High-Poly Modeling Techniques in Blender

hey i don't know if any of you guys have heard about this but apparently epic games just released the early access for unreal engine 5. awesome let's talk a little bit about high poly modeling as this is something that's usually very important for creating assets for any aaa quality game and what better way to demonstrate this than with a weapon design as these are often god tier assets that are required to be held in the player's view throughout the vast majority of gameplay at least for fps titles so in this video we're going to start going over high poly modeling techniques and we're going to start with the modifiers that you'll need to set up for your high poly model now there's a bit more to high poly modeling than just what's covered in this video and we might save that for a future video but right now we're just going to focus on modifiers and properly optimizing your model as always if you have difficulties with any part of this feel free to leave a comment below and i'll get to you as soon as possible also if you're interested and you need to post a screenshot of whatever technical issue you're having consider checking out my discord server which is linked in the description below okay so i'm gonna be using this weapon model that you might have seen me working on a little bit of in the last video and currently i'm almost finished with the high poly modeling stage it's not perfect i still need to work on a few areas but we're just about finished with the full high poly model as you can see from the statistics up here in the corner it's currently comprised of about one million two hundred thousand triangles which that might seem very dense but that's a good amount of geometry for us to get these smooth surfaces that we want in order to bake them down into our lower poly iteration of the same model and for those who may not know baking is the process of creating a normal map which is a texture that fakes bumps and lighting information that can then be projected on a model that is better optimized for use in an animation or game engine environment so for the purpose of this video we're just gonna go over the high poly model creation for the upper and lower receiver as this is where the most complicated geometry is and it's the best place to demonstrate everything i'm going to talk about for starters this is essentially what my low poly version of this model would look like both the upper and lower receiver have auto smoove enabled which i've set to a 45 degree angle and both of them have received a weighted normals modifier the lower receiver also has a mirror modifier since it is symmetrical on the x-axis okay so if i go ahead and select my upper and lower receiver and i tab into edit mode you're going to see that my model has all these blue lines on a number of edges now all these blue lines indicate is that i've already gone through the process of adding bevel weights to all the edges that i want to retain their form this way when we further subdivide this volume those edges won't get smoothed away because they have a very slight bevel that's helping to retain the shape now you can do this by selecting any of the edges that you want to have receive a bevel and then hit ctrl e to bring up your edge options go to edge bevel weight and then drag off to give it a factor of one however i like to use a lot of add-ons that help to cut down on the tedious repetitious manual acts that i would otherwise have to do in 3d art and that's why i really like the hard ups add-on so for this i would just select a number of edges i would hit q on the keyboard which brings up my hard ops menu and i would simply click on mark to either mark or unmark those edges with the appropriate bevel weight in fact hard ops was a very important part of creating the receiver for this weapon model the receiver was created using a large number of boolean operations which helped to carve out the shapes from a single volume now i'm not a non-destructive modeling aficionado and everything i did in creating this model can be done with the basic blender package but as i said hard ops really helps speed up this sort of workflow [Music] okay so going back to my low poly model i'm gonna tab out of edit mode i'm going to hit q on the keyboard to bring up my heart ups menu and i'll give both of these objects a bevel all right it's going a little crazy at the moment but i'm just going to lower the width to about one millimeter right there and in fact i'm going to select both of these models and i'm going to change that to something about one-fifth of a millimeter so i'm going to add an extra zero and a two add that and do the same to the upper receiver all right so that's essentially the width of the bevel that we're looking for i turn on the wire frame up here you can see just how tiny and slight that bevel is on our edges that's just going to help to retain the shape of the volumes across our entire model when we do the next thing which is to add our subdivision modifier so i'll add it to the upper receiver and i'll add it to the lower receiver and on both of those uh they'll be set to catmull clark and i'll set it to two levels in the viewport all right so you would be able to accomplish everything i just did without having to use the hard ops add-on you just have to add a bevel modifier with all the same settings three segments a width of basically a fifth of a millimeter and you would want to go into here change the shape profile to about point seven and here another thing that hard ops does automatically for you is change this meter outer from sharp which is going to be set by default to arc also one thing i need to change because when i automatically add that bevel modifier using the hard ops add-on it has the limit method set to angle and we want it set to weight so that it knows to use all those weighted bevel edges that we set in edit mode and as one last side note if you're doing this manually without the hard ops add-on you will probably want to toggle off the clamp overlap as you can see for uh some very obvious reasons okay so this is what will probably suffice for about 80 to 90 percent of your high poly hard surface modeling needs now as you go for your model you might find that you're getting a few uh odd shading artifacts like right here and you can just go into your model and add some extra edge loops which will help to decrease the spread of those little artifact now if you find that your viewport is really slowing down and is getting very laggy when you're trying to make these edits is probably because you have these very dense high poly modifiers enabled on your model so just go out of edit mode and you can just click on this viewport visibility option in your modifier stack and that will disable all the modifiers in the viewport you can then go back and just turn them on one by one or toggle this viewport visibility again you can also toggle the stack which will simply collapse all the modifier options that you have open making things a little bit more manageable i'll do this quite often from time to time but this workflow might not suffice for everything you're trying to do now you can go in and you can tweak some settings like we can change this to something like half a millimeter to get a little bit more of a bevel edge variation there but we're going to go for a process that will change this from a high poly model to a very high poly model and then we'll knock it back a little bit but to get started on that i'm just going to toggle this modifier stack and i'm going to give the upper receiver a remesh modifier and immediately it just zapped our entire upper receiver into this little voxel shape up here that's because by default this remesh modifier is set to a tenth of a meter and our model is built to scale so i'm gonna start changing that by decreasing our voxel size back down to something around a fifth of a millimeter and now with our remesh modifier set to a fifth of a millimeter you can see that the whole thing is comprised now of about three million voxel triangles so if i go into wireframe you can see just how dense this model is all right but now if we go out of wireframe and we look closely at the surface of our model you can see it has like this stepping or this aliasing effect going along the surface of our model and we don't want that because that might show up pretty well in our bake results so i'm going to add a smooth modifier [Music] and just an fyi from this point forward you're probably gonna have to bear with blender a little bit because it might chug along as you're dealing with these polygon counts that are in the multiple millions but will probably depend a little bit more on whatever hardware you're using okay so real quick on the remesh modifier i'm just going to go ahead and check on smooth shading and then for the smooth modifier the only thing we really have to do here is increase the repeat factor from one to something around let's say 45 now you're probably gonna have to wait a few seconds while it updates your entire modifier stack but once that's finished we should see something that's been fairly smoothed out while still retaining fairly crisp edge fidelity now real quick you can see i'm having a little bit of an error right here with uh this part of the receiver is getting clipped with the interior now i could further decrease the voxel size until i'm no longer getting any little clipping issues like this but it would probably just be easier to disable all the modifiers in the viewport and then just slightly tweak or adjust the position of these edges that are inside the receiver now if i go ahead and i'm going to turn back on the modifier stack and i'll have to wait a few seconds while it updates and voila we no longer have any little flipping issues right there okay that's good so we're looking pretty good but still we went through all this and now we have a high poly mesh that's in the multiple millions of triangles that's fine because we're not looking to use this in a game engine but that can still be very cumbersome for blender and we don't need all of these polygons to bake down a good normal map so we're going to go ahead and we're going to add one more modifier which is going to be a decimate modifier and this decimate modifier will do a very good job of just reducing the overall clutter of polygons that are located on these flat surfaces while still retaining the polygon density that's preserving the edges of our volume that we want so with the decimate modifier i'm going to leave everything by default and i'm simply going to decimate it by typing in 0.1 in the ratio and then of course waiting a few seconds for it to update and when that's finished updating your model probably isn't going to look any different and it shouldn't but if we hit shift z to go into wireframe mode you can see it has reduced the overall clutter of all those voxels which were all equally spaced apart on this model to something that is a lot less dense and you can try uh decreasing this ratio further but i think for baking purposes this will do pretty good and you can see from the statistics up in the corner that it is essentially a tenth of the polygon density that it was so this is what our final high poly model looks like and just for an example i went ahead and created the low poly versions which are fully unwrapped and i went ahead and baked down the high poly details into a normal map so if i go to our shader viewport you can see that this is the results of our texture baking doesn't look half bad alright i hope you found some part of this video useful if you're having difficulties with anything feel free to leave a comment below or consider checking out my discord server which is linked in the description otherwise thanks for watching like and subscribe [Music] you

Channel: Tosmo

Views: 45,726

Keywords: Blender 3d, Blender tutorial, Blender 2.9, 3d tutorial, 3d modeling, low poly, high poly, blender to unreal engine 5, weapon design, ar-10 308 rifle, brn-10 upper, weapon artist, hard ops tutorial, hard surface modeling blender, blender remesh, blender subdivision surface, normal baking blender, Blender decimate, video game weapon design, Blender, blender weapon modeling

Id: kBgYwSDC3wI

Length: 14min 11sec (851 seconds)

Published: Sat May 29 2021