Modeling From High-poly to Low-poly in Blender

all right so we've covered some high poly modeling techniques and we've covered texture baking but we kind of skipped over generating the low poly model so in this video i'm going to show you how you can take your high poly model and down res it into a low poly game ready asset now this video might be very workflow specific but generally speaking for prop art and definitely weapons art when it comes to video games you want to develop your high and low poly models in conjunction with each other whether you're going from high to low or low to high having a workflow like this is simply more time efficient and reduces the potential for errors to occur and it's not very complicated but there's some very specific steps that you need to take so that's what we're going to be covering in this video so if you're having technical difficulties with anything covered in this video feel free to leave a comment below or consider checking out the discord server we have a dedicated channel for helping you fix any technical issues that you're having with blender or 3d art so starting out we have our high poly weapon design which is resting at a sleek 1.5 million triangles alright so we're gonna have to reduce this into something that is more acceptable for a game engine and something that we can easily texture now all of these parts have something like a bevel edge weight modifier and a subdivision modifier which helps to give it the smooth surfaces while other parts such as this upper receiver have a lot more such as a bevel weight subdivision remesh smooth and then decimate which we all went over in the high poly modeling techniques video now i also mentioned in the texture baking video that we have a number of instances of these little float geometries now these little pieces of geometry are going to get removed from the low poly model and they're simply serving the purpose to be baked down onto our normal map and if i go ahead and i click on the material shader viewport you can see that i've assigned all these bright neon materials to the various parts of my weapon now these bright materials will simply allow me to bake out a material id map when i do my texture baking now a material id map is simply a useful texture to have in order to mask off certain portions of your model so if i go to the lower receiver here and i tab into edit mode i'm going to select all of these little pieces of float geometry then i'm going to go into the materials tab and i'm going to add in a new material and i'll select this green id material and i'll assign all those little pieces of float geometry to the green id material so now even though i plan to remove all these little pieces of float geometry from the low poly model they're not just going to appear as a normal detail texture but they'll also appear as a different color id on our material id map this means that if i want to mask off these little pieces of float geometry in my texturing program of choice i can easily do so by selecting the color of the material id map that i assign them all right now before i move on i want to go into edit and preferences and i want to increase the resolution scale of my user interface just slightly so you can see what i'm doing a little bit better there we go now if i go into my scene collection i already have all the objects that we're seeing here in one collection which i've given the name of the weapon underscore high poly and if i hit this little drop down you can see that i've already pretty much appropriately named all the parts of the weapon now what i'm going to do is i'm just going to tap in the viewport hit a select all the parts of my weapon and then i'm going to hit control f2 to bring up the battery name tool i'm going to go to set name and i want to add a suffix to all the items in our scene and i'm going to give that the suffix of underscore high denoting that these are all the high poly parts and now if we look over here in our scene collection you can see that all the parts have been given the underscore of high right so real quick i'm just going to select a few parts here and i'm going to disable the visibility of all the modifiers just to make this scene a little bit more manageable so now scrolling back up to the top i'm just going to collapse the little collection folder that i have here i'm going to uncheck the collection and i'm just going to right click and duplicate it so now we have a duplicate of our high poly collection i'm just gonna go ahead and delete a few of these extra items such as this dimensions cube and these empty objects which i was using for modeling reference i'm also going to go to our new collection and i'm going to rename it to the name of the weapon underscore low poly okay and now i'm just going to hit a again select all the objects in our scene and ctrl f2 to bring up the battery name tool all right so i'm going to do a find and replace search so i want to replace the underscore of high with the underscore of low okay and i'll hit okay and now all of our items have been renamed with the underscore of low but also when we duplicated off our scene it gave all of our object names this little numerator at the end of point zero zero one and we're just going to get rid of that by once again going to control f2 and going this time to strip characters we're going to select digits and punctuation and end so that it is taking away all the digits and punctuations from the end of our object names and we'll click ok and it got rid of that little point zero zero one and like that we now have the proper naming convention set up for all the objects in our scene so that whether you're using substance painter or marmoset pill bag you'll be able to make sure that you're baking the high poly version of the object down to its low poly counterpart the next step can get a little bit tedious but it's to simply start down resining our mesh by removing all the high poly modifiers such as bevel subdivision and remesh meanwhile i want to apply modifiers such as mirror and solidify which have a crucial impact on forming the low poly geometry and to do that i'll simply click on a modifier that i want to apply in the modifiers tab and hit ctrl a at the same time i can also start going into certain objects and then start deleting the little instances of float geometry now there are some other instances that i want to talk about such as this barrel shroud which has a unique stack of modifiers so right off the bat i'm going to delete the bevel and the subdivision modifier now you can see that this piece is looking like it's being tremendously smoothed out and that's because we have this moving modifier now the smoothing modifier for the high poly asset is cranked up to a repeat factor of 20 but this is obviously a bit too much for our low poly model now i'm just gonna go ahead and disable this in the viewport briefly and i'll apply the mirror modifier and the solidify modifier and that's looking good but you can see that this edge is a little bit rigid that's because if i tap into edit mode you can see that i have these supporting edge loops and because this low poly barrel shroud is so rigid it likely won't conform to our high poly model which will lead to some baking errors though i'm going to enable the smoothing modifier but i'm going to take down the repeat value from 20 to 1. now that helps to kick back that rigid edge and should help make our low poly model conform more with our high poly while i'm here i'll also select this little sling hook which was created using a curve object i'll delete the subdivision modifier and i'll go to the object tab and convert it to a mesh now if i tab into edit mode i'm going to go ahead and i'm just going to go into edge select mode and select every other edge here and just dissolve that and that's simply because we don't need so much geometry on this one little piece however i would caution against going into edit mode and deleting a bunch of edge loops from your model because a lot of these edge loops serve a purpose in giving you a clean texture bake in whatever texture program that you're using when you're done with the entirety of the texturing process it's okay to go back into your model and eliminate things like edge loops and extra geometry to create lower level of detail meshes and now all of that completed you can see that we've taken our high poly model down from something that was 1.5 million triangles all the way down to 21 000 and that is more than appropriate for a game res asset but we of course have to unwrap it first and that is what we are going to be covering in the next video so thanks for watching i hope you found some part of this useful if you did or if you're having any difficulties please consider leaving a comment below or check out our discord server we have a growing community of people who would be willing to help you out with any technical problems so consider giving that a try otherwise like and subscribe social media links in the bio [Music] you

Channel: Tosmo

Views: 42,756

Keywords: Blender 3d, Blender tutorial, Blender 2.9, low poly, high poly, blender high poly to low poly, blender modeling tutorial, blender weapon modeling, ar-10 308, brn-10, weapon design, 3d modelling blender, blender (software), high poly to low poly workflow, how to convert a high poly mesh to low poly, blender material id map, blender high poly modeling, blender low poly modeling, Weapon artist, 3d artist, blender modeling workflow

Id: BEOkZgRtdsU

Length: 10min 19sec (619 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 11 2021