Game Assets in Blender: A Complete Workflow (Volume 2)

hey what's up guys and welcome to the game asset master class volume 2. it's been a while since i made a video like this and a lot of people really seem to like the last one so this one's going to have a ton of information i'm going to show you the modeling process the unwrapping process the optimization process texturing pretty much everything you need to know to take the default cube and turn it into this um cool looking model here this this door okay so we're gonna show you the whole process you're gonna learn a ton so to sit back enjoy it follow along if you'd like and we'll hop right into it now for anyone watching this who's not used to blender or still a beginner or perhaps wants to learn more about blender we have a completely free hard surface modeling course available on our website you can pick that up there's a link in the top of the description so that'll kind of get you up to speed with blender if you're new to the software or if you're just interested in taking the course it's totally free and i think you'll get a lot of value out of that so link to that in the description for anyone new here it'll get you up to speed pretty quickly and we can go ahead and get started okay let's discuss tools so the tools i use in blender and my hard surface modeling workflow are hard ops box cutter and machine tools the hard ops and box cutter bundle is like 37 bucks the best money you'll uh you'll spend if you want to quickly model you don't have to get them but it's just going to save you a lot of time these are the tools i use personally and these are the tools i'm going to be using in this tutorial so if you have a problem with me using the tools this probably isn't the video for you my main goal is to be as efficient as possible in my workflow and these tools allow me to do that second i use machine tools it's totally free and this allows you to go in and out of edit and object mode very quickly and the last add-on i use is also free it's called power save which basically will save a copy of your scene and just kind of save you in case of a crash so with the tools out of the way you can get them in the description by the way we can go ahead and get started so i always love starting my blockouts just by pretty much figuring out the proportions that i want to use so you know i just kind of scale the cube figure out more or less where i want it and then kind of go from there right and that's going to give you like the best solution in most cases so i'm just going to kind of scale this down to all that good stuff you know when you first get started with hard surface modeling one of the most difficult things can be you know even coming up with a shape in the first place and what i can say based off of my experience so that simply comes down to how much you know energy you're putting in each day you need to practice consistently every single week ideally every single day because if you don't then um what's gonna happen is you're just not gonna advance at all it's it's who would have thought right like the the painter who practices every day becomes a better painter right it's the same idea with 3d so i see a lot of people they're like oh i struggle and then i ask you know how much effort are you putting in each day and they're like oh maybe like an hour to a week and i'm like it's not enough you got to put in a lot more effort than that because the issue with that is everyone else is doing the same thing as you right everyone else is putting in the same exact amount of time and um pretty much getting nowhere but if you're the guy who puts in way more work than anyone else by default you're just going to get better than everyone else right it's not rocket science just most people um don't want to put in the work and that's really what you have to do and i understand people are busy with other things but if you really really value and enjoy something you'll find the time in one way or another right you know i tell people for example i was talking to my friend the other day and i was like you know i just don't have time to cook and i thought about it to myself i'm like you know i do have time to cook if i really found the time i could do it i just don't like cooking right i'd rather just get a um meal prepping service and the meals come out to about the same price anyways and it's just it's just an excuse really it's that i don't prioritize that type of time so i kind of tell people that and it makes them a bit uncomfortable but it's the truth you prioritize your time for things that are important to you so if 3d is important to you you really need to put aside the time each and every week to just you know practice there's no other way to do it so yeah it's usually what i do and just the more you model the more you follow tutorials and the more you practice the easier all the stuff becomes so that's kind of my little motivational speech for the day i guess it's just um put in the work right same for anything um let's see it looks pretty good so this could be like the outline for the door right here i definitely want this to be a bit wider so let me scale this little bit on the y and take this and move it a bit on the y as well just so it's more or less big enough it's a little bit too big that should be enough and then maybe i could just hop in here with the box cutter ngon cutter for those of you that don't use box cutter you'll uh you'll begin to see why i love it so much as you watch this video because it just speeds up your entire workflow it does take you know a little bit of time to learn um we have a complete course on heart ops and box cutter actually if you want to pick that up on our website blenderbros.com but it's it's not a difficult add-on they're just a lot of tools you have to learn how to use and also how they work so most of my videos kind of cover these tools so if you're you know getting into blender and want to grab these add-ons we have a plenty of content for that because i understand it can be tricky to do cool that looks pretty good let me mirror that so it's even on both sides i think i think that's good enough we'll go ahead and smart apply that mirror cool awesome so this is like roughly like the door outline and on the inside i want to actually have the door so it's going to be more or less kind of like sticking out like this this will be the door um but before i do that what i actually want to do let me hide this i want to fuse these two together and the best way to fuse two meshes together is to simply use a union boolean so we do that control click on sharpen to apply the boolean and we're just going to click around here control click and just give ourselves a nice bevel now i'm trying to keep the poly count you know more or less low there's no need to go like 50 segments on this for a game asset right but you know when you get to the bigger size bevels it's usually a good idea to go a little bit higher on the segment count so that way it doesn't look too blocky kind of like we have here so maybe on this one i'll give like eight segments you know nowadays with the modern graphics cards polycount is nowhere near as important in my opinion it's um generally about memory usage and also um just how it looks right so i always go for looks even if it comes at the expense of some additional polygons right so you can do something like that i want to be careful that i don't push too far because if i do we'd end up getting an overlap here and i'd probably have to dissolve out this edge and it's just going to kind of disrupt that curvature there so more or less something like this could be enough looks good now this is a little bit close so i'm going to use the mesh machine unfuck tool yes that's what it's called because it literally does that what we can do is actually use that and then just kind of expand the propagation a bit i guess it's called propagate whatever and kind of get something like that i don't want it to affect this edge right here because that's actually holding the curvature of that bevel so there should be a way to flip which one's being affected um i might be wrong i don't use this tool too much maybe someone who uses machine a bit more can tell me but this is the easiest way just to kind of get those bevels a little bit more even and maybe i'll just run a different connection point like that should um look decent enough only issue here is we'll get a pretty nasty shading artifact let me add a small holding bevel here and drop a weighted normal looks like that shading is actually pretty clean even though we have a um end gone here on a curved surface we could even just check with a matte cap real quick just kind of see yeah it looks absolutely flawless so a little bit of a pull right here actually so let me use a face influence on the bevel set to affected and flex that to a hundred and just kind of see how that looks yeah that's not too bad if you're new to my channel you're gonna begin to see um very quickly that my number one goal is to get good shading not necessarily quote-unquote good topology i use plenty of n-gons because you can actually set that back to i'm going to turn off the face influence and actually keep that set to 50. but yeah my number one goal is always always always to get good shading because at the end of the day the end guns don't matter if you're not you know flexing or bending or deforming the mesh unless you have like a very specific pipeline where you need the quads maybe like vfx or something that's so my concern just good shading and a clean design i can always triangulate at the end and get everything working nice and clean so in my opinion you know this whole quad-based workflow especially with new weighted normal um modeling techniques and boolean techniques it's just completely outdated now there are still plenty of situations where i most definitely do use uh quads like if i'm trying to run a strip of trim sheets or something quads can be very powerful especially for unwrapping and straightening islands but um in general for just a base model like this it's um it's not a massive deal so we're gonna do something like that looks good then we can go ahead and turn this cube back on and let's just apply the scale and then control alt click to select all those can make the segment kind of a little bit lower and just get a nice um nice bevel right there pretty good and then all i want to do is scale that up and then maybe run a difference boolean just to kind of get a cut out for the door and this is where i want the door to be right inside here now check this out what i can actually do is i can go to everscroll to recall this cutter and with these cutters um what you can actually do is ctrl-click on mark and what that's going to do is run a non-destructive chamfer which we call a reverse bevel so that way i actually have that chamfer there while still working non-destructively now i don't want to go too far with that because i still want to have a little bit of buffer right here but something like that should be more than enough it looks clean and then i can go ahead and ever scroll again and shift click on shade solid to duplicate it and move it outside of the cutters collection which is super powerful setting i'll make this bevel a little bit smaller too i could even move that in actually i think it's fine where it was i'm going to even move it outside of this a little bit so the door is kind of like popping out almost i think that could be a pretty decent solution yeah this looks really nice so far i like that let me kind of pan around what i might actually do is how do i want to do that actually it's a good question i actually think i'm going to symmetrize this so to that side and when i do that symmetry i'm just going to pull this face off a little bit more so this is kind of like a connection point for the door or something you can kind of imagine like there's a um let's scale this down you can imagine like there's a wall right here that's kind of like the chamber you would pass through right something like that just kind of like using my imagination here just extending that out a bit should be okay and it doesn't look like it symmetrize the hole here simply because that's still an active boolean so when you run symmetry it only works on real geometry not what i call theoretical geometry so stuff that's not applied yet cool so let's go back to this door here and just kind of play with this a little bit more so one very important concept in visual design is making sure you re-use shapes that you already have my biggest issue when i first got started and had no idea how to make a clean looking model was i would just put shapes all over the place any empty space put a shape there and what ends up happening when you just arbitrarily scatter shapes with no rhyme or reason is you get just this clash of details that does not look visually appealing the best way to get a visually appealing design is to echo elements you already have cluster details soften the edges here with bevel there's so many different solutions to this we actually cover some of that in our design course if you want to pick that up on our site but that's one big issue i see is a lot of people don't know how to effectively place details to get the model looking clean and that's one of the most important things you can do as a as a 3d artist okay i'm going to go ahead and add in another cube here and move this up and this is going to be our window so this is going to be another boolean so it doesn't really matter where this is just going to put it right there and give myself a nice bevel to kind of echo the bevel we have going on here right then i'm just going to go ahead and run a different spool in and just like that we have our window and just like i did before it might actually be a good idea to run another reverse bevel here so i'm just going to control click on mark just kind of push that out um let me shift click on sharpen to kind of move to a better angle that looks really really clean now a nice and easy way to enhance the aesthetic of your models is to basically take a set of edges that you already have and just kind of make like a little ridge around them and what i mean by that is let me make this a little bit smaller maybe something like that and what i could actually do in this case is i could maybe take this face right here and inset these edges um let me see why is it oh i need to apply this chamfer right here so apply that bevel i could take this face right here and inset it bevel it so it's just one segment and watch this i could press e to extrude right click to cancel and then i guess i could just extrude it back actually just e to extrude it back and now we kind of have like this ridge right here kind of going around the door which enhances the overall shape right so when you look at complex models just kind of study like where these shapes are placed and just think about it is it really as complex as it looks usually it's just a ton of simple details added on top of each other strategically so let me go ahead and let's turn on heart of normals by default give this a nice little bevel around there and this is a little bit too close for comfort let me scale that down a little bit more even more there we go it's a lot better you want to be careful because these things can get really tight like for example this is just right here to here just too tight look at the difference visually you have this which is too much going on and then you have this it's a lot more just you know easy on the eyes i guess you could say so positioning is really key you'll begin to kind of picture like where the best positions are with things the more you model and practice but you'll just kind of begin to think to yourself or recognize like what's what looks bad and what doesn't and you know we're all still working on that i still make bad decisions myself just a constant level of improvement right okay so we have the simple door set up nothing crazy i love cavity because just look what cavity does it just makes a really boring model just pop it's amazing now what i'm actually going to do here is recall this little window cutter and shift click on shade solid because i want to make this into a glass material and with hard ops it's really easy you press alt m and then you shift click on the add blank material button and that'll actually make it glass and let me also take this cutter and pull this face all the way through and i could also use this cutter on the main mesh and then we kind of have like um like it's looking through the door almost which is kind of cool move that back a little bit actually i'm not sure i want to do that quite yet you can kind of imagine like if you're looking through this window it's probably going to lead to somewhere and right now it's just like a tunnel or something so maybe we'll just leave that alone for right now at least i think it's all right and also we kind of have some z fighting going on since these faces occupy the same space in 3d so just alt s and edit mode scale those a little bit along the normals and you'll be good to go all right so we have the basic block out of the door here as you can see the workflow is really quite simple i'm just stacking bevels and stacking details and stacking shapes that already exist now what i think we could do is start to add some functionality so we kind of have like a clean shape going on now we can begin to think to ourself how can we make this look functional my goal is never to like oh put this screw in this specific spot and make sure like the you know centimeter difference like i don't care i've had engineers come to my videos and they're like oh technically it needs to be moved like an inch like the whole goal here is to make it look like it works i'm an artist i'm not an engineer i need to use my imagination in these cases and kind of figure out what looks like it works properly what looks like it's going to function properly what is believable the whole idea here is to make this look believable to whoever's playing your game or whoever's viewing your portfolio right that's my main goal here so if i was looking at one of these doors maybe it's like in a video game or something you can usually imagine there's gonna be some sort of like mechanism that probably helps like open the door or maybe like it moves up and down and moves around the door on the inside it's really down to your imagination but we can just start adding in some shapes here just to kind of imitate that effect right so we're just going to kind of go in here and just work on that so maybe we could start with a cube we could bevel it and i'm going to be moving this around for right now i just want to get it in place i'll go over here that is a little bit too excessive i think so for right now we'll just kind of get something in place more or less maybe we could let me turn off overlays maybe we could move it like right here notice how difference in placement can really make all the difference this looks a lot more balanced already and it's really more of a feeling like an intuitive feeling it's hard to explain the more you work the more you begin to kind of feel where shapes should uh be positioned so what i'm going to do here is maybe put that on the bottom and then this could i'm not sure where i want to put this one i don't want to keep it like in the same spot because now it looks a bit too boring and monotone but and i don't know if i want to block that curve either for right now i think this should be enough i'm also going to run a power save just so i have a second backup here looks all right um okay cool so what i'm going to do is take this piece shift d duplicate it and scale it a little bit on the z and run a difference boolean here just so we kind of have like a small outline so it looks like it's sitting in something right give this a small bevel as well and maybe do something like that same idea here just duplicate it scale it a bit on the z and do something like that that looks reasonable and then maybe i could go over here and just make like a little wedge cut or just a box cut rather press b to bevel give it actually i don't want to bevel that i'll just keep it as it is and let me just um run the bevel again and just press the a key to adjust the angle i guess it's already it's not beveled yet is it so just drop a bevel should catch that edge and then same for down here we already have a bevel on it so we could do another cut down here maybe here we go looks pretty cool all right so now we need to do is add a door handle now you want to be careful because in terms of functionality and just real-life application even though this is more of a sci-fi piece it needs to make sense like you wouldn't put a door handle on the back right the door handle needs to be positioned somewhere where a human or whoever is using this door can still access it so you can get a bit creative here maybe it's a button maybe it's a sensor maybe it's a door handle it doesn't matter what it is just think about how would i actually use this in real life if there's a keypad put the keypad somewhere in the front where it's reachable if it's a door handle make sure it's not like super high where they have to reach up to get it put it in an area that makes sense so for right now we can just start here you can even add in like a like a character into the scene just for reference to kind of figure out like where it should be positioned and i'll probably do that here in a second but for right now i just kind of want this could be like the door handle or maybe that could actually work that actually looks kind of cool i like that let's go in here and oops let me undo that let's go in here and sharpen it make it smooth and maybe give it one more segment make it a bit more round so we can do that and then maybe here we could also do the same thing now it looks a little bit more tucked and realistic move that over and then also take this back face here and just move that in and maybe move that out a bit more actually where it was was fine i think yeah that looks decent and let me quickly uh bring in a character into the scene here what you could also do is you could just add in a cube if you don't have a character and i think the average height of a i don't know if it's like different in other countries but at least here in the us i think it's like 1.8 meters i might be wrong don't quote me on that but um what you could do is kind of imagine this is like a human and you're gonna see the scale of the door in this case is actually the one that's off so what you could do is scale down the door instead until it makes sense but i don't want to mess with that right now so my preferred solution is just to bring in a character you can get these for free off like cg trader and stuff so that's probably the best solution there and then what we can do just move the human up there right and do something like that just kind of imagine like roughly where's that door handle gonna be right that's pretty much all i'm going for you don't have to over complicate it so that kind of gives us an idea okay let's go in here and let me run a let's shift click on curve extract and make like a little handle here or something and scale that or what i could do is inset it invert the selection and then we kind of have like this thing whatever you want to call this let's invert it a little bit more or inset it a little bit more i don't want to go too far because of that bevel but i think where it is is enough maybe even where it was before is fine okay let me drop a oh shoot let me apply the solidify modifier first and then drop a bevel it's a really small bevel nothing crazy and that looks pretty good and then maybe just move that over a little bit on the y just to kind of make a little bit of variation or something looks good and you know maybe what i could do is i could rotate this a bit on the z so it's kind of angled it's like something you press in and just cut this part off and just rotate that in a little bit more so maybe this is like a something you press in and then we could even inset this do something like that now it looks awful we are not doing that just gave it a try i'll play with that a little bit later for right now that's definitely not a priority but what we do need is a little bit of a cut out here in the door because right now if you take a look if this door were to open it's just like there's no area for it to pass through this handle right so you can always just duplicate these pieces and remove the bevel before you run a bullion alt s and then just run a difference boolean on the door and then kind of imagine like if this door pulls out or something it kind of passes through that handle so you can kind of kind of play with it that way you could even move that in i'm not really sure i like how that looks though and i'm going to make this entire handle here a little bit smaller so i'll just kind of move that up and then take the cutter and move that up as well yeah that's not too bad cool so i'm really liking how this is coming along i'm probably going to make some adjustments of course you don't get everything first try and you're always going to finish a model and think or wish you did certain things differently of course but just get as much done as you can and try not to regret your decisions because sometimes you're like damn i wish i could have done it this way instead but at that point you're already like done with the model right now i'm not going to do that i just noticed i need to make this cutter a little bit higher up and a little bit more out and then maybe i could take these two pieces and kind of pull that to just kind of exaggerate that effect right there i'm not sure how much i like that but more or less something like that and then just ctrl a apply the scale and it's looking pretty good you know i was kind of thinking about it what if i put like our branding logo here i can make like a bowling out of it and then maybe bake it later i'm not sure if i'm gonna do the baking yet we'll have to see it there's some stuff we could bake so maybe so what i could do maybe is i could kind of engrave some text so let me first first apply the scale and bevel this a bit and maybe make this a little bit smaller i guess and then i could even union it to this piece and let's go here to this boolean what i'm going to do is i'm going to actually bevel that like that maybe even move this out a bit more just for some more space more buffer make the bevel even bigger like that now it's a little bit too top-heavy that's pulling a lot of attention so instead of doing that i think a much better solution would simply be to just straight up engrave the text so i can add in some text here text is always a very good element to bake just because the topology can get really really nasty and cause some issues so i tend to bake the text by just removing it for the low poly but what i can do here is you can also load in like fonts and stuff it's really cool this is my favorite font olasis and we could do like um [Music] bros actually maybe putting our branding blunder bros stuff wouldn't make sense here but maybe it could be like something a bit more natural like unit o2 or something because maybe this is like the entrance to something a bit more exciting than our branding right we could just put it right here in the middle i could also just selection the cursor move that up and then move this out and then once you're happy with that just apply the visual geometry to mesh and what we can do is run a limited dissolve because that can get really nasty on the text here and for some reason teas never work very well i don't like using text too much in blender for this reason but i think it would look really clean if it were engraved so what i'm actually going to do here is take this edge subdivide it and then actually get this connected or it's a little bit tricky here this always confuses me so i'm just going to go ahead and delete the faces only faces and just figure out what the heck is going on there we go and then i can fill it and i think that's the only one with an issue we could probably make these connection points here a little bit better as well like i said if we bake this life's gonna be way easier so i'm not too worried but at least i could make this a little bit better up front and i think this should all be okay cool so i'm gonna go ahead and extrude this back and just recalculate the normals just in case and we can either what are the two terms if there is engraving there's like the the opposite i suck with those terms we could try just doing a union to that together it's actually kind of cool i think what we could do is i like the engrave there it looks nice you're gonna see um unfortunately the bevel just kind of collapses due to the connection points we have going on here this is why i'm not a big fan of text here and uh in blender but we could try to do is maybe run a knife cut straight on through like that and see if that helps at all helps a little bit um maybe what i'll do now is run a cut from here to hmm how do i want to do that i could join that together does that do anything that kind of helps let's move that across like i said this will be big so that should be fine there we go it looks alright i like that i think this engraving right here with no like back plate or anything is a little bit more natural i think the back plate idea like with the cube here and just put up here i think it's a little bit too heavy in terms of the attention it pulls i don't want to pull too much attention away from the actual design i mean i guess this could work it's i'm kind of in the middle on that one but i really like how this looks and i think that could work as well um i think this one would really boil down to personal preference honestly now what i want to try to do here is maybe let me think how i want to do it what i could try is using a mesh machine offset so i could go in here and run the offset tool it's going to kind of collapse right around this area that's totally normal the main reason i want to do this is because i just want to quickly test and see how this might look on the bottom like that that kind of shape actually looks i actually like that it's not too bad kind of enhances the overall aesthetic here so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to press q operations and shift click on smart apply to smart apply duplicate run a sharpen on that we're just going to throw this one away once we're done but i basically want to take this entire i'll just take from here to here and what i'm going to do is i'm going to offset it and then just take this let me dissolve this out i guess i can't not really a big deal like i said we're about to throw this away anyways so i could just do a bevel right here as well and then i could literally just take this portion invert the selection delete faces and now i kind of have this thing cool so now what i could actually do symmetrize that over merge these at the center and now we can actually use this as a boolean without having to mess with the topology and just make things you know crazy so we could do that and difference that actually looks pretty cool well that looks really cool actually i like that and you know what else i could try maybe on this cutter i could like chop it off right here and it just kind of like let me hide that then we just kind of have something like that which is just like in one corner it's kind of cool we could even just run to ever scroll apply that boolean and perhaps we could take this face right here and just like i don't know if this will look good i'm just trying to copy this angle right here that kind of pulls a bit too much attention i don't think it looks natural i think this will be enough i could even try running the cut this way instead so we have this one yeah this one's pretty good and let's try maybe doing the same thing on this upper side so once again shift click smart apply can steal this extra piece we're going to toss it in a second so for right now i just want to maybe just offset some extra portions i can do something like that and then maybe i could take from here to here bevel that invert the selection delete faces and now we can use this just like we did before and just um what the heck there we go extrude it back and run our difference boolean again that looks pretty nice i like that i want this to push down a little bit more so let me take this piece and add a global orientation to that face so i can actually move it along that axis and just extend it a bit and then i'll just remove that i don't need it so it's a little bit different this one's a bit more extended this one's a bit more localized and i think that looks really clean in terms of the form so i like what we have here so far the only thing i don't like is how blocky these pieces are here in comparison to the rest of the mesh so what i'm going to do is i'm going to recall this cutter right here and i'm going to shift click on this piece and we're just going to go ahead and take these edges and take these edges and just bevel them and just um we could do something like that it's not too bad or we could do a chamfer let's see how the chamfer looks first it's not too bad we can try that we can also try a rounder one to see how that looks i think they're both okay i kind of prefer the chamfer so i'm gonna go with that that looks good and then we can go ahead and box select again just make sure you're only selecting these portions and we can go ahead unmark that and then just give this maybe like three segments to make that a bit more round move this over a little bit and there we go same idea for this one just going to recall this cutter shift click on the actual piece and just box select these two and give that a nice chamfer as well it looks like i need to actually apply the scale so that bevel's even okay and we'll go ahead and how's that look let's move it back a little bit much better these rounded edges here just kind of follow the overall form and flow of this door a little bit more which is kind of why i wanted to do that so just a very simple adjustment but it makes it look a hell of a lot better cool so we're kind of nearing the end of this thing i'm not trying to go like crazy far in this because i want to you know make this video as easy to understand as possible without just you know modeling for 10 hours so what i do want to do however is make like a um i kind of want to extend the cutter here for the actual door so let me take this back face and i think it's already cutting through and let me just run a different spoolie in here as well i think we'll actually leave it as it is but what we could do differently here is we could maybe cut like a like a hallway or something so we cut straight through and you're going to kind of see when we do that it kind of looks like the door will open then it kind of brings into some sort of hallway i guess you could call it so i'm just going to give this a few segments here we'll just kind of see how that looks keep in mind like the whole point of this thing is not to necessarily see it from the back because you know the character will probably just walk through it but just to have something that's going to go against a wall really nicely so you're going to see the door right here i want to make this cutter a little bit wider so let's press s and then y scale it to about the size of the door or something like that apply the scale and let's just kind of see how that looks you can kind of imagine like maybe you know there could be a few different ways you have the door go um let me unequify everything cool so you know maybe the door pulls out or something which would be kind of a weird uh functionality or maybe the door is actually quite thin in which case we could actually go in here and just kind of cut up to this point and maybe the door will actually be able to like rotate open in some way maybe we could move it back and kind of have like a hinge or something so the door is kind of like elongated outwards there's so many different solutions here just kind of use your imagination figure out what you think will work for you and in this case i'm going gonna actually scale that back in a little bit or maybe i need to do that to the door so you're gonna kind of see maybe i'll um i'll just leave it where it is but really what i want here is some sort of like you know mechanism that kind of rotates the door open so maybe i could go in here and add in we'll just do like a 20 segment cylinder should be enough while still being relatively round we can kind of go in here s and then shift to z and then we're just going to kind of put like some sort of little hinge or something right you could also use references for actual doors like this if you wanted to but for right now i'm not going to go like super crazy or anything just trying to see what might work and what might not work it might actually be a good idea here to kind of cut in a little bit of space for those which is just kind of that clutters up the entire form of it too much so maybe what i'm gonna do is move this over here let's get a little bit on the z maybe move this over just to that location instead and then maybe i don't know if i even want this one to be honest just go ahead and delete that one out so maybe instead of you know that this piece being like right here and kind of disrupting the form maybe there's like a mechanism on the inside of this piece here that kind of helps to rotate out the door like i said it's all about the implied functionality making it look believable you don't have to actually set everything up perfectly it just has to make sense so what i could do is maybe move the 3d cursor like right here and then we can just kind of pretend you know this door was opening it could kind of open like this right that's not too bad i wish there's a little bit more walk-in space but this could definitely work we could even move this one out a little bit right same with these little handles right here so the door is kind of like protruded outwards a little bit and then it could kind of rotate from that direction but then it's not really against the piece so you got to kind of play with it and figure out what works for you i much prefer the door sitting right on the inside extended out just a little bit also the door could perhaps you know rotate inwards in which case you're going to have to actually make like a room for that to happen so i think in this situation the best use case would be for the door to kind of open like that right and then the you know character just walks through or your other option is to maybe align it with let's see well that 3d cursor snapped there yes it will so maybe align it with that back edge instead so now when it rotates open it kind of rotates a little bit more on the inside you can kind of see how that works um only issue here is it now begins to intersect with the actual little unit right here so maybe instead of that we'll just go ahead and keep it where it was i think that was definitely a decent location but it looks like we are going to have a little bit of a space right here so i think we're gonna have to at least put some sort of just some sort of indication that there's like a you know mechanism that helps rotate that so i'm not gonna go super crazy with it because really what's going to happen is when this opens the viewer is probably not going to even notice it but at least they have like uh something here just to kind of indicate that hey this is how it's opening right so let me undo that and just try to find a good position for it without disrupting the form too much because if i pull this out it becomes a little bit too distracting right so somewhere on the inside is going to be where we roughly want it you're just going to kind of see the issue there so maybe i could even move that back so a little bit more and then try to rotate it again and it looks like we're just going to have to move this up a little bit more right before it reaches the outside and then i think we'll be in a good position for this to kind of you know make sense kind of like that now i do want to make this very clear um if you are going to use this in a game or something or perhaps you want to do like some interior renders when this opens there's not much of a design on the inside of the store so i would highly recommend that you actually add some additional details on the inside here and maybe even some additional details on the inside of this little piece right here as well just to make this whole piece look significantly more exciting right because if the character is going to walk through it you don't want the wall to be like crazy empty or anything and you certainly don't want the inside of this door just to be like blank like this you kind of want to add a little bit more stuff to it now i think at that point i've given you enough modeling material and tools for you to do basically the same thing we've been doing for this entire tutorial so just an interest of keeping this video a little bit more short i'll leave this as an exercise to you to maybe take the door you can isolate it with forward slash on the numpad and maybe make your own design on the other side so just go to the back view right and you can just make your own design on this side maybe you could even like you know perhaps inset this and then bevel these right and then just make some additional details on the inside like that totally up to you i'm going to leave that as an exercise for you to do because it shouldn't be anything super complicated but i do want to keep this video relatively short or at least reasonable time so that should be pretty fun for you to do on your own so go ahead and give it a try so since i'm going to be using this as an art piece what i actually want to do is instead of having this massive like just cut out here it doesn't really look cool through the window what i'm actually going to do is delete this so ever scroll i'm going to delete it from there but i'm not going to delete it from the actual door that we cut because we kind of have like a like an isolation chamber on the inside or something whatever you want to call it so maybe what i could do instead of just make a little bit more of a localized cut right here so i'll just cut through maybe bevel it and then what i could do is perhaps scale this a bit on the y and now if we kind of look through here you're going to see it kind of indicates like there's a chamber on the inside i should probably also make this window smaller cut that and apply it so i actually just scrapped like an extra like over one hour of recordings here because i was just kind of playing with this design and you'll notice when you begin to texture things even if the design looks cool in blender it still might not be quite there i think we're just missing a few little things to kind of spice it up a bit so what i want to do here is i want to maybe make some additional details here on this pipe so maybe what we could do is drop a loop cut ctrl b give it a good extrusion here alt s to do that offset it even and then maybe what i could do is i could scale that a bit on the z and just kind of make like an interesting effect here make like a cut out like that and let me shift click on sharpen adjust the shading on that let's give this just a one segment bevel we'll fix that shading stuff later shouldn't be a big deal right now what i will do is just try to align this up with these vertices there so i can at least kind of re-topologize that to somewhat minimize the shading issues but for right now it should be fine so you know we could do something like this and maybe what we could do next is we could i have a pretty good idea so let me ever scroll let me scroll up to this cutter right here what i'm going to do is shift d to duplicate it tab into edit mode select everything and then alt s to scale along normals here and i'm just going to run a simple slice operation on the actual door so now we kind of have like an outline like that and the same exact idea on this one down here gonna go ahead shift d let's scale this up a bit alt s and then we'll run another slice operation over here as well looks a little bit more appealing but i also want to do is maybe make a few little like details here the reason i want to do this is because it's actually going to enhance the design because what i'm going to be able to do is i'm going to be able to kind of like add in tertiary and secondary level colors to kind of emphasize the overall form a bit more so even if these pieces don't mean much they can actually make the design look quite a bit more interesting to the viewer so i'm just going to kind of drop some stuff in there trying to think of what else i could do maybe on the sides here let me fill this in with the f key and then i'm going to run a boolean selection the boolean operation here so i can kind of inset that pull that in and then kind of have an effect like that and then maybe on the sides here what i could do is i could simply use the end gun cutter with cyclic turned off and make some like trusting effects here kind of do something like that and just see if that looks interesting which it kind of does and i'm just going to go ahead and just move this back a little bit more kind of like that and then let's just go ahead and apply the let's apply well first of all let's take this boolean and this boolean and applied that we can leave this one live that's fine that one should be okay that's the solidification for the actual cut so we'll leave that alone and now what i can actually do is maybe make some i could apply the solidification actually because i'm done with it and what i could do now is maybe bevel these give this a few segments now like i said on more obtuse angles you can generally go with a smaller angle and on more acute angles like this you have to go wider so it doesn't mess up and generally on these you also want to use an extra segment otherwise the auto smooth might not catch so just an fyi there it's the same for this one and yeah this one here dissolve that out then go ahead and scroll down a bit make those bigger this one's gonna have to be a bit bigger than this one here kind of in the middle and there we go let me actually undo that real quick right here i think i'm just going to dissolve out all these edges actually maybe not i'll just do a very small subtle bevel right here just enough to catch it and then once we hit that edge we can go ahead and just press three with machine tools or if it doesn't catch just press ctrl x to dissolve out that other edge there and that should be plenty but right here is kind of what i was worried about we're probably going to end up catching the bevel so you might need to even use an extra segment to avoid that there we go that should be i think decent enough all right so now what i can do instead of mirroring the actual piece because it's not symmetrical we're going to end up getting the cuts on that side instead of marrying the actual piece we can just mirror the cutter instead so press alt x and i could just mirror over this piece by shift clicking it alt x and then mirror and now it's going to be on that side as well and this just kind of makes the design look a little bit more visually appealing in my opinion and we could probably even bake that detail now let me try one thing let me go in here move these faces back and try running a reverse bevel so control click on mark i'm not sure if i'll like it but only one way to find out i actually kind of do like that looks a little bit cleaner in my opinion so i'm going to leave that one as it is looks good and all right i definitely knew something was missing so although i did scrap like an hour of this footage i think it was worth it because i just felt like i ended the design a bit quicker than i should have and that's an issue i've always struggled with i always think i'm at the end but as a general rule of thumb if you think you're finished you're probably not put in like another 30 and you'll probably end up being really happy with how the design looks this is looking pretty clean i'm trying to kind of picture how the texturing and stuff like that's going to look in substance painter but um for right now i'm not too concerned about it now what i might do is go up here to the hard ops panel and under this little favorite icon i'm going to turn on the blank material similar to viewport and this will basically give random materials of some sort of gray shading so i can maybe select this piece and press alt m and kind of cycle through these different gray colors and get like a slight highlight there so this would be material 002 i could give this one the same thing maybe the door handle i could give the same thing as well just to kind of spice up the interest a bit here maybe same for this one and just really begin to see how it looks or maybe for the door make that gray but i just kind of want to add some highlighting effects here so i think this should be enough maybe this piece in here as well now what i might do is take this pipe that's on the inside and maybe move a loop cut down here ctrl b to bevel it e to extrude and then run alt s just kind of see how that looks that could kind of work maybe i could even symmetrize that and actually no i don't like that i think that'll be decent enough not too worried about it and then maybe on this pipe down here i could even drop another small little bevel in there and do another one of these just kind of spicing up the design a bit making it look a little bit more visually appealing to the viewer and maybe i'll even move that down a bit it looks pretty good and then maybe same idea i could do like uh let me go back to box cutter cut through and then press the v key to array and then press x to flip the axis maybe do like two of those or something just to kind of spice it up and maybe for this door right here what i could do is take all these outer edges and just um just give it a small chamfer see if it looks good it's actually not too bad i could even try this one instead it's actually pretty decent but if i'm going to do that i'm going to also scale this one down and also make sure that um these faces here they need to be scaled in a little bit more so alt s and just kind of bring those in maybe even scale this a little bit on the z and apply the scale yeah it looks a little bit cleaner and what i might even try is taking these faces here and setting them and then extruding them back a little bit and just see if that outline kind of makes a difference which kind of does it looks pretty good so yeah you know these small little adjustments you make here can really make or break the entire visual appeal of the design so i always recommend you know spend a few extra minutes doing these things because it really can just make all the difference and make the viewer a lot more connected with the design so i think that's good where it was trying to think of what else we could do here you know we don't necessarily need to overdo it but i definitely want to make sure that um before we do all the optimizing and unwrapping and stuff like that and it's actually done because if we have to redo it again it's going to be a headache so you know what maybe i'll do is i'll come in here and run a slice maybe on that side maybe make it a little bit bigger actually just to kind of bring some additional visual appeal on that area and i guess i could do the same thing here technically just depends how far i want to bring that one in and i'm not sure what that is i think it's just a shading issue from this thing we'll just scalp it up a bit we're going to be fixing these issues here shortly so don't worry too much about it but it kind of makes it pop a bit more i do want to move this so it's about the same size as the right side you know what i'm just going to undo it i'm not sure i like that very much now what i kind of want to do on the window here i'm not sure if it's going to look good or not but let me try making a slice around it just a very small subtle effect there so what i can do is cut through b to bevel and then press the x key i just want to see if like a window frame would look you know interesting or not it actually kind of does the only issue is there's not much room to work with it so i just want to be careful as to where i position this thing so maybe what i'll do here is move this over a little bit on the y move it down a little bit on the z it doesn't have to match perfectly but just you know more or less kind of in the center and maybe i could adjust the bevel here i don't need too many segments but you know just enough to kind of match it and something like that could be cool and then we'll go ahead and just drop in a material and that kind of brings in a little bit more visual appeal to the entire thing a little bit tight not too much room here but i think we can get away with it any more than that and i probably would just scale the window down a bit more but i think um i think that's reasonable that one's fine now what i might do here on the bottom and just make a few little notches just i don't know just kind of playing with shapes here right i could do something like this and then i could maybe just mirror it across like that just adding different shapes here and this is already looking a heck of a lot better than just a few minutes ago so i'd say we're nearing the end of this design but i know i keep saying that but i'll probably just keep finding more things i want to add so let's just see i'm just kind of curious how it would look if i had like a echoed effect like that i think it would be a bit too distracting it might just leave the back just neutral as it is i think it's fine now one thing that's kind of bothering me here is if you look at this um this little notch right here um it's kind of very just straight and linear compared to the nice curvy shapes this actual model has what i'm going to do is recall this cutter and just bevel it now i could just press q and then bevel it right now but watch what happens notice it kind of bevels and we end up getting this type of like see how it's kind of like beveled right there so i'm gonna do instead of just pull this face out a little bit more so that way that bevel doesn't actually hit unless i make the bevel really big so let me just turn off overlays so i can just see how many segments i need for that bevel to go away so maybe this many is alright i could even turn on wireframe just to kind of see because i might dissolve it down later this should be probably enough like that cool now you're going to see just look at the difference now notice how much more soft and visually appealing this looks um in relation to the rest of the mesh compared to this see the difference looks a lot better it just matches this curvy aesthetic a lot more which is exactly what i want so i'm gonna do the same thing for this bottom one let me go ahead and recall the cutter pull this face out a bit and then we'll just go ahead and bevel it and just do something kind of like that doesn't have to be super big but you can already see the big difference here now i also want to make sure these pieces are lined up because this one's extended a bit further out compared to this one so what i'm going to do is just go into vertex snap press g y and hold ctrl to snap it there which is a little bit too close isn't it let's just see how much room we have we still have a decent amount of room but yeah i think we'll do that then what we can also do is take the cutter and move that back as well this um slice operation and then the actual cutter behind it here actually you know what i'm just going to delete that i don't even think i'm using that cutter for anything yeah i'll just go ahead and delete that one that's fine all right so this is already looking a lot better we have a nice cluster of details here on the left and then a nice balanced design here in the middle and also the handle here on the right so this is looking pretty good i'm just trying to think if there's anything else i want to add because there almost always is but it's uh it's too late before i kind of figure out what that is but totally normal process of modeling there's always going to be a hindsight there that you wish you did just be happy with the model that you have and once you're happy with it just kind of accept it you know say there's probably going to be something i wish i added in later on but i'm just going to accept that and be happy with what i have right now all right so what i want to do real quick is fix up this shading issue now of course when you run booleans on curved surfaces you're always going to get a bit of a headache but what i'm going to do here is let's take this boolean and just kind of merge together these vertices this shouldn't disrupt the curvature too much but um actually before i do that let me put a holding loop here to isolate the shading and then maybe just take this cutter and move it just a little bit more to the right like that you know alternatively what i could do is i could simply you know take um these loops and just you know control click around and just do an extrusion you know it's basically the same thing just don't have to really do any retopology so that could work as well but you will get some shading artifacts simply because as a result of the bevel you're going to see without the bevel it's fine but with it it actually spans out into an end gone right here so one two three four five vertices right so what i usually do in these cases is just kind of tighten it up with a loop cut i'm more concerned about the shading so there we go a little bit better but you know another option is to simply not put a bevel here and sometimes i'll do this on areas where it's not really that much of a difference but this kind of pops a bit more and the shading is very minor so i'm actually going to leave it as it is and then same idea for these right here let me quickly um take these let's scale this and let's also just move that into more a more ideal location so something like that a little bit better and then all i really want to do is i want to put a loop cut here to tighten that shading a bit and then put a loop cut here and then i want to put two right here and then i can simply apply this boolean and then maybe just do a little bit of retopology just to kind of help the bevel out a little bit not super necessary but because the triangulation later is going to pick it up but you can just do it now you're gonna see that's quite a bit better and i just noticed right here i kind of have this thing intersecting i could cut it out but it actually kind of looks cool not gonna lie i could cut through this but i'm trying to think that actually kind of looks somewhat interesting in there so i might actually leave that alone the upper one's fine so i think we're about ready to optimize this thing so you're probably wondering how exactly do we optimize this well if you're following along with our what we call the mad t framework it stands for modeling automation decimation and triangulation these are the four pillars of a functioning hard surface game asset now we've already done the modeling process here the next process would technically be decimation but we don't really have much to decimate here because i already went with a low segment count on all the bevels so we can actually do is just go right into automation which is basically unwrapping and the way i unwrap is by automating most of the process now the first thing we're going to want to do is save a separate copy so i'll just run a power save and then what i want to do is make some collections here so i'm going to make a new collection and i'm going to call this collection [Music] low and then make a new one and call this collection high so we're going to have a low poly and a high poly so i'm going to select everything press m and then move this to the high poly collection so we can turn this off and on and then i'm going to select everything and duplicate it all and we're going to move this one to the low poly collection so now we have two duplicates so we have the high poly and the low poly and obviously we have to make this low poly so let's begin the work on that so the very first thing you want to consider whenever you're just trying to optimize this thing is you want to figure out which areas can i bake and which areas can i kind of reduce down the poly count on we've mostly done this because we used a low segment count on the bevels but you know for example on this area i could maybe decimate this down by dissolving these edges here so control x make that a little bit lower poly but pretty much everything else is fine i could do the same thing in the back here dissolve all that out so ctrl x but i think it's about as far as we're gonna get now the next thing we want to consider is which areas are cut out on a flat face as long as there's areas on a flat face that aren't cutting all the way through kind of like this back piece you can bake that so for example what i usually like to do is i like to go to each of these booleans here and just turn them off and on and figure out which ones i should apply and which ones which ones i can remove so for example right here this kind of defines the form so i'm going to apply that this one right here i have no clue what this is so um let me just apply it this one right here this can be baked gonna remove that this little line down here we can bake that so we'll remove it this line up here can be baked we can remove that as well this cuts all the way through so we have to make sure we apply those same with this one same with the slice operation what else same with the slice operation down here apply that and then we have one more boolean here which seems to be these little notches now these notches can be big so i'm just going to go ahead and remove that and then just delete these little pieces because that will be able to be baked from the high poly okay cool so now we have here we have another boolean for the side these could actually be baked quite well because they don't cut too far through generally if these cuts were any deeper i would probably opt for a um up for just applying it but i think since these are so minor and not really that far in we could actually remove that and bake it and we have one more boolean here and i have no clue which one this is these little notches down here these could also be baked technically we'll get a little hovering line right here but it's going to be very unnoticeable so i'm just going to go ahead and remove those as well now i could have technically applied this slice operation right here but i think it's fine so i'm going to go ahead and just smart apply operations and smart apply that and then right here operations and smart apply that one as well and then we're just going to basically just check everything else so no booleans on these no booleans on this this boolean we can apply and same for this one here and i think that's about it now what i like to do before unwrapping is i like to go piece by piece and just see if there's any issues we need to sort so for example i'm like right down here notice we have a slight shading artifact going across because of where this cut is so what i'm going to actually do is dissolve out these edges right here it's not going to make much of a difference and then maybe just join that up or not i guess we can leave that one alone it should triangulate fine anyways i could also technically actually know i'm going to leave that one alone but up here for example i can maybe dissolve this down a bit if i wanted to it's not going to make much of a difference but i'm just kind of showing you the process could dissolve these two and now what i want to do is just merge these near miss vertices together so with machine tool shift one merge that one there and that should be decent enough cool and i'm just going to kind of pan around see what else we have going on not too much it's actually pretty good maybe in here i could decimate that down a bit but a little bit too far i'll leave that alone okay so that one looks good i'm going to go ahead and go back into global view and hide that for the door here the door is fine as well let me actually apply the boolean on it and that one's good and then i think the rest of these pieces should all be fine we'll just apply the boolean on this window frame and i think we're good to go the reason we want to apply the booleans is because before we unwrap everything all the booleans need to be applied so that way we actually have access to that geometry on those booleans so let me press alt h to bring everything back and what we're going to do is just begin the unwrapping process now i personally prefer unwrapping one piece at a time so what i do is i just isolate the view with forward slash on the numpad i'm going to add a new material and i'm going to call this one uvs just so i know what it is you can name whatever you want though we're going to go into the shader editor add in an image texture and then just make this whatever resolution you want i'll make it 4k can name it whatever you want and then set the generated type here to uv grid and then connect this up to the base color that's all you have to do so now if we go into material mode we're going to see a preview of our uvs which currently are just absolute crap so let me show you how i automate the unwrapping it's very easy to do and there's two ways to do it the more native way to do it would be to go to select and then select sharp edges and then right click mark seam now the other way to do is with hard ops which is a bit quicker press ctrl tilda and just make sure you have the seam option turned on okay so we're going to click on that and it's basically going to do the same thing it's going to whenever we sharpen it it's going to apply those seams on any of the sharp edges here pretty easy now what i also want to do is go here to the workspace panel under options and turn on on the live unwrap feature so that way whenever we update our seams it will automatically get unwrapped for us so let's go ahead and select everything and press u and then unwrap and we're going to change the method here to conformal you almost always want to use conformal for hard surface objects and angle base for more organic or semi-organic objects okay so this is pretty much all hard surface so we're going to go ahead set that to conformal and now we have to clean it up a bit you're going to see we get some distortions here on the top and basically what we want to do is kind of imagine since we have a big bevel right here we need to pretend this was a sharp edge so if we didn't have a bevel here where would that sharp edge be and that would probably just be around here somewhere so i'm just going to go ahead and put a seam all the way down this portion up to here and then right click and mark that seam and then we have to continue up through this one as well and mark that seam so right click mark seam we're gonna do the same exact thing on the back here i can just alt shift click everything all the way up mark the same much better now let me show you why we have this nasty distortion here on the top if i go into face mode and press the l key and i go into the uv editor you're going to see we have this thing that kind of resembles a ring and if you've seen my other videos before you probably already know what this means it kind of looks like a ring imagine you have a sheet of paper and you tape it together it's going to form a ring of paper right now if you cut that paper where you taped it you can flatten it out and basically the same way to cut in terms of uvs is to use a seam so in order to avoid this ring formation we're just going to put a seam somewhere here on the bottom where we can't really see it so maybe right here you can mark that seam and you're going to see it's a lot better we also have a little bit of distortion right here so we're probably going to need to put a seam on the bottom as well maybe right here like that and that's quite a bit better a little bit rotated but not too big of a deal for the materials we're going to be using honestly what i might even do is put some seams here just to split it up a bit more we're not going to really see the top or bottom of this piece so it doesn't really matter how many seams you put the more you can split up your islands the more uv space you're going to be able to use so maybe we'll do something like that and we're never going to see those seams so not really a big deal and it kind of projects it a bit better so we just have to go around to all the pieces that have a ring so like usually examples like this you're going to have a ring so just go ahead and put a seam here it could be the top or bottom like that the inside here is fine same for this portion and i think we're pretty much good what we can do is select everything and just make sure we don't have any rings and actually we do right here let me turn this on press the l key and you're going to see we also have a ring right here now what we can also do is we can actually remove seams on any chamfers they're pretty much redundant so i'm going to go ahead clear that one out and then maybe just put a seam from here to here connecting these together so we're gonna mark a seam and you're gonna see that unwrap is much cleaner now now i'd highly recommend if you haven't yet picking up our hard surface game asset 2.0 course it shows pretty much the entire process and also goes a bit more into our mad tea framework a bit more in depth so that way you can understand these concepts um a bit more intuitively so pick that up i'll probably put it in the description but if i don't just go to blenderbros.com the course is on there and it's a fantastic resource to add to your tool belt anyways this is a very clean unwrap i like it we're going to go ahead and hide it and actually before we hide it let's select everything and in the material menu we can go here and copy that material to everything else so now we'll maybe go to the door same idea we're going to sharpen it unwrap it make sure it's set to conformal and let's take care of this ring right here put a seam on that area maybe remove one of these chamfer seams here like that maybe we could remove this i'm not sure how it'll look a little bit too warped i'm gonna leave that one alone and this is pretty much good enough we can straighten this out um actually maybe not because we have n-gons but we'll go over that a bit later there's a tool that we can use to straighten out islands that are a bit rotated but for right now actually what i'm going to do is just cue operations and then sharpen everything at once so that way i don't have to keep marking the seam on each of them so right here we only have one ring which is around here on this area so we're just going to put a seam on the bottom call it a day and then for this one same idea we're just going to unwrap it i'm going to put a seam here on the bottom we have another ring on the inside but first let me remove the chamfer seam mark the seam there and that should be clean and then this one's pretty much good enough i could remove the chamfer seam here technically so let me just go ahead and do that we'll just control click all the way through oops all the way through there clear that one out and this one's this one's good enough for me and same for this one just going to go ahead and maybe put a seam here on the bottom and we can straighten those out later that's good enough i'm going to hide that and then only a few more left so for this piece right here not too much we really need to do on this one same for this piece probably not too much we're going to have to do on here this is a little bit skewed so what i'm going to do is actually put a c maybe put a seam here maybe i don't know another option is to maybe just use a project from view but it might not capture everything so even though i could do project from view bounds it's probably not going to give us the exact result we want yeah i didn't think so so maybe what i'll do here is just put a seam on that area put one there and it depends how much i care about that distortion but for right now that's fine right here should be easy as well just do a quick unwrap and since this is a cylinder we can actually remove the top and bottom cap so we're not going to see those so we can remove those and then we're just going to need to seam all the way through the back here so we can mark that and then maybe remove some of these additional chamfer seams we have going on let's just remove this one and then actually this one in this one and maybe this one and this one you don't have to be too picky here you can't really see too much of these i'm just trying to see what works the best so this one might work and then that might work as well cool so that's clean enough and then for this one i don't think we're going to see the caps let's see we're kind of going to see the bottom so all i need to do here is just put a seam through the back and then maybe i can remove this seam in this seam and let me unwrap it again interesting i think this seems to be an angle based or maybe conformal something's missing here not too sure what it is i'm not going to bother with it right now i think it's actually since the scale is not applied make sure you apply the scale control a apply scale otherwise you might run into weird issues like that but you're not going to really see too much of that piece i'm not too concerned about the seams okay right here do a quick unwrap on that and this should be the last one do a quick unwrap on this one and then maybe just drop some seams in to make it a little bit cleaner not going to worry too much about that one cool all right so now we can actually do is press alt h to un unhide everything here and you're going to see we have a nice clean unwrap now i always tell people when you're just trying to get the unwrap in the seams place don't worry about the size of your checkers just make sure they're projected nicely one thing i did notice here is that these are a little bit slightly rotated i don't think it's a big deal though what i could technically do is maybe put a seam here and here because we're not going to see the top and that should help split up the islands a bit nicer and project them a bit nicer as well then maybe i could put another one here let me remove this one and put it here instead a little bit better cool now what i do tell people like i just said don't worry about the size of the checkers just wait till you're done unwrapping now we can worry about the size so notice right here these checkers are smaller which pretty much means that this is going to have a much higher resolution while these back here are bigger which means it's going to have a much lower resolution so you don't want to have a really sharp texture here and a blurrier one here it doesn't make sense so once you're done unwrapping what we have to do is unwrap everything together so i just select everything in edit mode i press u unwrap and since the seams are already marked on all these different pieces you're going to see it unwraps very nicely now before we do anything what i really recommend doing is going to this uv panel and ticking on the average island scale to make sure that the checkers are truly the same size and then you can go here to pack islands now blender has an ok packer but a much better packing add-on is uv pack master it's going to be the best add-on you purchase so i'd really recommend picking it up i have links to it in the description and you're going to see why so let me show you the first thing i do this add-on is i go to advanced options and turn on normalized islands which is basically the same thing as average island scale so we turn that on i turn heuristic to 10 seconds so i don't have to wait super long and then all we have to do is click on pack and notice how much better the solution is now the ultimate goal here is to get as much gray space removed as possible and this is pretty much this is a reasonable decent solution i wouldn't yell at you for this but there are some additional gray areas we could sort out let me show you some additional ways to really optimize this unwrap even more the first thing you can do is remove faces that cannot be seen so for example if you just go into solid mode you can pretty much see that in the back here i'm not going to ever see any of these faces so why do i even have them i can just go ahead and remove them so i'm going to remove the one in the back i could technically drop in a loop cut and remove some more of these but i don't think it's that big of a deal so i can remove that one back there and then same for this one i could delete this face right what else could i do so you could remove the faces in the back of the door here but you might see them if the door were to open so maybe not the top and the bottom if we're not going to see the top and the bottom maybe there's like a wall covering it you could technically remove you know these faces here just be careful because you don't want to show that to the viewer so maybe i'll just remove the faces on the bottom because i don't think we're going to ever see any of those just remove it completely because it's probably going to be sitting on the floor right there's really not too many faces in here we can remove in this particular example but we can at least remove some so we could do that and then the face is here in the back we can remove those that looks good now we could also remove some of the faces on this one as well now be careful because you might think you can just go in here and delete out all these faces on this part and you would be wrong because if we deleted these faces look what happens to the bevel notice that right here we have a bevel and when i remove those faces it goes away so now you're going to see we don't actually have a bevel right there so what i recommend doing in these cases is simply insetting the the faces here because what's going to happen is as long as we inset it and set it here when we delete this we're still going to have that bevel being retained right so that's one way i do that you can do the same thing on the inside of the door here select this whole portion and set that and then delete and we're still going to have all of that so same idea for the inside of this area so we can just press l and l and set all of that stuff and it's going to be a bit tricky we don't have too much room to inset so just don't go too far delete those faces and that should be fine then same for this little slice piece right here we're not going to see most of the inside of this slice piece so let me actually clean this up real quick i forgot to do that so let me merge this one here merge this one here and then maybe merge these together shading might break a little bit but it's not that big of a deal in this case okay then we'll just go ahead and inset this portion very good and then the back side as well we can do the same thing so inset those got to be careful here let me just dissolve that one out and then inset delete perfect you're going to see we don't see any difference so pretty powerful workflow let's go to this one now down here just give that one a quick inset good and then same for this piece we can at least inset this area i think actually no let's leave that one alone but we will do is grab the back side delete that out and then maybe for this one just do a quick inset and pretty much this whole back piece over here we can't even see so what i'm going to do is actually just um just cut that out and i'm not sure what's happening let me go into view align okay something weird's happening there but anyways regardless what we can do is just um at the very least remove these areas like that and then we can just you know resharpen that should be fine and i also forgot to delete the back face out of this one we don't need it just remove it pretty much the same thing for this we can just delete out those pieces sharpen it again and you're going to see absolutely no difference visually so there's always going to be faces or areas you forget to remove and that's just part of the process just try to remove as much as you can and if you forget a few here there not a massive issue it's going to happen but try to get as many faces deleted as you can you're going to see maybe one more right here could be good let me actually apply this bevel i'll just go in here and set that and you're gonna see yep looks good as long as the window moves with it right there we go now the final thing we need to do in this process is make sure all of our bevels are set to one segment reason being is because if they're not set to one segment what's actually going to happen is you're going to get these baking artifacts whenever you try to bake the maps there's a whole technical reason for this i don't want to get into detail in this video because it's quite boring and not very exciting but if you want to research a bit more about baking with bevels you can probably find some solutions on there but just take my word for it change your bevel segments to one it doesn't really look much different you can kind of see between three and one it's basically the same thing in addition to that also reduces the overall poly count which is even better so it's kind of a win-win so just turn all these to one you could even do this beforehand you don't really need to use three segments i just think it's the default for hard ops and then hide all of that and now we should be good to go so you're going to see we have about 9 000 tries on this piece but keep in mind that's the with bevels if we removed all the bevels i bet this would be around three to four thousand tries which is not bad so we're going to go ahead and unwrap this again so we should have a much better solution with a lot less faces and space being used and what we could also do is use this add-on called uv squares to actually straighten out some of these more rectangular islands that are made of quads we can actually straighten those out and we could even find some more rings that we may have missed and just kind of figure out which areas those correspond to so here in the back for example i'm not sure which area that is can i delete that out no i can't it's holding the bevel i'm just going to leave that alone but what i can do is just take any of these pieces that we can straighten out somewhat and just do that real quick so this one's not going to really work this one should work same for this one same for these pieces the analogy i give to people is imagine you have a suitcase and you're trying to pack in a pvc pipe would you rather have a bent pvc pipe or a perfectly straight one kind of cut into pieces that's going to give you a much easier packing solution in that suitcase right so that's kind of the analogy i like to give to people this is probably fine i'm gonna go ahead and turn this off actually what happened here okay something happened let me just select these again that was a bit weird i don't think there are that many so it was literally just these pieces and then just a few of these okay cool i'm gonna go ahead and go into the uv squares add-on and click on two grid by shape you might have to turn this off and by the way this add-on is completely free you can just get it on github i believe so pick that up but there wasn't too much to straighten out here and anyways what we can do now is just go back to uv pack master and just get a much better packing solution here and there's still quite a bit of gray space so i think what i'm going to do is just a final optimization solution here is just to take any of these rings we have going on and split them into smaller pieces so for example what i could do here is maybe take this piece and just for these seams here in the back we're never going to see what i could do is maybe just put a seam there put a seam there and you can just split these into even smaller islands which is pretty cool so let me grab this piece and was that the right one yes it was i'm just going to keep looking for any areas that are more of a ring formation so like right here let's go ahead and take a look okay so this one should be able to be straightened out even though it looks like a ring sometimes these just kind of trick you so i think we just actually need to go back in here and do that again so we're just going to take this piece pretty much all these pieces whatever these things are now be careful because if you have n-gons they will not straighten out properly and the add-on won't work so just select the ones that have quads these right here this one does not so i could technically re-topologize that and just connect those vertices together and let me show you how you would do that so for example i could take this face in this face ctrl t alt j and just hopefully get a um [Music] decent solution there let me actually symmetrize this so i'll reset the origin and then just symmetrize over which isn't actually perfectly symmetrical unfortunately okay so all i'm missing here is this needs to be connected to that point and maybe i could just um [Music] dissolve this random portion out here here and then remove these don't need that and then same for the back we could just ctrl t alt j and then just dissolve this out and now we can straighten those it's very easy to go overboard on this optimization but it is also very crucial because you want to get this pack as clean as possible but you also have to consider how much time it's going to take you and if it's worth that time usually it is but just be careful you know because it will take you quite a bit of time so what else um we'll get these and i think that's pretty much it yeah it looks good enough to me so let's go ahead and to grid by shape sometimes you'll actually get like these weird um issues where it just doesn't straighten out and sometimes you just have to undo it and redo it and that could also indicate you actually don't have quads you have an n gone and you can see right here we actually have an extra vertex so shift l we can deselect that one because it has an ngon this one might be the same issue yep so shift l on that one but pretty much everything else here is going to be good to go so now what we can do is pack it again much better all right so i'm happy with this solution i don't need to go any further with it this is pretty much decent enough a little bit of extra gray space but we're not going to get much of a better resolution even if we could cover that so here it is a very clean unwrap of this door i could have also removed these faces in the back here i forgot about those but you know like i said you won't remember everything now let's stop here for a sec and just answer some common questions i get the first one is do we have to unwrap the high poly the answer is no the reason we unwrap is because this gives substance painter areas to you know map the textures to we're not going to be using the high poly and substance painter we're only using the high poly for baking so we only need to unwrap the low poly version the other question i get is do we have to do any sort of optimization on the high poly not usually unless you have overlapped geometry which can cause issues but in this case we actually don't and one way to check is to simply go into the face orientation menu yours might show up as blue but just look for any red areas if you don't see any red areas that means you don't have any overlapped um geometry so you're good to go there so the high poly you don't really have to do anything to okay the only thing we'll be doing to the high poly later is triangulating it so right now the low poly is the only thing we have to do some work on and most of the hard work is in the unwrapping in the next step the final step of the mad t workflow that i use is triangulation so we've done the modeling we've done the automation for unwrapping we've done any sort of decimation for optimizing and the final step is triangulation the reason you want to triangulate is because this is an ngon based mesh now one of the big reasons people preach in all quad based workflows for a few reasons if you're doing like a vfx pipeline or doing any sort of deforming or animation sometimes all quads could be very important for example if this was a an asset that was meant to explode into a million pieces this ngon based mesh would not work at all so that's one practical use case of all quads another one is it's easier to run trim sheets and straighten out your uv islands and things like that but for the most part that's not really a main reason that i worry about another reason i hear to use all quads is because that's just the way it's done which is a pretty lame excuse if you ask me um if there's a specific reason you need to use quads fair enough but just for that reason with no explanation not fair game right and another good reason to use quads would be because quads are what i call natural triangulators for example if i had this cube or even better yet a sphere let's go in here and add in just a uv sphere notice how this is pretty much all quads and if i subdivide this or triangulate it look what it does it's a natural triangulator they triangulate with pretty much no stress see this pretty much ready to go so if you were to export an all quad-based mesh into another software whatever triangulation algorithms those softwares are using is going to be be able to handle those quads without issue a lot of the reason people say n-gons don't work is because it's true if you just export this mesh as is you're going to get a mess because what happens is all these different 3d softwares they have different triangulation algorithms and what happens is when you export this to say marmoset or substance and it tries to automatically triangulate the mesh for you it ends in usually ends in a disaster so we always want to triangulate beforehand and blender as long as we do that we're going to have a mesh that works inside of these softwares okay so this is an easy way to do it triangulating is very easy in blender what we need to do is just select the mesh any of these pieces and add a triangulate modifier actually before we do that i'm going to save a backup copy so we're going to make a triangulation here tick on the keep normals button and then what we're going to do is make sure we have the copy attributes add-on turned on so now we can do select everything ctrl c copy selected modifiers triangulate and click ok and you're going to see this entire mesh is triangulated now could we technically stop here yes we could but some of these triangulations are really stretched and just overall quite nasty and they could cause some problems so for example look here in the back notice how much how much these are pulling down what i like to do in these cases is to just re-route the triangulations a bit so for example i'm just going to run a knife cut from here over to here and i can dissolve out these really far connection points there and then we can just go back into wireframe see how that looks so these are pulling a little bit too far so what you could always do in these cases you could simply um let's see you could simply subdivide this edge ctrl shift to b to bevel that vertex and now we're going to have a much better connection point on this we could do the same thing on the other side here we could subdivide this edge and just snap it to this one and then snap this one down here and you're going to see these triangulations are a lot better we could even move that up a bit so these are a lot more perpendicular that's the main goal here is to make these triangulations more or less orthogonal then same for up here we could do the same thing just subdivide maybe move that around a little bit that's going to be a lot better for the mesh now for right here these are all pulling pretty far so what i like to do in these cases is make a centralized vertex which will actually make this connection point a lot more elegant and perpendicular see that so that's just one way i like to kind of clean up these nasty stretches just because it's very easy to do so maybe for this vertex here move that up a bit you could probably move these down a bit as well that's fine you're going to see this is already much better this bottom portion looks fine now over here what we could even do is we could maybe join these together just kind of move that down a bit and that's just going to naturally catch this kind of depends where you want it right we could do the same thing here we can't move that one but we can join that and just kind of move that up these should all be okay so not going to do too much work in there so that's just a little bit better of a triangulation strategy so i'm going to go ahead and hide that piece and same idea for these we could just make some more centralized connection points so maybe just run a knife cut from here to here and just help these triangulations a bit could even run from here to here move this over a bit move this up a bit right and if i really wanted to i could even you know do something like that check the back back same problems we're just going to go ahead and maybe run a knife cut from here to here and then here to here and maybe this one over a bit now these corners are what i call a ping pong in effect they kind of go back and forth like this so to fix that you can usually connect both corners like that and then just kind of move these um vertices in a better location so they catch better got to be careful you don't overlap anything though so maybe take this one move that over a bit and then maybe move this up a bit much better go ahead and hide this and then same idea for this square whenever you have squares like this you're almost always going to have this ping-ponging effect so just join it up like that and then like that then you can just do a quick symmetry to both sides that's going to be a much better separation same for the back join you can press shift r to repeat the command by the way and then just do a quick um mirror down symmetry rather i use a mesh machine for that this one looks okay pretty much all quads so like i said quads are natural triangulators so we're good there this one has a bit of a ping-ponging effect so i could always you know do something like this and then like this there we go and then same for this one maybe we could do that and then maybe we could just run a knife cut from here on the x to here make that connection point better and then same for the bottom here to here and then connect these up and that is a much better triangulation see that very clean almost done here guys you just got to take care of some of these this isn't too bad what i might actually do on this one is actually i'll leave it alone um this is fine this isn't too bad i guess i could if i wanted to do something like this just put a more central connection point for those that's good this one's fine this one's pretty much fine as well you could even put in a loop cut to split those up a bit more if you wanted to but these are all pretty much quads so they're going to be natural triangulators anyways but for long cylinders i like to kind of split them up just to make it a bit easier a bit cleaner this one's fine and this one maybe we could just do something like that and maybe connect these up here and then just join that up or something there we go cool so we're going to go ahead and unhide everything so alt h and now we have a much better set of triangulations going on go ahead and turn that off and you're going to see with the bevels were right around 9 400 tries which is not too bad modern graphics cards can handle much higher poly counts nowadays so not a big deal all right so now that we have our unwrapping done and we have our triangulation done um you're going to see we kind of got a little bit of skewing going on right here so what i might do real quick i might have changed the topology by accident well not by accident on purpose because i added in those lines but not a big deal we can just go ahead and re-unwrap this so we'll just go ahead and press u unwrap make sure we're on conformal and then like we did before we can just quickly you know straighten out some of these rings here don't spend too much time on this it's not a massive issue but just kind of get what you can so maybe these those are all good options and then maybe the ones that don't have any n-gons like that maybe this one this one and what else am i missing maybe this one here as well and now we'll do just go ahead and go to we'll turn this off actually do we have to turn that off no we don't and those are all going to be straightened out very nicely looks good and then we can just go ahead and pack this again so select everything pack it again and we got a pretty clean solution here and we should be good to go so unwrapping's done triangulation is done and all cleaned up now we're ready to export this thing now whenever we're exporting softwares like marmoset are always going to read based off of the suffix of the mesh so for example the high poly is going to be read as underscore high and the low poly is going to be read as underscore low meaning we have to rename all of these objects here but it's a lot easier than you think so before we do anything what i want to do is select the entire mesh and then just rename these cubes okay so i'm just going to press ctrl f2 to batch rename we're going to go to set name and we're going to set the name here set to new we'll just call this door and you're going to see everything now gets renamed to door and then what we're going to do is press ctrl f2 again and this time we're going to add a suffix and this suffix is going to be underscore low so now it's going to be door whatever number it is and then underscore low and that's all you have to do guys really easy second we're going to do the same exact thing to the high poly but one thing we have not yet done to the high poly is triangulate it so i'm just going to go ahead and smart apply all these booleans and stuff so select everything operation smart apply then what we're going to do is just add a triangulate modifier tick on keep normals and then copy that to the rest just like we did in the low poly now if we go into wireframe this is going to look like a complete mess and i'm not too worried about the triangulations on the high poly because blender triangulates in such a way that it does not cause overlap so i only need the high poly here for baking purposes i'm not worried about how clean the triangulation is this here is solely being used for baking so i don't care how it looks i just want it to get the job done when i bake it so you don't have to do anything else when you triangulate this you're just going to leave it as is and then just like we did for the low poly we're going to rename everything so ctrl f2 we're going to set the new name to door and then control f2 again and this suffix this time is going to be underscore hi click on ok and now we're ready to export so to export is really easy all we need to do is select everything we're going to go up here to file export and fbx and i already actually did some test exports here so i'm just going to go ahead and tick on the selected objects button and i'm just going to call this a door underscore high and we'll just export that and then for the low poly here we're going to go ahead make sure everything's deselected and then for the low poly same idea we're going to export this one as door underscore low very important that you have that underscore low there and just make sure selected objects is turned on and now we're done so go ahead and save your scene grab another cup of coffee if you need one because blender is finally can be closed down we're going to hop into marmoset bake everything marmoset's like a two minute process really easy and then we're ready for the fun part which is texturing now the reason i use marmoset is because it tends to make the normal maps significantly better than other software just like a blender or even substance but i'm also going to show you how to bake in substance so even if you don't have marmoset i got you covered i just want to show you for those of you who are interested really easy it's like two minutes so go here to this baking icon we're gonna load in our high and low poly so just open those and you're gonna be able to see your low poly you can turn that off and on and your high poly you can turn that off and on cool now i want to change the samples to 16 the format to 16 and i'm just going to bake the normals here and i'll also set the resolution to 4k that one's up to you though and now all we have to do is click on this p icon for preview we have to make a new folder and then we'll just go ahead and change this to png and then just click save and then you're just going to give it a second and it should bake the normal maps for you and to change the lighting you can just hold shift and right mouse button we'll just kind of move the lighting around and you're going to see now we have these details baked in see the difference there looks really nice now i do see some issues here on this portion now let me show you a really easy way to fix these types of situations notice these nasty bake artifacts here check this out this is kind of like a cheating way to do it but it gets the job done what we're going to do since there's not actually any detail on this pipe to be baked what we're going to do is simply delete it out temporarily so what i'm going to do is we can just close out a marmosat okay with marmoset closed out we're just going to go to our low poly we're going to delete out this one and delete out this one and then we're just going to export it again you can just press q and use the hard ops exporter to bit quicker this is going to be the low poly then same exact thing for the high poly we're going to go ahead and delete that out delete that out and then we're going to export this one again so basically this is going to bake without even having those cylinders or anything on the on the mesh so we're going to go ahead and export that one and now we can do is just undo this since we've already exported it we can just bring these back with ctrl z awesome so now we have the fbx files baked or exported rather without these pieces so now when we bring it into marmoset it's not going to even consider those so let me open it i'm going to go ahead and do the same exact thing as before i'm going to load those in okay i'm going to change this to 4k i'm just going to do 16 16 and we're going to bake the normals so now all we have to do is click on the p button here and let me just delete out these folders i don't need them i'll just delete that and make a new folder and then all we're going to do is go to png and just wait for that to bake and you're going to see we won't actually have any issues cool so now we have the areas baked that we actually wanted to have baked so once this is um once this has shown up it automatically saves to that folder you made so you can basically just close out of marmoset now and now that we have the maps baked without those pieces giving us issues what we can actually do is export these all once again with these pieces back in place okay so we're going to go to fbx this will be the low and then we'll do the same thing for the high there we go so now we're ready to hop into substance painter and texture this thing so inside of substance all you have to do is go to file new and we're going to load in our low poly we're not going to be using the high poly anymore unless you wanted to bake something specifically and i'll show you how so we're going to load in the low poly we're going to import these or just the normal map here and then we're going to click on the ok button so now if we just go ahead and kind of pan around here we can go to texture set settings and actually load in our normal map you're going to see there it is very clean everything is nice and you know set up for us now we also need to bake is the ambient occlusion and the curvature and i'll also show you how to deal with the id maps and what those are used for so i'm just going to go to bake mesh maps and if you wanted to bake your normal map inside of substance instead basically what you would do is you would go to the high definition meshes right here and load in that high poly and then you can just bake the normal map but we've already baked that inside of a marmoset so i'm going to turn this off not too worried about the world's space normal id we haven't set that up yet going to turn that off but i do want to make the ambient occlusion curvature and position the position just defines where the bottom and the top is then i'll just turn off thickness i don't need that so change this to 4k click on big selected textures and then give it a second and just like that this looks nice and clean inside of substance painter now let me show you the value of id map so say for example i just wanted to drop a texture into here so maybe something like this and i only wanted to affect certain areas well the way you would usually do that is by simply going to the black mask option and then you could just go here and you could use like a volume fill for example and you're going to see you might not want to capture this area here for example so alternatively we'd probably have to do is like um paint it in so instead what we can do is we can define which areas we want to have separate textures for by using what we call id maps and we can set those up in blender very easily basically what you do is you just tab into face mode and you just tell blender hey i want these areas to have different textures and we do that by just selecting the areas so for example maybe this portion here i want to have a certain texture right and maybe this one back here could have the i don't know maybe the same one maybe not but for right now what i can do is go to vertex paint click on this button and then choose a color maybe blue and if i press shift k now we have a blue color so each separate color is going to represent a separate texture although you can use the same texture on multiple colors no problem so i always aim to go for different colors if i'm not sure now what i do want to do is save this color on the palette just in case i want to access it again and give another piece the same color so here if we just go to the workspace panel and go to color palette i can click on new and then click on this button here so it'll be saved so now what i usually do is i just tab into edit mode and then hide it and then i just do the same thing for these other pieces maybe we'll give this one a different color now make sure you get everything it's very easy to mess up i'm going to get this interior part as well i'm going to go to vertex paint and give this maybe like a green color shift k tab into edit mode actually before we do that let's save that to the color plot as well then we can just go ahead and hide that piece pretty easy and actually what i probably should have done is also gotten this area here maybe so no problem that's why we have the color still saved in here shift k and then we'll just go ahead and hide this portion by the way you can get that back with alt h very easily so this part here i definitely want to have a actually i can just go into vertex mode and press l on this whole thing it'll select the entire thing maybe i'll give this one like a yellow shift k and then add that to the color palette and then hide it that one should be hidden too and the rest of these should be pretty easy we just have to go to um [Music] i'm gonna hide all that we just have to go here and we'll select the door and we're gonna give this one another color so maybe like a orange shift k and then add this to the color palette okay and then this one right here could be another color as well and it doesn't matter if you use like different shades of orange or whatever just make sure they're different colors physically so this one [Music] added the palette you should get the idea by now but i just want to show the whole process this will be the window so this can be maybe like a cyan just to kind of represent the windows we remember well it should be pretty obvious but and then we're going to hide that and then we have just a few more so we have this one here we could give this one maybe a purple right and then we'll go to this one same idea turn this on shift k and then hide that and then just a few more over here now i want all these to basically be the same thing i don't know if there's a way to do this all at once i don't remember i don't think there is but not really that big of a deal as long as i just have you know a new um set of colors here it doesn't matter too much so you can hide that machine tools makes it easy to hop into vertex paint i think it's which one is it this one so just uh if you want to do it that way it's always a bit easier and then these pieces up here will have the same exact ones so vertex paint shift k don't forget to add these to the palette just in case you need them again and the same for this one shift k hide it then we just have two more we have one right here and these is going to be the same one i think so maybe give this like a faint color whatever you want that to be can add that to the palette and then one more right here shift k and then what we can do is press alt h and we're gonna have a um if we go up here we can go to vertex and you're gonna see now we have vertex colors assigned and i'm just gonna make a separate save here and now what we can do is just export this one more time so go ahead and go to settings export fbx overwrite the low poly and then just go back into substance so now we can basically just load this back in like we did before we'll load in our low poly i'm going to import that normal map i'm going to click on ok and then all we have to do is just hop in here select that normal map and now we can do is we can bake the id the ambient occlusion the curvature and the position now for id we're not using just click it we're not using material color we're using vertex color make sure you change that and then basically we just set this to 4k and we're ready to go so just bake it give it a second and you're going to see those vertex colors should pop up once this is done there you go you can see them right there you could even go up here and go to id and basically this all represents where different textures are going to go very very useful so let me change this back to material right there and now we're ready to texture this thing now the way i like to begin is to just find a material or texture that i think would look cool on this asset now one thing i see a lot of people do especially beginners is they tend to throw like a million different textures onto their model much like you want to have good visual design and only use primary secondary and oftentimes tertiary details you can pretty much apply the same concept of texturing now rules can be broken but a good general rule of thumb is you don't really need more than like three to four textures and for more primary shapes maybe like even one to two so don't go overboard on texture just focus on a few really good ones that fit the design and then play with them there okay so let's look for maybe i was playing with this one the steel so i use smart materials up front because smart materials have different effects built into them like scratches grunge dirt edgewear effects things like that so i always recommend going for like a smart material up front kind of see what you have this one's not too bad we could try maybe like a steel that was not too bad either let's try an iron here let's go to maybe iron forge i know this one's pretty good this one might actually work so what i want to do and this is why we used id maps i want to right click add add mask with color selection what we can do now is we can pick the color and this is why i really love id maps because we can basically just you know pick a color here and we can just reuse it if we want just pick another color maybe back here same color and that's just the power of id maps that's pretty good we could also try just experimenting with some of these other materials maybe we could do one with the steel and just kind of override it see how it looks just visually i think the other one looks a lot better so that's one trick i use i just kind of overwrite it by putting it on the top of the layer and if i don't like it i can only just delete it out so press the delete key so we could try steel painted or maybe something like this you know a lot of these steels are pretty good it just kind of depends what you're going for let's try this one here this one's actually pretty cool [Music] so we have this one and we have that one and a lot of this will come down to like personal style personal preference right you can maybe like mix the two by just kind of turning down the opacity right so now you have like primarily um let's see if you turn this all the way down you're gonna see you're basically i'm just left with this base shape here or base um base material you can kind of see those streaks there but if i turn the opacity back up it'll go away so just kind of play with that maybe like mix and match the two this isn't too bad and maybe for these secondary shapes so you know these details here the window or whatever well obviously the window is going to have a glass so we can kind of give that one an exception but maybe for the door i found that the plastic materials although they're called plastic actually look pretty good so you have like this one is it's if we change this to a white color might look pretty good i don't like the streaks on here though let me try going to um in the folder we can go to the base color change this over to white and i definitely want to get rid of these um this dust effect looks awful and then we have some stains here which isn't too bad what i am going to do though is just slightly decrease that we don't need that many stains so just go pretty low you could also play with the actual size of the stain so you just go in here and um sorry not in there we go to grunge stains right here and there should be a scale option you just kind of play with the scale there and you can kind of make that a little bit more like like plaster like someone threw some water on it or something but that could work you could also turn this one off and just leave like one set of stains instead something a little bit more like that i think that'll look pretty cool and now we can do is we can actually drag this below all the way to the bottom here and that's just going to automatically since this comes first and these overwrite it but are not selected on the door then that should just um pop in very nicely not sure i like the aesthetic here what i might try is a different plastic um let's see one of my favorite plastics here is the where is it this plastic used i always just drop this one in and then i immediately change it to a different color so instead of 10 we could do like a white color here i think white's going to be the only one that really fits in this case so something not too bright not too dark just kind of like sci-fi-ish right and i'm probably going to disable the so you can see we have some pretty heavy bumps there you could drop the opacity or just disable it all together and then you have like roughness variations some spectacles most of these are actually fine with um you have some soft dirt you can kind of go into the mask editor here if you wanted to and just play with that dirt level so it's not too heavy you also have the edge wear which is pretty subtle so i'll leave that alone we're just going to drag this to the bottom and i think this one looks a lot nicer now i do think we could maybe play with these settings a little bit more so this is the soft dirt this one's fine i actually like that these are the edges roughness variations now what i could do is go to the base color here and this way you can change the parameters like metallic and stuff you could make the door metallic if you wanted to so it has that nice feel to it now keep in mind metallic value should technically be between or just zero or one there's no values in between you have dielectric and you have metallic materials so but you can kind of like go in between for artistic purposes i think that's fine um roughness you can play with if you want to make it like reflective or whatever the base color but not too much of a difference we're not going to really play with anything else here that's fine and then maybe we just drop that a little bit more now we're going to add some dirt and different wear and tear and things like that to this model but for right now i just kind of want to get the base material set up that's why i tell you guys when you're modeling just design simple shapes and see how you can build on those shapes same with texturing put very simple textures and then see how you can build on those also i think i'm going to go over to the let me close this folder to this iron forge and just go to the color selection actually not this one let's do it on the steel dark and see how this looks it's actually not too bad if i wanted to mix and match i could also drop this other one here too but i kind of like that aesthetic right there now one thing i learned in a book that i read quite some time ago the book was called the design of everyday things it's a pretty cool book kind of teaches you how to think a bit more just like common sense thinking about how you design things and this can be applied to 3d and one thing or one concept in that book was the idea of signifiers so say you're going up to like a fire escape right the door should be very very obvious how you use the door it should be obvious if you're pushing it it should be obvious that you're pulling it it you shouldn't have any trouble getting out of a fire escape right and the book was talking about situations in which there were doors designed that people were just rushing to get out but they couldn't figure out like which way you opened the door and that's dangerous right now in this case we don't really have any danger but it's a pretty good concept to consider you want to immediately tell the viewer where they should be you know opening the door where this where all the attention should go and one very easy way to do that is to use a completely different color that pulls a lot of attention so you know the door handle is pretty obvious here and we're all kind of acquainted to that but it kind of blends in in a way but watch what happens if i maybe do like a you can play with some more materials here or you can just build your own if you wanted to but for example i could use like let's do something like this what i could do is add a mask of color selection and then put this on the door handle and this immediately is going to pull attention right so the first thing anyone's going to see when they look at this thing is this door handle because it pops so much now i don't like this color i would recommend kind of playing with that right so we could do is go in here and let me just maybe turn some of this off and just kind of see what we have going on here that's why i like these smart materials because they're pretty much just plug and play although you can always build your own as well i want this to be a little bit darker maybe even like on the orange side or something if i wanted to but i think the red is going to be our best bet i'm going to go for a more like subtle type of red here so just something like just a hint of red right so it still kind of blends in with that color but you can so clearly see it i don't want it to be like too too attention pulling so this is a pretty easy way to just tell the viewer immediately hey this is how this thing works now the last thing i think we're missing here is some glass so there's some pretty cool glasses in here glasses is that like the right term for plural i don't think so we have some pretty cool glass um just drop that in and add mask with color selection and then just pick there and now we're gonna have a pretty cool looking window here now this window looks a bit too plain a bit too generic so what i'm gonna actually do is find some sort of material that i could use as like a like a dirt almost so i'm going to look for maybe i've always found that the steel or something just the basic materials work pretty well you can just pop and find like a simple steel rust or just something steel rough what you could actually do here is kind of get some wear and tear looking now you wouldn't technically have wear and tear from rust on glass but it's it's how it looks that's what mainly what i'm going for but you know if that kind of bothered you and you wanted some more natural stains you could always add in a fill layer here and just try to find like a darker type of grimy color and then all you'd really have to do is add a generator or actually we'll add a black mask first and then add a generator because what the blast black mask does is it conceals this entire material but when we paint in white let me show you if i were to go to add paint and i were to paint in white it'll actually begin to reveal that that's how masks work if you're not familiar with that so what generator will do is it will add white in a way that looks like dirt it's pretty cool so if i go here and go to dirt notice it adds white and it kind of adds in a way that looks like dirt so now what i could do is i could limit it to this glass here only but it actually kind of looks cool i just out of curiosity i want to just see how that looks layered it's kind of cool but anyways i just want to put this on the glass so all i need to do here is i need to right click and add a color selection choose the window and you're going to see it doesn't work even if we switch the spots here in the mass stack you're going to see it still doesn't work because the entire door either has the dirt or if it's switched then the window just doesn't have anything now the reason this is happening is because of our current blend mode let me drag this down here so what i want to happen first is i want to have the dirt first so the dirt is going to appear and then below it we're going to have the color selection now if i change this to multiply you're going to see this actually fixes it what this does is it multiplies the top layer over the bottom layer and gives us the darker result so you can imagine this dirt is going to have the splotches of white and this color selection is going to have full white so we're going to basically receive the darker result here which ends up being the dirt i think probably explained that in a confusing way but worst case scenario you can always play with the blend modes by just clicking and just control scrolling through and generally you'll find the solution that you need if blend modes confuse you they definitely used to confuse me and there's still certain ones that i just don't even use because they're not very intuitive to me but that's basically how multiply works you also use multiply in situations like in blender for ambient occlusion when you want to um just reveal the shadows only so that's another useful way to use multiply but in this case it actually works quite well as you can see so now we have like a dirty window maybe a bit too heavy so we could do is we could kind of play with the dirt level so you just give a little bit of dirt you can also play with the dirt contrast you can play with some of the grunge amount settings if you really want it to get dirty but it's kind of up to you you also have grunge scale so you can play with that some decent ones and then you have you know some various other settings here so i'm just going to leave this alone you can also use seed to kind of randomly generate some additional effects but yeah just play with it see what you like you're going to find something so now what i could do is start just working on some additional little details so maybe i could add in a paint bucket tool here and we could do is let's see add a black mask and then maybe we can make this one like a much darker color and then i could just start painting in like whatever i want or what i could use here i could go to the black mask and choose a different alpha and just kind of find some cool looking shapes so for example if i chose this one then guess what if i control right mouse button to scroll up i kind of get that effect so this maybe this is like a um this could be pretty cool maybe this is like the entrance to some medical facility on some sort of spaceship so we could do is put that there and then you know just find like a green color but these kind of clash a little bit too much for my liking the um the red and the green i actually just prefer that neutral color also that positioning is awful so you might want to hold alt shift and left mouse button to kind of swing to the front and you can just try to find like a like a spot that looks good so that's actually pretty well balanced up here i don't think is gonna work very well we could try though let's just kind of imagine how that looks yeah it's a bit too much i think this is a good triangle of focus to have because what's going to happen is the eye is going to immediately bounce to the door handle here and then most of these details up here which are the most visible and interesting and then down here this is going to pull quite a bit so it's going to be like a triangle of interest and that's kind of the idea i'm going for this design now let's go to base color you can kind of play with the color it doesn't have to be super sharp but it certainly doesn't have to be super light so we don't need it to pull too much attention just enough to hold the viewer in that triangle this is pretty good i'd say i'm also going to add in a color selection i'm curious how it would look around that window sill if i just drop that black color there perhaps it's a bit too heavy yeah that's kind of why i was worried i thought this would be a little bit too tight and maybe it is but that could work but i think i prefer this one now what i want to do real quick is i want to load in a different hdri now the one i use is called abandon slipway from from blender now to load in your own custom ones i believe what you have to do is go to import resources and then add the resource here so i could just add the um my usual abandoned slipway and then i would make this a environment and i just need to import it for this current set or project only so import that and what we could do is kind of play with the hdri settings so maybe see how abandoned slipway works for lighting just give it a second to load and then just hold shift right mouse button you can just see how drastically the lighting switches in here and it just kind of makes a cool different aesthetic i kind of like this maybe i could also try and by the way all these hdris are free on hcrihaven.com this is where i get all of mine you could also try maybe this abandoned parking do that as an environment and then maybe this abandoned tank farm i found these are pretty cool and this could be for the project and just play with hdri hdris it's hard to say that quickly just play with these and see what you like so this one's the abandoned parking let's see how that looks it's not too bad i don't like it as much though and then we have the abandoned tank farm this one might be too dark actually it's not too bad i think i'm just going to go with the slip way because this one is just very neutral overcast lighting although a bit boring in some cases but i think it looks interesting here now one thing you can do is you can go here to the settings as well and turn on shadows i found that shadows can kind of help highlight the form a bit more but it's pretty heavy by default you can always turn this down and just give it a little bit of shadows in there you have average and you also have intensive i don't know if it makes a difference to be honest um you also have like field of view and focal length right now the focal length is at 17 so you could change it if you wanted to um i found this look just looks a bit weird to me i'm just going to keep it at 17. i think blender's default one is 50 though and then if you were going for like a more orthographic render you could do like 135 but we're going to render it in blender so i'm just going to keep this here because it's easier to work with by the way nothing wrong with um substance painter for rendering i just prefer to use blender cycles because it looks a bit nicer to me and also i can use different planes as reflectors i can diffuse light if i need to i can put it on a floor and add backdrops and things like that so just a bit more versatility with blender but it's really easy to export all this back into blender so don't worry about it we also have some post effects and we're not done yet i just kind of want to show you you can do some simple color correction if you did want to you know do some rendering in here i do not think this will affect the exports of your textures just the overall look here in um in substance painters i'm just going to keep this at 1. so you could do that you could also do things like a um like a glare if you had that vignettes just stuff like that and then if we go down we should have actually i think that's it really so there's some pretty cool ones you also have like color profiles you could just scroll through i don't really use these to be honest that one looks kind of interesting looks like we're in a dark hallway but these could be useful as well if you're running a substance but i'm not gonna not gonna mess with those now what i think i'm gonna do is go back to this um steel dark age and i'm just gonna actually it's not that one is it it's the iron forge i just think these are pulling too much attention so let's just give those the same one that looks a little bit better much better this isn't pulling as much attention before it kind of was now let me just pump up the brightness in here real quick i just think it's a little bit too where's brightness color correction here it is see i just want to turn this on and give this a little bit more brightness i don't want to play with the contrast i think that's fine i have no clue what the hell bias is to be honest with you um clearly it does something weird then you can play with saturation if you wanted to kind of desaturate this a bit more all stuff we can do in blender as well so maybe if you wanted something a bit more neutral but the issue is that red color will go away if you turn the saturation down so maybe just do a little bit yeah it looks a little bit better to me but so far so good guys it's looking pretty clean now we could start using is um some simple normal stamps i use this all the time let me show you how it works so if i were to go into and there's two different ways to do this one really easy way is to go to the brush tool and what we can do is turn off everything except for normal and all we would have to do is basically go to our this button here type in normal and we could use some of these stamps so this would simply stamp onto our already existing normal map which means we could basically um just not have to use any more polygons instead this would be on the normal map so for example we have a handle right here i could drag this in and then i could just drop a handle like um i did not mean to do that we could just drop a handle on the door right here so you know just somewhere decent there's also this one let's see how this one looks i like this one better so that's pretty cool now this scratch on the door is really bothering me and it doesn't look real at all so what i'm gonna do is just i don't know which one this is i'm just going to turn it off there we go scratches just disable that no need for it then we can just keep adding more and more of these now i see a lot of our students go very heavy on details when they don't need to do that so these are meant to be enhancement details not anything that pulls attention unless you want it to pull attention so these are just meant to be like small little highlights on the mesh just to kind of make it look cool so you can just kind of find some different stuff in here like on the top we're not going to really see the top so why bother but you know there might be some other areas you want to do like a little notch of some sort maybe you want to do like a line you could even just do something super simple like this and just let's just change the rotation in here instead so 90. could even just do something like that here and here just little details here and there could look kind of cool so you don't have to go overboard i'm just you know just showing you what you could do that's just going to be useless i don't like these either i'm just trying to show you like the general idea honestly i don't think i want to put too many if any at all because i'm pretty happy with how this looks already another thing i could have done is i could have instead of baking this detail here i could have probably just used a normal inside of um substance painter as well as for example i could maybe let's scroll down and drop one of these in i could like you know finessed it kind of with a normal stamp but just not as good in my opinion but i'm pretty happy with how this thing looks overall so if you wanted to add some like additional alpha as you could so for example you could drop that in drop a black mask and then maybe you could find like some other alphas you could put like an arrow if you wanted to like emphasize where the door handle was right you could do like that i don't know looks kind of weird not gonna lie but you get the idea so i'll leave that up to you for right now i'm pretty happy with how this looks what i might do before we end this or move to blender rather is just play with the not these a little bit too dirty so maybe what i could do is go to the mask here let's see how this looks so we have this one and we also have this one let's go in here and just kind of play with some of these different details we have the dirt maybe we could just drop the mass builder a little bit so just drop the opacity or just change the settings overall you can always do that this kind of depends what you're going for anyways now once you're done what you can do is first of all save your scenes you don't want it to crash and the second thing we can do is go up here to file and then export textures now what we're going to be using is the output template for pbr metallic roughness that's what i use for blender now by default this one does not have ambient occlusion so what you can do and i'll even do it from scratch let me just find my copy use the same thing i'm just going to remove these so basically what you do is you go here to the output template you go to pbr metallic roughness you duplicate it you can rename it if you want by double clicking but we don't need the emissive since they don't have any emissive materials but what we do need to do is add in a gray channel just copy paste one of these and then just rename this to like ao so we know what it is and what we need to do is drop in an ambient occlusion so like that and then you're basically done that's all you have to do it's really easy and you're going to see your list of exports we're going to get all this different stuff so for example i guess it didn't update the emissive but we're going to have base color height metallic normal and roughness and we technically don't need the metallic if we don't have any metallic stuff but it doesn't hurt to export these you can always delete them if you don't need them so we're going to do is just change the you could leave this on the default so it'll export as the default resolution we brought it in so 4k or you could force it like that we're gonna do a there's a bunch of different ones you could do i think png will be fine eight bits and dithering tends to work it just kind of dithers out the noise if you ever have that or you could just go for 16 bits it it's um it's going to be a render so go with what you want and then we can just export this to a folder so you know i could go here and then what i could do is go to desktop and then here and then substance export so i know select folder and then export it takes like two seconds and then you're done now one thing i just noticed i forgot to do when going through these is i completely forgot to change the um option here to pbr metallic roughness copy the one we copied because i noticed my ao didn't get exported so not a big deal i'm just going to change this and delete out the old maps and then do it again so then we can export it and now all our maps should be ready to go so here it is we have our ambient occlusion we have our base color this height isn't any we don't have any height information so we can delete this one we have metallic normal and roughness so fantastic now we're ready to go into blender and render this so inside a blender just open up your most recent file with the you know the door and the uh uv's material go to the shader editor and what we're going to do is delete out this image texture because we're going to load in our new ones and make sure you have node wrangler turned on and what we can do is press ctrl shift and t to load the mid automatically so i'm just going to go to my substance exports folder i'm going to load in all of these now ambient occlusion won't get loaded in for some reason so what we can do is duplicate this one so shift d press y because we're in 2d space to move it up we're going to load in that ambient occlusion manually and all we have to do to get that in is add in a mix rgb node set to multiply to ignore the white values because the dark values are what we want to keep for aim and occlusion for shadows what we can do let's go into material mode so we can preview it okay what we're going to do is we're going to connect this up connect this up and then put this here and let's flip these cool and now if you adjust the factor you can kind of see like it gets darker in some areas 0.5 is fine by the way just leave that one alone cool and now what i'm going to do is load in my abandon slipway hdri if you want to load this in look dev and not just cycles go here and just go to the install button for hdris and you can load in your own custom ones there i'm going to be using abandoned slipway because this one looks cool and i'm also going to load that one in here for the actual world settings for cycles so just drop that one in here we'll go into our rendered mode and this is a pretty common issue you're gonna notice that um it doesn't actually show some of these things and that's simply due to the rave visibility of some of these different objects here so if something's not showing up go to this panel and make sure under visibility the array visibility is turned on i don't know if this is an issue with like some of the hard op settings or what the deal is but um just keep that in mind sometimes these just aren't turned on i'm pretty sure it's a hard ops issue but it was only for those few so not a big deal and here it is so now we can do is really begin to kind of play with this and this is why i prefer blender for um for rendering let's add in a plane and we're just going to move this plane here to the bottom and we're going to scale this as you know big as we want something like this now keep in mind the whiter the plane the more it's going to reflect light so we can do is make a new material and we can kind of dim that down and notice if we go darker we get more shadows on the bottom of this not as much light as reflected see how dark it is and then as the light goes up as the color it reflects more of that light onto the object so you can kind of play with this and figure out what value works for you right here is okay and we could also play with like the roughness and just kind of get a little bit of a hint of a reflection there you can make it fully metallic if you wanted to i'm not going to do that though and i'm just going to go for a really simple infinite backdrop so to do that basically you could just usually i just make this super long and then i extrude this up and what you want to do is make just a really really high set of bevels here that's what i do at least you can smooth it out and now we're going to kind of have this infinite backdrop the only issue with this is um you're not going to want to have it super reflective you're going to want to have this more on the roughness side of things and there you go and then you have yourself a simple infinite backdrop you can play with the color you know just kind of depends what you're going for you can also adjust it in post-processing as well if that's something you want to do you could also you know increase the strength of the hdri another option is to make the strength really low and if you wanted to you could play with like a lighting setup i know hard ops has some random settings for adding lights you just press q and then add in light so no nothing selected and this is okay but it's just um it's it's random and when you're doing lighting you don't want to be random it can be cool for quick previews but often times it's not going to give you the best result this is actually pretty decent but just be careful when you play with those see in this case it actually isn't too bad what i am going to do is press shift a and add in a camera and what i'm going to do is press ctrl alt 0 on the numpad to focus in that camera let's turn the render region on so we're only rendering this and i'm going to do like a 135 let's go here to where is it now it's under camera focal length we'll do 135 g z to kind of move that out and you kind of have like a really simple setup i don't think these lights are quite giving me the result i want unfortunately so what i'm going to do is just delete that out and we're just going to use a simple hdri instead just a bit more natural if you do want to use your own lights i would highly recommend placing them on your own so if you wanted to add in like a point light what you could do is like move this around play with the power play with the radius you can study lighting and blender on your own just different settings make it do different things but i'm just kind of showing you quickly how you could like kind of play with those effects make the power really really high could do like there's a thousand five thousands too much the radius is definitely going to affect it as well gonna affect the shadows so just kind of depends what you're going for so i just tend to go with a really simple hdri setup not only is it easy it tends to get the job done very well and i'm not a professional photographer unlike ryu my partner and um he always tends to get better renders than me because that's just his area of expertise i have you know decent renders they're not top of the line but they're good enough and that's mainly what i'm going for here something like this so you can just kind of see that light is just picking up a highlight there a bit too distracting so you just want to be careful when you're doing that because it can add a bit of emphasis but it can also pull some attention so you just be careful when you're adding in your own light because you want to make sure you know what you're doing but this is actually pretty cool and what we could also do is kind of see where the lighting is hitting from so if i go here to the render panel under film and turn off transparent you can kind of see this is a mostly overcast hdri so very good for neutral lighting but the light isn't coming from here right there's a tree but the lighting is probably coming from somewhere over here which is kind of why it's highlighted more on the front and you're going to see if i were to rotate it i'll just do this very quickly if i were to rotate this you can kind of see like 180 degrees would completely change the look and that is why lighting and just where the lighting is hitting from is so so important because you're just going to have completely different effects depending on where that's from so play with it see what you like but make sure you're just using common sense the lighting so we could try like negative 45 or 45 i think the zero degrees the original one was actually our lucky spot cool anyways what i can do now is just reposition the camera a bit we can maybe just try to find an angle you like it's a bit too far away from that door in my opinion but something like this i'm also going to play with the some other hdris just in case you know while you're here you might as well just see what other hdris look like so this one actually isn't too bad you could do like a strength of one kind of like that i don't think i like it as much as the other one so maybe i could play with like the this abandoned parking just kind of see how these work i have quite a few other ones there's like this crosswalk i don't know what these really look like i don't want to open the preview because it runs a lot of memory but you don't need to worry about the color toning as much that can be adjusted in post for your portfolio but in terms of lighting and just how it's hitting things you might just want to play with some different ones and just kind of see what different effects you get not all hdris are created equal so i'm just going to go through here there's probably not too many that are going to really i'm going to prefer i always like my neutral lighting so i'm just going to go back to the slip way here keep that set on zero and now all i want to do is change the power here of this point lamp to like 2000 and maybe just give it like a slight tint of like a different color like a slight hint of like a a tan or something it could look kind of cool then you could always maybe move it down move it back to see how like these different spots affect it actually i think this is too heavy maybe like 1500 you could even duplicate it and move something down and just kind of play with that as well but in this case i don't think that's a good idea we're just going to keep it as it is we'll just do 1000 where it was before i think that's fine finally this frame is a little bit cramped so what i want to do is select the you'll turn overlays back on select the camera outline then press g z then hold middle mouse button i want to give this a little bit more kind of breathing space maybe move that down a little bit the smallest changes can really make a difference so don't underestimate the power of just kind of you know moving things around right about there looks pretty good maybe it's a little bit more and then i'm just going to kind of pull that down so we have a bit more floor there this is some of the stuff i struggle with the most by the way so if you're struggling with this too it's totally normal lighting and just general composition can be very very tricky and is something i'm constantly getting better at so if it's uh if it's a struggle for you it's a struggle for most of us you'll just get better and better the more you do it all right so now i just want to make sure this is set to a higher resolution i tend to go higher and then downsize if needed so i'll do 2560 by 1440. and what else do we need to do i think that's it really the defaults tend to be fine for me here i don't use the denoise option or anything i'm just going to go ahead and press f12 to render it now you're going to see when we render it we have a mess and the reason this is occurring is because we haven't disabled the high poly in the character and um in rendering mode so let's turn this off we're going to go to our high poly turn that off in rendering mode same for what's in here same for this we'll turn that off and we'll try it again i don't think we have to disable the individual ones we just have to disable the collection there we go and here it is guys so all we have to do now is go to image and then save as and we're just going to save this as um i usually do tiff 16 bit for the highest quality and i'll just call this render so do that and another thing i like to do and you'll see why when we do post processing i also like to delete the backdrop so first of all save and then delete the backdrop and make sure you have transparent turned on under film like that so now we're just going to have a simple cut out in case we only want to make adjustments on the actual door so i'm going to also render this one as a separate cut out so now we have this and we can save this as a [Music] render underscore cutouts are just door cut outs we're going to do 16-bit tiff again and now we can hop over into photoshop do a bit of post-processing for the portfolio so i went ahead and loaded in the original tiff now what i'm going to do is load in the cut out here so what i'm going to do is just shift click drag this over you're going to kind of see the shadow difference because the plane wasn't there so we're not going to actually use this one this is simply going to be turned off and put on the bottom so when we control click on it we'll have it as a cut out to affect this area only now the first thing i notice is that the highlights are a little bit strong here so i'm going to do is duplicate this layer ctrl j we're going to go to camera raw filter we can do some effects in here let me make this smaller and we're just going to go to the brush panel so right here we're going to go to brush and what i want to do is i just want to hold alt and left mouse button to make this a bit smaller and what i'm going to do is go over to highlights kind of reduce these highlights a bit paint over where those highlights actually are you can kind of see we can affect those highlights a little bit so maybe something like this and you can kind of see the before and after kind of reduces it a little bit now the next thing i want to do is increase the overall brightness of the scene just a little bit just kind of pump it up maybe like i don't know you could do like 0.2 and i also want to paint in a little bit of clarity here so first let me click on ok and now what i'm going to do is control click on this so what i can do is only paint in only be affected on the on this cut out here so basically i just want to go in and just increase the clarity a little bit and we're simultaneously going to need to lift the shadows because that mess with the shadows so maybe around there click on okay you can kind of see it just pops a little bit more of some clarity maybe that was a little bit too much you can always just paint in the clarity in certain areas as well so you could always go to the brush panel you could go over to shadows and then clarity keep those roughly the same and then we can just kind of paint in like the areas that are of most importance like the front that's where you'd probably put a little bit of clarity and not the whole thing maybe so do something like that you can kind of see the before and after just kind of pops a little bit more so so far so good now i do use a plug-in in photoshop and i'm just going to show you it here let me go over to this extension the plugin i use is called infinite color yeah it's like it's quite pricey but it works for me you could also just use color balance instead to just kind of play with some of the highlights and mid tones and stuff but uh this um tool is just pretty useful because you just go to light and you can like play with some quick different color tones it saves me a lot of time which is why i use it so i can just kind of cycle through some different presets here and to see what i like i want this to have like a more medical feel because of course it's like a medical entrance or something so i just kind of want to present it as such so maybe a more like neutral type of feel there so you can kind of see the difference here it's a little bit more white which i like a little bit more of like a medical feel to it and then ctrl alt shift e is going to combine everything below that together so now what i can actually do is maybe use i use a knit collection i'm just going full plug in here because this just this is what i use in the main thing i know how to use but you could alternatively do i'll show you in a second but i'm going to be using the film grain tool here in nick collection so let me click on later make this smaller what i like to do here is i like to where's the where's the menu there it is i like to use the film grain option in here because it adjusts the contrast and the film grains so we're going to go here to film grain and i basically just want to make this um [Music] i don't want it to be too heavy on the grain but maybe like 450 and you can also play with the contrast so right now it's already at 50 but i could go even higher or i could just go back to the default state this is why i like contrast this is the original and this with a bit of contrast i think 50 will be good you can also play with the shadows if you want to lift that a little bit but i think that's fine and the highlights i want to leave alone so we're going to click ok and this should just pop the contrast a little bit more so you can kind of see here's the before and the after this looks a little bit better alternatively what you could have done is you could have used in or not infinite color the camera raw filter and you could have adjusted the contrast in here and you could have used the film grain option in here very similar effects i just like this because it's quicker and kind of balances it a bit more and you could also try using the pro contrast tool i don't want to go too heavy on the contrast but i do want to see how it looks because remember this is going to be like a portfolio piece and i'll probably do a little bit more off camera but i'm just trying to give you the general idea here so you could do a little bit of you know extra contrast to pop it you also have dynamic contrast i wouldn't go too heavy on this unless it makes sense you can like correct the color cast make it a bit more neutral which is actually kind of cool i might go a bit higher on that i don't know just leave it alone maybe and then click okay and it just pumped the contrast a bit more um this thing is quite dirty so there's actually another feature in the um camera raw filter you could use and it's called the texture you could actually kind of reduce the overall texture of this thing kind of blurs it a bit more you don't want to go too heavy on it because then it'll look kind of blurry but you know you can always reduce it a little bit maybe drop that vibrance a little bit and the saturation i don't want to drop too far but it might actually look kind of good if i just kind of play with these values just very subtle effects you kind of see the difference there this makes it a little bit more clean i think so already you can see the difference if i alt click on this layer here's the before here's the after just you know very subtle effects being stacked some people say this is cheating but i mean if you're not showing your best self on your portfolio then it's like you're not going to get the clients right it's like on instagram when people post all their trips they do and all the cool you know all their life people like to show the best part of their life you should be showing the best part of your work and you do this through photoshop right so it's always a good idea to post process your work i don't care what anyone says because it's going to make the clients look at your pieces with more respect and i'm definitely not like the best at photoshop i do most of the basic operations i'm not like a crazy photoshop guy but i know like what operations work for me and what kind of make these images pop a bit more and this is the general workflow guys i mean there's plenty more you could do especially if you're more well-versed in photoshop i just wanted to give you the general idea here let me kind of show you you could do text if you go to the text panel you could put like um you know the name of the door if you wanted to drop some text move it around maybe change the color like that alternatively you could put your branding so for example i could open our blender bros logo and drop that in it's always a good idea to put your name or your brand just you know somewhere in the corner lower opacity just so that way people can kind of see who made it you don't have to go too heavy on it it's probably a bit too low but you know enough to read it and that's it guys that is the entire workflow that i use to make game assets in blender we start in blender we use my mad tea framework for hard surface game assets i'm going to plug the course again if you want to pick that up it's a really good course i genuinely think it's going to be fantastic for your learning so pick it up if you haven't and i'll link some other resources in the description so you start with blender you do your baking if you want to bake then you texture it inside of substance painter do some rendering and blender and then a bit of touch-up work in photoshop that is the entire process that i use for my stuff i'm probably going to spend a bit more time on this off camera but usually when i do this type of stuff it takes me hours because i'm always going back and forth and i don't want to bore you with that stuff so i hope this gave you like the general idea i didn't really plan to put in the rendering and post stuff but i thought it would be valuable and hopefully give you an idea of how to do it i see a lot of people not having the best renders of the best presentation and this is the general workflow you need nothing crazy just working with lights and working with colors so hope this video helped guys and if it did make sure you drop a thumbs up that really helps out with the youtube algorithm helps more people find this video and like i said we have a completely free course available on our website if you're new to hard surface modeling called the hard surface jumpstart you can grab that link in the top of the description that should teach you a lot about blender and hard surface modeling if you want to get into it other than that thanks so much for watching drop me a thumbs up subscription all that cool stuff and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 39,928

Keywords: blender game assets, blender game asset tutorial, blender hard surface game assets, blender tutorial, blender hard surface modeling tutorial, hard surface modeling blender, blender hard surface modeling, blender hard surface, blender beginner tutorial, blender donut, josh gambrell, blender bros, blender hard ops, blender box cutter, 3d modeling, 3d, blender 3d modeling, blender hard surface tutorial, blender texturing, blender unwrapping, uv unwrapping, blender uvs, texturing

Id: WKb3OYi6UMk

Length: 169min 33sec (10173 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 25 2022