High Poly Special - creating the perfect hard surface High Poly model - 3Ds Max 2017

hey everyone welcome back to another chamfers own special episode this time we are creating high poly geometry by using smoothing groups in combination with a chamfer and the tubu smooth modifier let's take a look so before I get into the details of it I just want to explain to those people that are new to it what all that means what is a high poly model what is a low poly model those things are essential for baking out a so called normal map that we will then apply to our low poly in the game and in order to make it obvious I'm going to switch over here to the wireframe view and that will pretty much already explain what our high poly model is here this one here the tessellated mesh has half a million pulleys in contrast then here to our low poly model that you actually see in the game which doesn't even have 2000 pulleys so that might still be considered pretty high but keep in mind that this is what you have right in front of the camera because obviously we don't want to put a mesh in that has half-a-million Poly's that would make your game basically unplayable especially if you treat every object like that so this is the reason why we need to have some way to add extra details onto our low poly model if you look at this here it's very very sharp everything all these edges here in contrast to our high poly model so this is how you would actually want to have it but since we can't put that mesh here into the game we have to find another solution and that's called a normal map the normal map is the result of our high poly bake down onto our unwrapped low poly and we then apply it as a material to our low poly in-game model so this is actually what the player would see because it has this texture applied to it and you can see that we have this nice little smooth babbling and the shading and all these details here we even have that that floated text here I'm going to talk about floaters in just a moment but just to sum it up this here is basically what we want to achieve and those two models here are what get up there okay so much for the introduction let's take a look at the actual teaching material here in that tutorial and that is the workflow to achieve such a high poly model if you are familiar with my tutorials then you know that I like to first approach the low poly model because that just makes sense you want to have your geometry as simple as possible at the beginning and then work your way up towards the high poly model but all these details like you don't want to start the other way around I mean a lot of people choose to and that's perfectly fine but in my opinion the best way to approach the whole hard surface modeling is to first take a stab here at the low poly model and then at some point where let's say we achieve something like that here I would then just take it and copy it basically make a clone version out of our low poly that we have here because this is really all the details that you would ever need in the game it has all the functionality here if you would ever need to move such a piece here you can do it so this is really what matters to have all these elements in place and then it's time to think about our high poly model well obviously while you work on it you should already think about it so as you get better at the modeling you know what matters to achieve a nice high poly but long story short at some point when you have your model in a stage where you're happy with it you would then just copy it and put that copied stuff into a new folder which you can then call high-poly model and from there on it's a matter of applying the modifiers to it in order to get the high poly model out of it so we still have our low poly model in place but we are now able to use that geometry to build our high poly and one thing that's important to mention just really so that there is no confusion like this here's just a demonstration purpose that I put them apart like high poly low poly and low poly with a normal map but if you would clone that then obviously it would be in the same place and that is exactly where you would also want it to be because later when we bake our normal map the normal map will require your high poly stuff to be in the same place as your locally where you bake it upon anyway so much for that let's take a look at what actually gets us to have this kind of a high poly based on our low poly geometry so in order to demonstrate that in the best way I'm just going to assume that this here is the low poly that we just copied in order for it to become the high poly now and let's just take one of these elements here I'm going to rid it of all its smoothing groups and that is a crucial part of that whole workflow which consists out of smoothing groups in combination with a gentle modifier on top of it plus then the too smooth that's going to tessellate it that will then give us our high poly so you will always start basically here with your core polygons that now as you can see don't have any smoothing group applied I just deleted them all and that's just so that you really get to see how it behaves I'm going to apply the chamfer modifier onto it I'm going to put from smoothing to unsmooth edges gonna put the amount all the way down and now you can see that it actually puts all these support loops that in the past people would just place by hand by like cutting it all in manually which is super time-consuming you can see now that it actually enables us here with that modifier to really automate that process like entirely and it's based on our smoothing groups so every polygon here right now is getting that chamfer treatment which then if we would put the tubu smooth on top gives us our high poly model so that here is basically what you could already bake out but then the problem is that it would also look like that in your normal map and obviously that looks really strange so that means that we need to go back here to our editable poly and take a look at our smoothing groups the smoothing group are a group of polygons in our mash here which form a smooth surface so right now every polygon has its own ruling group pretty much well we deleted it all so that would be here the equivalent of having one pooling group for each polygon right now it doesn't have any which is the same thing but if we were to take that thing here and give it one smoothing group then you can see that it lives up to its name it smoothes that whole surface here it describes that shape here where some polygons are connected and where others are not so in order for this whole thing here to smooth nicely like it does here now that we reapply our modifiers we have to make sure that everything has its smoothing groups where it's supposed to have it so I'm going to put one here I'm always putting out a smooth by the way usually I just like to work with this out of smooth because it's easy it looks at our angle so I'm going to put out a smooth here then I'm going to make a selection here for this group let me also take these ones here and I'm also going to outer smooth it so now you can see this is perfectly smooth and let's just take another look here with our modifiers applied on it if we only look at the chamfer then we see that wherever we apply these smoothing groups here we have this nice support loops around the chamfer regions so that is exactly what we are doing here with that method that we tells the d-max like look here's our smoothing group please chamfer round it give us these support edges that we need in order to work with the to be smooth so here with to be smooth you can tell that this here looks nice this here all ever still needs more smoothing groups so sometimes I also just like to go into like front orthographic perspective and just tell it to outer smooth that whole bunch here this whole set of pulleys which then pretty much solves the whole issue like it's really just one button click and sometimes then you just you still see a few things that you have to zoom into that need some additional tweaking so in that case I'm just going to make sure that this here I want it to be one smoothing group for that whole cutout shape here so I'm going to increase the angle tell it to outer smooth and now you can see it's exactly how we would want it to be so that would be something that we could now pretty much consider a finished high poly piece that we can bake down to our low poly and one thing that is also very nice about this modifier is that very often people bake stuff out a little bit too hard edge so if you look at it so zoomed in and you have your reference image on the other side of the screen it's often tempting to just go as the real-life version but for game creation like game art creation you really want to make sure that your edges are actually a bit rounder than they might be in the real life so that means that you can control here the amount and make it a bit you know more bevel then you may actually think it should be so something like that here would just ensure that even if you're a little bit further away we still have this nice normal map look on it in stead of having well pretty much that here so you want to make sure that your normal map really has a few pixels of information around these edges and because of that it often makes sense to just go a little bit softer than you actually would think it should be the case so that's just a side note the other thing that I want to also talk about is that you may have already spotted it if you paid attention that we have a few strange little pinching things going on here and that's because we have some n-gons here which by the way is a another video that you may want to watch the end gun special that's okay to have on the low-poly geometry however here in combination with that chamfer modifier we get issues like that here wherever we form a triangle here like that it does a really odd job and then in combination with the to be smooth which smooth it's in a pretty poor way as you can see here so unless we go back to our actual wireframe and get rid of this triangle intersections by reconnecting or getting rid of some edges there's nothing we can do about it unless you are willing to buy a third-party modifier that you can get from Mario szilágyi it's called crotch answer and it just does a better job than the default chamfer modifier and I'm just going to show you what it does in contrast here to the stock version chamfer modifier so let's disable the chamfer modifier which by the way it gives you an idea of what it would look like here without these support edges and I'm just going to apply the crotch chamfer so this is the name of that third-party modifier which is superior to the chamfer it's really fantastic and it's solely because it does one thing that the chamfer modifier doesn't which is that it takes care of these pinching issues that we have going on here so you can still see like there's some odd stuff happening however now we're going to enable quat intersections on it which then perfectly collapses that stuff and leaves us with nothing but smooth geometry all around so this is basically the same kind of a modifier it lets us do the same stuff like we can still bevel our edges but you will never encounter ever any pinching stuff so I'm just going to toggle it here so this is the chamfer modifier and this is the quad chamfer so it might be a very minor thing really that you may not find worth to upgrade to this modifier it's like I said a third-party modifier but if you really want to have the best quality result then I really recommend you to get that modifier it's worth every cent and in the end of it in my tutorials I'm still gonna use this top version here because I don't want to make people buy something that otherwise they couldn't follow the tutorial however it's just something to keep in mind if you want to have the best quality sometimes it's just necessary so also here like I have some pinching going on here let's swap it and you can see it's gone so if you can just see this will generate a perfect normal map and at the end of the day this is really what matters so once again normal map that is really what we're going to see what we're going to look at the whole time and because of that it's just crucial to make sure that we have the perfect smooth geometry and I almost forgot to mention the so-called floater text that I was speaking about at the beginning what is a floater for those people that don't know it it's like the name suggests geometry that is have a ring or let's just a floating in front of your actual geometry where you want to bake down the point so in that case here we know that we want to have these details here added to that cylinder and in order for us not having to actually baleen all that stuff in there like actually physically cut it in we can get away by adding these details here and floaters and later on when we bake our normal map it's being recognized as a detail that will just get baked down onto our texture so you can see here we have all these details here on our actual low poly that is just floater geometry so that makes it super easy and you will love the floaters if you work with for these stuff on a daily basis because it allows you to add a whole bunch of flexible good-looking detail without actually having to put a ton of work in so you could just place that wherever you want and it would then bake this kind of a thing here down on our model or texture I should say and just at the end of the tutorial I want to show a few more tricks here actually one more trick like let's say you have this detail here and you find it a bit dull and boring looking let me just show you how fast you can add detail here with that method so for instance we could just inset that here pull that out a bit keep in mind that is our high poly model I was just giving that here it's smooth and now you can see like we have this extra detail here which now then again where the floaters would be like a bit of an overlap so we could just scale them down a bit more so there's always a hundred different ways that you could add more details like super fast like just by in setting and like pulling that stuff in here give that another outer smooth and then sometimes you would see these little artifacts here that's because we don't have another support ring here however we can just once again like at that here on a flat surface grow the selection give it one smoothing group and now it's gone like this is the perfect geometry obviously that wouldn't work here with that thing in the way but just to give you the idea how flexible we can be here with that method and another example would be to cut in some extra paneling stuff like for example let's take these edges here I would then just make that edge selection and I would extrude it on a very small margin here like you can see there's actually this extruding going on so now it's looking like that so I would then select again these polygons give it an outer smooth and then we have something like that like some extra detail here which we could also add wherever we want like let's say we do the same thing here just smooth it and now we have something like that so you can see that it's a ton of details really fast and just makes it for a really nice way of working if you would want to have that here perfectly smooth you could then just chamfer it something like that also give it an outer smooth and now we have to see actually as a bevel curve so sometimes it's a compromise of like having like stuff really as a sharp edge or smooth but at the end of it like it just makes it very flexible you can of course always use other methods like Oh constructive but for me this here is the method that just works very well I I prefer it because probably mostly due to being used to it so much and I just find very flexible so thank you very much for watching that special episode of creating high poly geometry next time we're going to take a look at creating the ideal unwrap here for our low poly model what needs to be considered where to place these UV shells and then we are going to bake that stuff down so you're going to learn about unwrapping and baking which goes hand in hand with what we were just doing here with the high poly modeling so everything is a chain that needs to be pretty much followed step by step and you can't just start slacking on one part so it's good opportunity to have this special episode series here to really cover the workflow that I use in the tutorials if you follow them in the past so I hope you liked it I'm going to see you soon and please feel free to follow on the champions on Facebook page as well as signing up to that forum here which has a really nice community going already so once again thanks for watching I'll be seeing you soon more tutorials are already on the way until then and happy modelling Cheers [Music] 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Channel: ChamferZone

Views: 91,788

Keywords: high poly, low poly, 3d modeling, 3Ds Max, smoothing groups, chamfer modifier, turbosmooth, gamedev

Id: -rz5_CCWQz8

Length: 23min 4sec (1384 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 13 2017