Creating Game Assets in Blender

I've heard you lots of you wanted to know how to turn an asset you've created in blender into a game ready asset which you can use in any game engine such as Unity or unreal now specifically baking materials so let's dive into that this video is sponsored by Squarespace more on that later now the process for creating game assets is mostly as follows creating a high poly model creating a low poly model the two of these are interchangeable between the two UV unwrapping your low poly model baking your high poly detail onto your low poly diesel adding textures and finally exporting the product before using any game engine now I have a rudimentary model in this scene to which I've added procedural materials that I created using the techniques from my how to create professional materials video and there's also a low poly version in the scene which we'll use to bake our textures too now the difference in tries between the two is huge as the high poly version is roughly 21k tries and the low poly version is only 780 six tries and this is exactly why we use low poly meshes with high poly detail baked on top of it now if you want to follow along with this video you can download the free base file from my patreon but alternatively I would like to challenge you to create your own high poly and low poly mesh to follow along with how this baking process works you'll learn tons from it and it's fun as well so we only need to unwrap our low poly model as we'll only use the high poly model to bake down its detail onto our low poly mesh this is going to be fairly simple but before we start unwrapping let's create a material to view how our unwrap is looking so let's head on over here to shading create a new material here and let's add in an image texture let's plug that into the base color and now let's create a new texture I'm going to call this UVS and I'm going to set the resolution to be 2048 and let's change the generated type from blank to UV grid and hit ok now if I go into material preview you'll see that nothing's actually happening because as we have not unwrapped our model just yet so for now let's go into edit mode hit a u and choose unwrap so that's a hot mess and that's because we haven't added any seams or anything so let's take this thing into UV editing this is how our UV unwrap is now looking it's a bunch of triangles which is uh not looking too good I might say the easiest way to unwrap hard surface objects and I learned this from Josh Gambrell he has a amazing Channel where he teaches a lot of these things is to actually select some of the sharp edges so with nothing selected in here let's go over here to select and choose select sharp edges now we can just right click Mark seam and then re-unwrap our mesh here and it automatically will look a lot better now I'm using the conformal method by default it's set to angle based but I usually like conformal just a little bit better and the only thing that we need to change now is maybe delete a few seams which are not necessarily useful so let's just look around and let's look at some of these face Loops like for example the this phase Loop over here it has all of these seams which it does not necessarily need so I'm just going to go back into Edge select select all of these it only needs one around the entire Loop basically so for all of these and that's the one we're gonna leave in here so let's just leave this one here so Ctrl e Clear seam and re-unwrap our mesh here now if you don't want to re-unwrap your mesh every time you can go here to options and enable live unwrap this should sort of do it live every time you make a change so over here clear the seam you'll see that it's now updating how it looks so we only have one in here as well over here let's do the same just gonna create this one all right and the inside of this does not really matter it won't be visible at all anyways plus we're kind of using procedural uh items anyways so it shouldn't be too much of a problem I am going to delete this one here and while we're at it I'm actually also going to delete the entire Loop here because basically this is a flat plane with just a couple of extensions so let's just select all of these this one clear the seam and there you have it that's fine and while we're at let's do the same to the top here [Music] alright so perfect that's looking a lot better our unwrap is looking clean now and we can take this into the next step baking with your low poly object unwrapped you're ready to bake your high poly detail down to your low poly mesh now there are several ways to go about this here the usual way means you'll bake down things like a normal map ambient occlusion and sometimes an object ID map you do this when you want to texture the object in a separate software such as substance painter or 3D code in this case we're using materials made in blender including additional normal detail colors roughness and all other relevant Shader Maps so we'll have to bake all of those down including the high poly detail to our low poly mesh using blender with all this talk about baking you might just be in the mood to bake some doughy goodness for yourself and what do you know apparently you've got a neck for it and you want to share those delicious things you've created with the world Squarespace can help you with that using their award-winning templates your business will look professional quicker then you can say croissant are you going to finish that croissant took some sweet photos pun intended image blocks automatically skill on your website to ensure it always looks great so you'll never have to worry about what device someone is using to visit your website you can easily sell your products using their online store tools and connect those social media accounts where people drool over your creation when you're ready head on over to squarespace.com Kaizen tutorials to save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain using Code Kaizen tutorials now this is not a texturing tutorial and if you want to create your own materials you can check out this tutorial here which will show you how to create great looking materials using smart masks all inside of blender I've already made these materials for the high poly object so if you're following along with the free base value you should have these in your file so baking is not always easy especially the normal bake and give a lot of artifacts but it's the most important one to get your or low poly mesh to look like your high poly mesh without the added geometry to be honest there's lots of tools that can do this way better than blender for a paid option I would recommend marmoset toolback and for a free option I would look at X normal which looks super old school by the way but it works perfect as well however because we want to keep everything inside of blender we'll be using blender for all of these I like to do my baking in the UV editing workspace so let's go back there and I'm just going to add in one more window here and set it to the Shader editor now delete the uv's material which we use to unwrap our model and add a new one name it whatever and add another image texture create a new blank image call it normals and set the resolution to whatever you want but I'm going to use 4K for my object here now you don't have to plug this in anywhere just leave it in there but you have to make sure you have the node selected so select the image texture node to get it back to work you need to have your low and high poly mesh in exactly the same spot in the 3D space so in your viewport this will look a little messy because of z-viting between the two objects but that's fine this won't have any effect on your picks you can only bake using cycles and blender so make sure you are using Cycles now select the high poly mesh first in the outliner and then Ctrl click on the low poly mesh this should make it so that the high poly mesh now has a red orangish color in the selection and the low poly mesh has a more yellowish orange color in the selection great now let's hop on over to the render properties Tab and scroll down to the tab that says big the first thing to change is the bake type which is standard set to combined but we are going to change this to whatever map we wish to bake and in this case we first are going to bake our normal map so let's just change it to that you can leave the influence settings for this big to default but it is crucial to enable selected to active which will make sure the blender bakes the selected object which is the orange one to the active object which is the more yellowish one now there's two settings in here you need to tweak and test with the Extrusion is the amount of inflation applied to the active object to properly capture the detail of your bag in my experience a value of 0.1 usually works fine but you might need to change this depending on your model the max Ray distance is the maximum distance the race travel for matching points I'm leaving it at zero which effectively means infinite Ray distance but sometimes you'll get better results with a different value so if you're not happy with how your normal bake looks tweak these values until you are okay so let's hit bake and let it calculate a 4-bit after it's done you'll see a nice normal map in your UV editor happy with it awesome so go up here to image which now has an asterisk next to it is very hard to say which means you haven't saved your image just yet so click here save image and choose your save location alright so that's one down now for the other Maps let's remove the image texture here the one with the normals add a new texture and name it to for example ambient occlusion change the bake type to ambient occlusion and make sure selected to active is still enabled and just hit bake wait a bit and done again make sure to save this image we already have two maps baked the next one we want to bake is the roughness map delete the current image texture again add a new one set the bake type to roughness and hit bake save it voila we already got three Maps down now the final two maps we need to bake are diffuse or as blender calls it base color and the metalness map now I saved these two for last because the process is just slightly different than the other ones repeat all the steps as before but change the bake type to diffuse but don't bake just yet because there's two influence things that we need to change for diffuse there's a couple of options so there's direct indirect and color these are called contributions basically this means blender will also incorporate lighting direct or indirect into your final pick which is not something that we want because we will use this model in for example a game which will have its own lighting to affect the model so what we need to do instead is disable direct and indirect and just leave color enabled with that done we can hit bake and we should get a proper diffuse map for our model now our final bake will be the metalness so if we change the big type you'll notice that there's no option called metalness or metallic but we can work around this so quickly switch to the shading workspace and select the high poly object and take the value that is now plugged into the metallic and plug it into the emission value of our principal pstf alright so with that done let's head back to our UV editing workspace let's reselect our objects so click on the high poly object and then control click on the low poly object to get this in the right order and in this case we want to change the big type to emit now this will capture our emission values which is perfect because these are now made up of our metallic data so with that done we should be able to get a good result so let's just hit bake and we get a nice metalness map here so make sure to save that again and you're done we now have all of our Maps done the final thing that we need to do to prepare this asset for using a game engine is exported as an fbx or obj now I like to export as an fbx so select the low poly asset file export fbx and this will open up a window in which you need to select only use selected objects which will make sure it does not export the high poly or any of the other objects in our scene but only our low poly mesh and down here we have this geometry tab in which our smoothing is currently set to normals only for example unreal doesn't really like this so make sure to change this from normals only to face and voila there you have it you now have a perfect exported game asset with all your texture Maps ready to import in any game engine if you want to know how to import a game asset into an engine I have linked videos to do so in unreal or in unity in the video description so you now know how to create game ready Assets in blender but your materials are still looking a bit basic and that's why you need to check out this video right here so you can learn how to create professional materials in blender thanks so much to the following patrons for supporting this channel [Music]

Channel: Kaizen

Views: 67,031

Keywords:

Id: vMQROGrJiF4

Length: 12min 48sec (768 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 28 2023