to do this when I am trying to you hmm I'll have to find a good a good use case as we go maybe we'll run into one but this next tool is really helpful if you have some of these like crossed in areas where occasionally it'll get something that looks kind of like this where things are kind of bent in the wrong direction just kind of like overshoot the bevel a little bit and it'll just get messed up so what you can do is select these vertices you'll need at least four selected in the edge loop and hit Y and you can use the unto l-- and i'll call it the unto because the star means like multiplication so i think you're supposed to multiply the f sound as you say it to keep that family friendly but yeah it's hit y go on and there we go it's back to normal so if you have any of those areas where things get kind of like tangled up and like flipped around and hit y on and there you go so that just makes fixing that very simple and there's a few different options as well you again you can change the width and change the tension and all that stuff just to make sure that you're getting it back to the right spot so that definitely comes in handy quite a bit after that oh yes so you can also flatten polygons which is a good one he provides a good example over here see with the flattened along hedge so with this first one can flatten along the face so hit Y and C flatten with these two faces selected so one of them is the active face and that's what the selection is going to be flattened according to so if you select this face and then select that one hit Y and then flatten it's just going to flatten that along these edges here and you can also see that there's options for a long normal or a long edge in this case a long edge and that's really nice because if you've ever used the loop tools flatten which I used a couple times in the modeling weapons for a first person shooter course I really love the flatten tool and it's it's super handy but if you try to do that with something like this do W loop tools flatten you would get pretty much garbage and one of the big problems with this is it distorts your your edges like these are no longer flat they're kind of bulged out this came up that one came up and it's total mess but with this it's a different type of flatten and so everything else is kept nice and straight you're not messing up this face you're not messing up that face you're just kind of sliding these vertices along until that face becomes flat with those other edges Matthew says hilarious and shinola that's good that's good I like that um similarly with this one we can do the same thing with edges I believe we select these two edges and a little flatness whole face according to these edges so it nosed flat in this face because we selected two edges that are kind of like surrounding that face why and flattened and there we go so two different ways of getting the same result and you can do that in different circumstances so one might be better than the other and you have two different algorithms here depending on what you need to do so the best part about this is just that it keeps all of the other faces exactly as they were you're not ending anything whatever it just it just works and simple but if I quite useful the next thing that you can do is to basically turn triangular beveled corners into into quad corners so the reason that this is important is because there's some things that you just can't do with triangular corners for example on bevel or unfuse so if we were to select these faces we would get an error if we try to unfuse them let's go here like so let's try to unfurl get an error or an error and that's because it's trying to uh the entire edge loops for these faces here I can't really do that because you know for this face the edge loop continues and goes downwards like that but for this one it continues and goes that direction and so when they're all kind of Criss crossing it doesn't know which way to go and this corner would just turn into garbage so just kind of errors out so what we need to do in order to actually get this to work is to turn this into a quad corner and normally that would be pretty difficult because I mean how would you earn these into quads good luck I mean they all they are already quads but they're not all flowing in the same direction so that would be quite a tedious process to do so but their quad corner tool you can just select this entire corner I'll select the middle and then hit ctrl + to grow the selection it Y and then quad corner and there we go it's already made into a quad corner so you can see that they're all flowing in the same direction we now have an end gun over here where all of these faces meet but that's okay it works works for this and you can manually choose which face you want this to going or which direction you want this to face in so now the corner is flowing around this direction now let's make it flow from here let's make it take a corner and go downwards and then we can uh that direction so let's select this corner hit Y quad corner and so now it's flowing around and down so if we were to unfuse this you can now reasonably guess that it's going to unfuse this section right there so Y and unfuse there we go and of course we can always use that up again change the segments change the tension do whatever we want to do it's going to work and since this is a quad corner we can now do the same thing down here we can either unfuse or can just straight up on bevel it turn that bank back into a sharp corner and we're good to go I'll see we got some questions over here nice this one is better machine yes this one is in the mesh machine jaesik asks I am overall impressed with this add-on I'm following the author's YouTube channel thing that I don't understand is how does it does this workflow help with irregular shapes let's say you're making a robo crab a robo beetle how to achieve such curve shapes in the slow method maybe I'm missing the point really it would be useful in the modeling with bevels showing the gun tutorial you mentioned I yeah so basically this is entirely about modeling with bevels if you're not using bevels then it's not particularly useful maybe the flatten would be helpful in some cases but this is only to do with if you're working with bevels regularly and yeah if you're not using bevels then it's not going to be a huge deal but if you're doing like hard surface thing if you're using hard ops or if you just like using bevels then then this is a good Adam yeah it's just different workflows you could you know use you subdivision surface if you want but this wouldn't really be too helpful in that type of workflow just because it's not really related yeah the best part about this is just the fact that it can you take it back to exactly what it was before before beveling see lastly or yeah I think this is the last one it can turn corners so if you've I guess we can demo it on this one if we just unfuse these guys why and unfuse like so let's infuse this as well because let's say we instead of this path going along this way let's say we actually wanted to wrap around the top so we could simply unfuse these guys and then take this corner here you can see it's a quad right over here and in order to I go around the top this needs to be up here which again would probably be a pretty tedious process involving merging splitting whatever but here you can just hit Y and turn corner and there we go change the width like so and then if we were to select this Y and then fuse we can do so like that by infuse and Y and fuse there we go so now I've just changed the direction of the flow so those are I think I've gone through all of them let me double check to make sure fuse change with flatten unconfused refuse isil didn't really talk about refuse too much but it's essentially just changing bevels after the fact where you select these hit why refuse and we can change the segments I think we did go over this there's also a bridge function as well we which just changes the method of doing so which is helpful specifically if you're like connecting to objects then it gives like a better interpolation between the two yeah such it is for mesh machine all in all not very complicated in terms of using each individual tool but when all working together it's just it's so useful and it's stuff that I didn't really know that I needed until I used it and I'm not sure I would be modeling without it so next up if there aren't any questions on mesh machine let's go and talk about decal machine because it's a little bit more involved I take a little bit more time so let's see here we go decal machine easily add non-destructive details to complex surfaces how does it do that basically takes these texture and stickers that almost look like real geometry I say almost because it's not exactly but it's very very close and you can really easily position those wherever you want on the mesh you can project those to match the surface normals and material edit the decals after creation create custom decals on the fly or externally batch create them so you can make your own decals non-destructively slash through surfaces so last week we looked at the hard ops slash where you can take two objects and like cut through one object with another object but with decal machine you can do that non destructively which is just super cool you can bake the bevel modifier down to non-destructive custom mesh normals which is definitely a mouthful and but honestly it seems like that would almost be better in a in a mesh machine type tool as it I'm not sure if that exactly has to do with decals specifically but it in the tool and it's a super cool addition to it you can also fix surfaces with difficult normals also seems more of a mesh mesh machine style thing but it's in decal machine and you can also also export these decals for use in unity and unreal now the exporting thing I got a little bit hung up on I was I was testing in a bit yesterday and today and there's some quirks but I think I earned that so I'll definitely try to go through that as much as I can so let's just start a new project here and take a look at decal machine so I guess I should have something a little bit more interesting to look at let's let's add Suzanne why not I think this is definitely a pretty complex surface if you were to try to you know add holes in this mesh or add in complex details really your only option would traditionally be boolean x' and get those nasty geometries where sometimes the shading might be weird and there's just you don't have a ton of options for for how to add details to this beyond just like regular normal Maps but here we do so let's add some decals to this guy or I guess girl oh you're right sorry I forgot to transition back all right here we go so we're just working on Suzanne I gave her a subdivision surface modifier and we're gonna have some decals so to add a decal in decal machine you just hit D and first without anything selected hit D and you get these inserts this one's blank because I've added my own I don't think I gave it enough time to render a preview so that's okay but these are all the ones that you would get with decal machine and let's just pick some circular holes something that would be pretty difficult to try to add to this kind of surface regularly and you can just hit control and position this wherever you want on the mesh I'll see it some at some points it kind of like cuts through but let's say we want to give her some holes right about here and one tool that I've been using a lot that comes with decal machine that's made specifically for rotating these decals I've actually used with just regular objects and it's super helpful so if you're in decal machine or if you just have it installed you can hit ctrl shift alt and then scroll up and down on your mouse wheel and it'll rotate things 45 degrees which is unbelievably useful so you can even to that up you can even do that with regular objects and it'll go around its local z-axis so I think even if we you know rotate that something weird we can still rotate it in even increments around its local axis you know even though we're still in global space so this is just super useful and I use it all the time so let's add some holes here you can see that this is a kind of a complex surface excuse me question decal machine have ad shortcut and I use the grease pencil more than decal so I'd like to know how to change the decal machine shortcut to ctrl D I'm pretty sure you can do that in the user preferences because by default yeah it takes over the D key and then it gives grease pencil tools with ctrl D but if you go to file user preferences now where'd you go there we go decal machine it has a settings right here under key maps and then you can just remap this where it says decal machine you can change that to ctrl D and then grease pencil pie change that to D and that'll do exactly that so once you have this positioned roughly where you want it to be then you can select your target object like so just hit D and decal project and that's going to project that right to the surface like so and sometimes it still cuts through a little bit so you can change the projection or the decal height which usually I'll just change the mid level of the displace modifier that adds and that kind of brings it up a little bit but I can see that that added directly to the surface and so it just kind of looks like it's stuck there like a sticker but what's pretty cool is if we go into a rendered view it looks really good like you can hardly tell this is not geometry there's some instances where maybe I brought it up a little bit too much yeah if you're to go and render this out like it looks pretty solid unless you're zoomed in really far this is just way easier than trying to add that with geometry that would be an absolute nightmare so this is really cool and the reason it looks surprisingly good is because it's not using regular normal Maps it's using its using let me find the gif of it over here is using parallax mapping which is not something that I think is is default in blender but it's using this crazy node tree actually I can show it to you in the materials here so if we go into the shader node or this tab into it actually no it's not the a shader it's the parallax over here so this is what's plugged into the vector you'll see if we unplug this and nothing changes here but if we were to go into a render view this is just a regular normal map but as soon as we plug in the parallax mapping then we get that depth effect like so and this is what controls it so this is a really really large rabbit-hole of math that I'm not going to pretend to understand at the moment I'm sure I could dig into it a little bit but I don't know it's beyond me but when you plugged that in then it gives an actual depth effect so in the documentation he provides a gif of the difference and that'll probably be a little bit easier to see then waiting for the cycles to like a resample every time they can see this flip between regular got a flat and then parallax map where you can actually see like down into the details a bit where it's not just you know a flat map it actually looks like it has substantial depth so that's what kind of gives it the good like faked mash effect and it yeah for most things unless you're like extremely up close this works perfectly fine and this is you know mostly for use in in a game pipeline but even for renders and cycles this this is great and again is just a perfect combination if you combine this with hard office if you combine this with mesh machine then yeah this is just another level of details another way of doing it so parallax mapping is pretty sweet so let's add some more decals over here see what else we can do it D bring in some other ones so these are all things that like subtract from the surface over here decal project change that mid-level a bit and since we have hard ops enabled then we can also mirror these things super easily just by hitting Q mirror and then choosing which way you want to mirror it that's pretty useful let's add some of these inserts which are kind of both going in and out I guess they're a little bit more complicated they look pretty cool you and I'm just kind of like randomly sticking these on the surface but ideally you'd give a little bit more thought to where you're placing everything but you can see that what it's doing is it's kind of like taking the geometry that Suzanne has and then like applying it to this plane then transferring the normals using the the data transfer modifier and that's using the displace modifier to kind of place it directly on the surface and give you a little bit of adjustment and they're also parented to the object so if you move this around that's totally fine Jacek asks but if this is a blender special shader that how did you move it to a game engine does that mean it does not export big simple normal map sort of so I can get to that at the end if we if we have time but the export process is interesting because it exports differently for different engines so I messed around with it a little bit in unity and let's see if I have the test here yeah so you can export these to unity and there's a way of doing that but you need to use the special shader that comes with it so when you export this it's going to give you a set of like machine shaders you can see here and let's see if I go to decals and you can find them in the unity under machine decals and then you drag in these custom textures which are like an interesting combination of of things so you're not going to be using standard shaders you're gonna be using custom shaders here and similarly and unreal but there's a few a few different nuances there especially since in unity you need to switch to deferred rendering in order to get the parallax mapping and all that stuff so it is is very blender specific but one thing that you can also do is you can bake these down to regular normal Maps and that's what I'm going to be doing um at the moment I've been using this to make some sci-fi assets which I can show you guys at the end if you want but I've been baking them down to those meshes so that they can be used in anything because I don't want to make something that can only be used in unity or only used and unreal I want to be able to provide these assets in a way that they can be used for anything you can put them up on sketchfab whatever you want and so I don't want to like limit people with that so I'll just be baking them down to regular normal Maps and that's totally possible here so if you don't get the cool parallax mapping but it you know it looks like any other any other game asset would anyway so that's fine yeah okay sweet so let's continue adding a few of these guys actually we can we can do a few more things with this so we talked about how to easily position these on the mesh project decals to match the surface normals edit decals after creation so that's something that we can can do so let's say that we have Cal let's go on the ear or something the 3d cursor and let's add a latch like this and since this is just a texture on a mesh we can do some pretty interesting things so we don't have to be just stuck with exactly what we have here so in case we want to make this the latch part of this longer again since this is just a mesh we can easily do that by adding edge loops excuse me you have to turn on correct UVs and that way as you slide this it won't mess anything up add in the edge loops like that and then just take this and then stretch the texture I guess we'll have to go along the normal like so so now we have it really long latch let's place it you're like so you all right D&D Cal projects and there we go edit these afterwards which is quite nice and if you ever get them like shooting through the mesh because of the way it's projected it might end up on the other side if you have the projection depth set to high you can see that it kind of like shoots all the way through so you need to lower that and you'll be set and if you don't want to see those wires and you can also just go to none in the deep I menu and you can see that you know some of these do get a little bit stretched but you can kind of fix them after the fact or you can re unwrap them or change them in the UV editor and kind of like fix the distortion that way if you if you want but some of them do get a little bit twisted every now and then okay so more things that you can do with this let's do a slash so kind of like in our tops where you can slash through objects you can fake that effect I guess would be a good way to put it by adding in like panel lines so let's slash through this corner of her head here see maybe not going through anything else there am i hitting anything I don't think so alright so let's slash this so we're gonna use the sphere to cut like a line around this part of her head so select these two it D and slice topology like so and it's just gonna add a panel line right along there using the topology of Suzanne that's changed mid level there and there we go so now if we look at this in cycles it looks like there's a slice cut out of her head there we go and you can also do something similar but if it's like a really dense object or whatever then you can also not use the topology if you wanted to just generate new topology instead of using Suzanne's original topology no way you'd do that I'll just throw in a cube here is use slice float and this will just create new geometry that attempts to match it and again you might get a little bit of weirdness right around these corners but again since this is a mess you can go in and you know clean this up however you want and like re unwrap it and change all those different settings so sometimes it can be a little a little hit and miss but so far I've enjoyed using it but as you can see here there's there's actually quite a bit of cleanup that would need to happen around here to make it look good and since this is new geometry it's also been shrink-wrapped which pretty helpful such that it won't go anywhere weird you always will stick to the surface okay so there we go we've made a panel cut you can also do that with different materials so this was automatically assigned or maybe I signed it the initial base material that machine uses so anytime you have a new object here and you want to match those decals you can just hit D initial base material and it'll give it that same base now because so change this so let's say I made a different material and I wanted to give it a different color make it a little bluish little lighter like so now it doesn't really match these panels have all we can do is then select these guys select the base hit D and then boot maybe you only need to select - there we go match and now it'll match part of this panel with that material so match and if you wanted to flip these two then you can hit D and panel flip and it'll flip which side of this has been matched to the mesh so we can do that for some of these guys match match and this won't work for extremely complex materials but it will work for anything that just has like a regular principal vs DF or you know diffuse glossy kind of stuff so nothing too crazy but it will try to match these outsides a bit that way it looks more natural than just kind of no it looks less like a like an actual sticker and more like it's supposed to be there okay one more I think let's do one more and then let's look at some more stuff oh yeah you also different like text inserts or like just paint decals that you can place anywhere you he'll project all right you can also do a material cut which is very similar to a panel cut that we looked at before but in this case it'll use a different material and apply it to that area so if we give this sphere something new let's give it a principal be SDF and like a yellow let's move the shade it all right something like that then we can select these two it D and material cut oh actually okay so I'm singing something else but you can also do that so you can material cut like so and it'll just cut through this option here so you can hit l and limit by one of these seem there you go and apply a new material to just this area so that's pretty helpful if you're if you want to change the actual material that it is or you can apply a material decal which is just like a regular decal but it applies a new material to the area so the underlying base mesh is not changed at all but you just have another decal on top of it some of these guys you oops cue mirror way go Jacek says I guess new feature called plug will replace most of the decal machine use cases some of them yes so in different ways so plug which I don't have a version of the I don't know whether that'll be in mesh machine or decal machine I forget exactly but it's essentially like adding hard ops inserts but a little bit more natural like it fits to the mesh better and it has better transitions between the two and I I don't think it'll completely replace this because this is something that you can use in a game pipeline and this is very low poly whereas plugs are not necessarily going to be low poly because they're actual mesh so I don't think they're gonna compete with each other in any way I think they're just different ways of achieving details but for different use cases so you can use them in you might want to use plugs for like really large areas but then for small details like screws and bolts you can use decals yeah I think this is enough of that like we've looked at most these details there's different cut lines that we can use all that stuff we have for now let's look at a few of the other features that are a little bit interesting so one of them that's interesting is the W step right here and what this does is it applies the bevel modifier and makes the that's kind of a weird way putting it okay so I guess we'll just see it in action but if I add a bevel modifier here turn the width down got a base material so you can see it you can see that this now has a lot of champ furs everywhere and this is kind of why I was thinking it fits more with the mesh machine because it deals with chamfers and bevels but if you have a bevel modifier here and you increase the segments and it's really nice and smooth you shade it smooth whatever you want or maybe as sharpen degree something like that okay so you have this that's beveled and it's very high poly it's not something that you'd want to export to a game engine but what you can do is hit D and W step and this makes it look like very little happened but it actually just removed all of those extra bevels so if we look at this in wireframe view this is now much more low poly and what it's done is it's basically taking that mesh that we had duplicated it removed all of those in-between bevels that made it a bevel instead of a chamfer it made all of those into chamfers and then it's applied the normals of the beveled one to the chamfered one using the data transfer modifier so if we hide this and unhide it you can see that you know this is is in fact just you know a low poly mesh I'll alt H to unhide it you can see that this is you know relatively low poly but as soon as we turn this on it's getting the normals of that high poly one and what's interesting here is that instead of actually changing the instead of giving it like a normal map this is actually the geometry normals itself so this isn't even textured it's not unwrapped or anything it's just applied those normals these normals and we can kind of look at this if we go down to normals here if we go to vertex per faced normal I don't I guess since this isn't applied then we want to see it in edit mode and when we change this that's a bummer but yeah it changes the direction of these vertex per face normals so that it appears as if it's was beveled so yeah it's kind of seems like a very niche thing to do but when working with game assets I can definitely see myself using that quite a bit especially just with the whole bevel baking thing takes a while so this might make it easier so that's a kind of a cool one another one is a surface fix so let's say that we're working on Suzanne here and we've added our decals but we want to add an actual like boolean inset so let's say we use hard ops and we want to just throw something in here see like this guy you that's not what I wanted to do you oh I was thinking of I see let's use one of these guys okay so let's say we cut this out we have to be a little bit more careful here because it doesn't actually project it to the surface like decal machine does you all right merge there we go so you can see how now we have this horrible horrible shading that's going on can you keep on editing this base object or the normals are you messed up I'll have to try that in a second but first I wanna show you this because it's it's super cool so here in edit mode I guess if we need to apply the boolean modifier again something that's fairly destructive now we have all this terrible shading and we have these boolean's here and they're not inherently bad some of these vertices we can probably clean up a bit I merge these guys together I so but overall this is not looking pretty let's remove doubles like that yeah looks pretty bad but we get that nice cut an inset so what decal machine allows us to do is hit D and then go to surface fix and it creates a new object and here we just need to recreate that initial surface to get that better smooth shading back so I'm actually going to see take this face here troll plus throw that selection do I need to do that again think so delete faces there we go so probably take ice a little bit of time just to get done but it's definitely worth it so if we take all of these extra vertices that we don't want alt em merge at last so we only have one vertex there take all these guys all TM merge at last you select these I'll merge it over here all to emerge at last okay so now we have this triangle and I'm gonna try to roughly recreate the original quad geometry that we had one thing that I kind of dislike about some of these add-ons is that it it throws you into face snapping mode with rotation turned on and most of the time when I'm modeling I really want vertex snapping turned on instead without rotation maybe I'll have to do something where it automatically switches to vertex when I'm in edit mode and then face an object mode I'll probably be much faster but anyway let's snap those remove doubles and I can see that the shading is back and what we want to do is apply that to the initial object so once we do that we can hit or you have to go out of edit mode you can see this is called surface fix Suzanne hit D commit surface fix and voila look at that it's applied that shading to these normals so you can see that is basically just taking all these ugly lines here and fix them so this one's still a little bit of a problem just because of guess the end on shading itself kind of sucks some verses that are super close maybe if this was attached to that and we fixed it again but overall this is just a a quick fairly quick way to actually fix some of these boolean issues that you might get if you're working with boolean's and you get that like weird shading then you can fix it like so you keep on editing the base object oh yeah so let's go back to the other example and see if I can keep editing the base um maybe not as it is a a step in in which case it's likely that you're committing your changes well let's give it a try so let's say bevel that a bunch smooth shading D W step yeah so when you go into edit mode its initially hidden and that's kind of the indicator of what's going on kind of like hard Ops hides things once you step it up um yeah if you now edit this yeah I mean still sort of works but yeah it would definitely get a little bit messed up so I guess this is a very last section of the pipeline kind of thing to do not something to do as you're going but since this is just a modifier you can always turn it off add another bevel modifier w step again do it that way and that might work but yeah it looks like that's something that you'll want to do at the very end maybe duplicate your mesh and then do it just so that you don't lose any changes and just kind of be careful about it that way dick says this could replace my shrink wrap modifier technique for fixing reading under your surface details yeah I think that's that's mostly what it's doing under the hood as well shrink wrap data transfer normals and call today maybe you have to reapply after edit I don't think so because it's still taking that other object and projecting the normals that way so it's still kind of storing those initial initial things and since it doesn't go back so once so once I beveled this and it did the W step you'll notice that doesn't go back to what it was originally because originally it's just a regular I coasts ear but once like W step and I'm hide it you'll see that these aren't the straight edges that we had before and I don't think we can I mean you might be able to unjam for I think you can uncheck for all of these because it's n-gons and whatnot I'd be very impressed if this works yeah you can't do on shampooer with n-gons so you could go around and individually or every single one of these or maybe you could select all in this way chamfer yeah so you'd have to do all of these one at a time to get back to the original one and then do it again but that's a lot of work so really I just duplicate your object save that on another layer just in case you need to go back and then continue um that way yeah you don't to lose any changes there so there's not a ton left stocker out let me left definitely let me know if you have any questions but we've talked about everything except for exporting decals so this is kind of the last piece of the puzzle here so first let's look at exporting to unity so if we select everything here there's a special export menu you hit by going ctrl alt shift E and you definitely won't be hitting that one by accident but then you can create Atlas group so with all these guys selected like so and then once you have an Atlas group you hit E and initiate decal Atlas and what this is going to do is make an atlas of all of the decals as the name implies and you can adjust things here so let's say for example that we only have you know a few of these and they're not very big so there's not really any reason it needs to take up this much space we can shrink that down it can't go over the original size just because you know it can't be larger than what it was before but you can shrink down everything else in comparison if you want and then once you're ready just hit ctrl alt shift key again repack that Atlas gives you options for padding or down sampling if you want so let's say we want more padding repack and it's kind of nice it gives you some information up here ctrl alt shift E except Atlas solution and that brings us back to here and then so this means that they're all unwrapped and packed into a game ready Atlas not something you need to do if you're just rendering this out in cycles that's created a group you can see that they're included in your pure DM Atlas decal one thing that I learned is don't try to add things to this or subtract from this manually it's a lot of under the hood stuff going on that uses this group so you can't you can't just remove this or add a new one it won't it won't work exactly the way you might think but yeah once we have that then we can select the things that we want to export and create an export group um info atlas oh I guess since we have some info then we need to add an intro Atlas there let's just accept that solution then I think we're ready yep create export group multiple targets exactly one non decal it needs to be okay so that's right so this is not a decal so it can't be part of the export group with this guy it can be if you're using a simple export group right here but for this example let's just hide that that's okay we'll use the normal workflow control out shifty great export group like so and the way you know that things are ready to be exported is it removes all of the fancy materials that you can't see in the viewport there's no ambient occlusion anymore things look very flat in the viewport that's how you know is ready to go and ctrl alt shift e one more time and now you can export to different things so here you get the options for everything that you can export it to decal bake down sketchfab substance painter unity with a back nine shader rock 9 shader I don't know machine shader unpacked or Unreal Engine 4 now I will export to unity using the machine shader and you get different options here I'll call this Suzanne mush reading all right sounds good and once that's done you can go to the export menu again and click export save your scene first this has a lot of good reminders in it alright now that I've saved the scene we're good to go and that'll automatically open up everything that you need here and a folder gives you your shaders it gives you your FBX and also give you some of your textures here so now if we open up unity Susanne looks like she came out of the hospital yeah not her best day to be honest it's a little rough we'll delete these objects first so we have a blank slate one thing that's good to know about working with this in a game engine is that all of the decals in your scene are gonna be using the same material and same the same texture Atlas alright so if you have multiple game assets that are going to be used in the same scene they need to share the same Atlas and same like export group and all that stuff otherwise you know it's not going to work you have to use the same material for all of them so once you've exported it you can drag these things into the project since I already have the shaders I'm not going to load those I'll just upload the suzanne machine and i'll grab these textures here add them in as well at her right here and so you see that it's I grabbed the camera as well didn't need that okay so here we have Suzanne and excuse me all the decals are applied now the reason that they're doing this instead of baking this down into an original texture is exactly interesting I'd recommend reading the polycount forums on it if you're interested search for the the methods that they used in star citizen and I forgot what the other one was but it's called the deferred decal technique and it's really quite interesting but essentially what it is is instead of unwrapping the entire thing in making textures for it you can just assign this a base material and then all of the decals stick those on with with lots of little textures but since they're all using one large map it apparently just saves more memory then using a bunch of individually wrapped textures so I don't know I haven't dug too far into it or like the reasons why but definitely it works and it's pretty cool so first I'm gonna give for this base material like so and one thing to set up before you do this is you have to go to edit project settings layer and under color space switch this from gamma to linear so I'll show you the difference here a bit of difference but that will just make sure that the decals look correct and you also have to go to edit project settings and graphics and my throat is super dry and switch the rendering here you can see there's different tiers for the viewport you just need to change tier 3 but if you're exporting to other programs then you'll need to change the other tiers as well and for each different environment that you're exporting to but since we're just using tier 3 let's click use defaults for everything else and then you guys switch the rendering path from forward to deferred now that's important because the parallax mapping won't work with forward rendering it'll only work with deferred rendering where it saves kind of the lighting until after those those textures are taken into account otherwise it'll just end up has black patches so once you switch that in the graphics settings then we can go back to the material and apply the decals material so I created a new material and just call it decals like so or maybe they were part of it and then i right-clicked and was it Oh once it's like act ah here we go so you find the materials in here decals right click strapped from prefab there we go and that'll make it so you can actually edit it because otherwise you can't actually text your stuff there so I'll drag the decal material over there and I already set this to machine stuff but normally it'll be just standard and then you switched to the machine shader decals plane and then you dragon these textures here see which ones are started from a new project but oh well so dragon the textures and what an interesting thing is that the normal map right here is not something that you need to change to an actual normal map so normally when you're using this with a normal shader or a standard shader I should say you would switch this to a normal map but if you were to do so you'd get some pretty weird effects and just incorrect shading so since this is a custom shader you just leave it as default and it takes care of it under the hood it's also helpful if you turn off compression it'll just make it look a little bit better hmm excuse me and yeah then it'll work so I can also do that for the panel decals like so dragging that material dragging those textures and the machine material has special settings for you know the parallax height we can zoom in here and see actually how much parallax effect that we want to be added to it like so and you can really see it on this detail here or if we're looking at at this well if we're looking at it from this side it really looks like there's a little bit of an edge going into the mesh there and we look at it from this side then again we start to see it right in there that's pretty cool effect you can you know turn that up turn it down as you wish change the ambient occlusion all that stuff so that's how to use it in unity and it's fairly simple if you're working in unreal I don't believe you can get the parallax effect um as far as I know I could be wrong though so don't hold me to it but uh I see up questions I can see a use for element 3d in After Effects yes so as I'll show I'll show this example now um may as well but for everything else that doesn't necessarily support that kind of like parallax mapping or maybe you want to expert it something else then we can do is you can export just like a generic normal map from it let's go ctrl shift E and reset the export group I guess we could switch export here as well if you switch to unpacked then it'll just give you a whole bunch of textures that you can use in basically any program if you hit sketchfab then it'll do something similar but what I was gonna do is the decal baked down and so what what this is going to do is apply these textures both of the info decals the material color it'll take the normal maps from here and apply them just the suzanne model so instead of exporting the decals as additional mesh to unity then i can take this and just export this suzanne mesh and give that indy unity there's one thing that you'll notice here in unity itself is that i didn't actually unwrap this at all like this isn't unwrapped it didn't need to be it just has this regular material with the other stuff on it no need for you v's no need for seams no need for all of that stuff so that's really handy but if you're working in a regular pipeline that doesn't support these decals then you can do the bake down so let's open up UV image editor here and quickly unwrap this smart UV project which is almost never the right choice but for the sake of time it'll work give a bit of margin not that much all right so pretend this is beautifully unwrapped then we can now take these guys control ship II and this is where I got a little bit stuck before so hang with me if it if I don't get it on the first try but if you switch to decal bake down it'll give you all of the maps that you can possibly bake to resolution distance bias for baking the normals and whatnot transfer sharp edges which is helpful for making sure that the shading is correct on hard surface stuff this doesn't have any sharp edges so it's fine substance naming so it'll automatically apply the normals to it'll automatically apply the map to the correct part of the normals in substance painter as soon as you kind of drag them in so that's helpful yeah so once you do that bake down and yeah that didn't work so before what I had to do was reset the export group so create a new one oh is because I moved the stuff before that's what it was okay so when I moved the stuff into unity I kind of messed up with the I messed up the file so I'm just going to delete all of these and it'll just have to make anyone you you alright let's try this again really hope this works did you save a new blend file since pecking this atlas maybe you okay yes so I I messed up by dragging that stuff into unity bummer okay let me just reset every honestly I think it would be a mesh machine I think that would be the most useful at this time just because it works with just regular bevels probably mesh machine number one hard ops number two geek out machine number three box cutter number four I had to order them but they're all good William says went offline you okay it looks like something stuttered let me know if its back but it says everything's healthy so I'll continue going forward let me know if you guys missed anything maybe the electricity guys from the other day came back now they didn't come back but I they literally reset the power it wasn't even like pulling the plug like they didn't actually like leave it off or more than a second but they reset the power as soon as I stopped the other strain it was like within minutes it was is pretty dense I was kind of worried about that but apparently they really needed to give me a new new meter okay so yeah I did actually answer your question in terms of like which ones I think I would buy an order probably number one mesh machine number two would be hard ops three decal machine and then for box cutter mostly in order of which ones I'd find the most practical for my personal workflow but I don't work the same as everybody else everybody works a little bit differently so all all depends so basically I was having trouble with the export here and kind of struggling through it as I was going because I exported to unity first and then moved some of the files around that it needed to work so that was that was my fault but let me make a new Alice except the Atlas solution you and Lord also reset all the atlases everything back to normal you and now I'm just getting lots of errors all right let me just try this again with a new file because I did something to mess it up and I'm not sure what it is alright let's just add a couple decals here yeah this is pretty much the the last you like details of the stream I didn't have anything really beyond this so if you have any other questions let me know or if you want to see something in particular that's totally fine export thing was kind of throwing me off earlier as well you Jake says hard ops will need some fixing for 2.82 point it uses q4 the user yeah I mean pretty much everything will need fixing for 2.8 it's just it's a different beast and since things aren't in the tool shelf anymore it like we need to find like another place to actually put some of these things look as hard opps in particular most of its in the 3d view so that's helpful but a lot of add-ons will have to be pretty pretty redone okay so let's try this again all shift II create Atlas Group except share info atlas except I got a unpack this guy or unwrapped you projects give a little bit of margin and I can see that in 3d view if I go to our tops see maybe I can't do that in edit mode oh well UV preview looks fine to me it's create export group now I need to save the file actually it's better to do that before trading export group I read in the documentation you hmm not still saying you well that's cuz I named it after making the Atlas that's what it was so I saved the file after setting up the Atlas and so as you saved the Atlas it saves the file with it that's what I was doing wrong okay let me try this again 2.8 uses less shortcuts to make it easier for developers of add-ons so it shouldn't be a big problem no I don't think so it should be should be fine you you I'm glad this is fun to play with otherwise redoing this a few times would be kind of annoying but still pretty fun so let me know in the chat like which of these do you think you guys would use do you think you would use any of them or what would you use them for any projects that you're working on oh no you I'm always curious to see if whether this would be actually useful or whether it's just like interesting to watch I don't know all right so I projected some details now I need to save the file before doing the Alice that's what I learned okay save as maybe dies into a test file all right then then create the Atlas Group Eilis mm-hmm except the Atlas solution there we go so far so good you select those guys create export group there we go did I unwrap this I don't remember go you smart UV projects give it a little bit of a margin like so UV preview looks fine Drella shifty okay so this time we're gonna do the decal baked down and what it's going to do is take these and kind of just like stamp them onto the surface ctrl alt shift e I don't need to export the FBX all of this should be fine and alright bake down and I'll take a minute or so because it has to bake all those textures see I use hard ops and box cutter all the time I don't think mesh machine or decal machine x4 now would be all that much use heart says you definitely give both a whirl it says on second thought you'd want mash machine first econ machine second hard ops third I just don't see myself doing a whole lot of that highly intricate mechanical detail yeah that's true definitely depends on like what you're absolutely working on wilco says for now I won't use any of the add-ons in the future I think I'd start with hard ops and this is something that Gerry said in the last stream and I 100% agree is that these add-ons and these are included with what he said about his add-ons I'd definitely add them all together on this group they're going to make you faster modelers but they're not going to make you better modelers so if you have trouble making detailed objects and you know let's I don't think you guys are but let's say for example if some of these like a bad modeler and they just make a mess this is going to help you make a mess much faster and make a much larger mess and that's certainly the case with me when I was starting out so it's not going to help you you know magically create awesome stuff if you don't know the fundamentals but if you are a good modeler then they can help you make good models faster and in so doing help you create better models because you have more time to spend on them but yeah don't don't think that you need to get these in order to be better or like create cool stuff if you can't create cool stuff already on your own first so definitely learn the fundamentals first and then as you're kind of running into these walls that's when you know like okay that's what I should get it but if you're not running into those walls don't worry about it it's not it's just kind of a fun fun thing to explore a few asks can one use decals as actual mesh components can you clarify what you mean by that Christina says I'm working on a sci-fi project decal comes in handy for panels and stuff like that I used hard opsin box cutter for the basic shapes and the great blur by Mark Kings worth oh yeah that's a cool one that's on the blender market that's pretty sweet I will complete the project you with decal machine nice looking forward to seeing it and Martin said you made a sweet fancy box see if I can view it oh yeah very cool look at that this is using decal machine yeah you can see right there very cool nice that's pretty awesome I love the colors on that to look sweet yeah okay so once that's done it'll make these out and so we have the atlas textures which were the original packed Atlas but since we're just using the square by itself we don't need that so I'm going to shift D duplicate the square boot over to another layer so we're not looking at the decals or anything to do with them see can we remove this from the I'll just reset the groups so now that was interesting okay so this is just a regular object now and it's already been unwrapped so let's apply those textures drag them in here so we go to the baked textures folder that it created drag in a normal map we can drag in the ambient occlusion some of these are really only useful in other programs but here might be good we can try the height why not and alpha-2 like isolate the decals if we need to all right and here we could start mixing stuff together all right so this is the ambient occlusion so I'll shift a color XR chibi and I realize that I'm rendering while I'm streaming hopefully that doesn't cause any problems but let's multiply these together and switch this to non color data because it's not a albedo texture just black and white normal map so a vector and normal map look that in you can see it just works like a regular normal map non color data you height we can also use a bump map if we want that to the normal map I don't think we need to because I think it'll just do the same thing but I don't think there's any extra details in this nah doesn't look like it but if for any reason you're wondering how to combine a normal map in a bump map this is how I'm color data plug that into the height maybe we'll just make it extra strong oh yeah there we go and if you wanted to isolate those details then you can use this alpha map as I export it and you can plug these in in substance painter as well and one thing that's cool how much time we have let's see go for about an hour and half so I'll probably wrap this up pretty soon I mean oh if there's anything else how does anybody know the thing oh the theme of that I'm using yes file user preferences I'm using modern minimalist which is my own theme but it's actually in blender so it's bundled by default and you can find it in your presets question wood using decal machine be kind of the same functionality as adding decals and substance painter yeah pretty much if you're doing this bake down technique so yeah essentially it just comes with the ambient occlusion and all that stuff let's try this in the substance painter just for fun because I do want to show you something so it's been a while since I've done it so I don't know if it'll work the first time but let's go export FBX sure this works selected objects all right let's load up substance painter creating new project you OpenGL everything else is good import mash normal maps and baked maps where do i I saved them where did I save it over there so these are all already named with the substance naming convention so hopefully it'll assign them correctly you you ah looks like it didn't let's go to like so ambient occlusion you yeah one thing that I wanted to show is if you go to the layers if you ever want to add things on top of it so say we already had a normal map for example let's say that these corners were not beveled and you needed to combine the result of the decal normal map with the regular cube like bevel shader normal map or baked bakes bevels normal map that's something that I was was working on so what you can do is add a new layer as a fill layer and then add this so let's just get rid of this guy I can't see it there we go so let's say we already have the normal map taken up by something else then what we can do is add a fill layer like so and make that the normal map use only normal like so there we go so this would be then added on to whatever normal Mac we already have set and then what's interesting is that we can now add an anchor point I believe as this layer so let's call this decal normal and add anchor point so this is something that you can do to the decal normals and what it'll do is if you're using a smart material go down smart materials probably should have done this on a more complex object but that's okay oh don't crash okay I probably have too much going at once let's pick an interesting one doing machinery okay so this is placed above everything else and so you can't really you know see it I guess you could put this on top but overall it's not really the details here aren't really respecting this I guess I need to bake the worldspace normal uncheck ID spec normal a oh sure okay make those really quick but essentially this is a way to get the that dirt like into the crevices of the decals um otherwise it doesn't really show up in the right spots you yeah so it added them here but if we were not using that Almanac did bake it with the worldspace no I did not do that so where is that coming from I was probably coming from the ambient occlusion there we go okay so let's say that our ambient occlusion our normal map is already taken up can't do it the dirt is not in the right spot and have those decal normal Maps but just not working so what we can do is go to the dirt and go into the mask here mask editor and since we've added a anchor point to the decal normal let's go to the properties to micro normal anchor points decal normal reference channel normal and I believe extra details that's really disappointing if that doesn't work I swear this works anything occlusion not found you hmm sorry about that I've definitely used this before because I know that's what anchor points are mostly useful for anybody's done this before definitely let me know you this should be in the normal channel you hmm yeah it got me it stumped me I'll have to look this up later I was hoping to show you guys that because it was pretty cool but I know for a fact that it did have to do with the anchor points here micro normal you no reference found you alright I'm stumped on that one but to make anchor work I think you need to have normal still working and applied how much about this program but I thought you turned off a Oh on baking oh yeah I did turn off a Oh that's why I just needed to add that in later have normal still working and applied you probably lost it when you removed the normals at one step there's no curvature on the object I did bake those afterwards and I can add in ambient occlusion again but that kind of defeats the purpose of of showing what I was hoping to show but that's okay yeah probably lost it somewhere along the way I'll have to look in that into that and obviously since I'll be doing this kind of thing in my next course then it'll be going over it anyway and I better figure it out before then but for the most part this was talking about decal machine and mesh machine and how to use those together so hopefully recovered it got a little rough at the end but I think it was quite fun and entertaining uh mostly I think mesh machine is just absolutely killer it's so much fun to be able to go from just like a completely not unusable but like something that you couldn't ever get back from to take something that is very destructive and make it non destructive is always helpful so maybe there's more things like that out there that I don't know that I need that I I do hopefully we can discover them soon but Nash machine is one of them and then decal machine is just kind of fun to play with and definitely useful for like quickly adding small details to stuff so thanks again for watching I will see you next week I believe next week is Jonathan Williamson talking about root OPA flow 2.0 and if you didn't know about that that was released today so definitely check out the video for that on our youtube channel it's a couple years in the making and it's a huge huge upgrade from the original and he'll be talking about that and demoing it and answering all your questions about that next week though I'll see any last-minute stuff I don't believe so so that's it for today thanks for watching and take care

Channel: CG Cookie

Views: 32,053

Keywords: machine, hard surface, modeling, blender, decal, game art, game design, unity, unreal, normal, sticker, bake, parallax, mesh

Id: o7CTwNFW5N8

Length: 99min 34sec (5974 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 22 2018