Making Mobile Game Assets | The Eagle Temple | Atlas Empires

hello and welcome to gambit media I'm grant Abbott and today I'm going to talk through how I made the Eagle temple so this so part of the work I'm doing for the game atlas empires and you can check out my similar tutorials and commentaries in the playlist in the description and do look at the other playlists as well sometimes I link to tutorials about texture painting or how to make low poly models like this so you do look out for those so you can see I'm working on the base here fairly straightforward I've mirrored it four times so in the X and y-axis therefore I only need to make a quarter with the model and I texture it like that as well just to save texture area and texture space these are 512 by 512 maps so this model gives me a bit more breathing space but in the previous ones it's had to be the whole set onto one of those 512 by 512 textures now you can see me adding loot cuts and things to the base here but I do merge my vertices afterwards so I just sort of create the basic shape use the knife tool a lot and loot cuts and so forth but really just sort of get a rough idea when you're building the shape the Eagles head was quite tough and you can see me spending a lot of time on this but for any low poly modeling like this you just get the basic shape and then you just add to it slowly try not to add too many polygons just add the way you need to it's quite an art in a sense and you kind of just get used to where you need a cut and where you don't need a cut and obviously you're trying to keep the Polly's low so you don't want to add cuts where you don't need them you can see I've got n guns all over the place that's not a problem because everything is converted to triangles when you take it across into a game engine the only problem with that is if you have got a specific face count that you need to keep under you can't really judge how many faces you've got because an N gon still counts as one face you need to triangulate your mesh to see how many faces you've got I don't like to triangulate my mesh because it's slightly more awkward to model when it's been triangulated it has got more cuts and more Poly's all over the place the feathers were really tough so you can see me here working out where I need to put cuts and where I don't so I'm not putting a cut in for every single feather I'm just of pretending that there's a big notch where one feather might meet another but not every single feather has topology which defines the shape so you don't always have to think about how the model is made in terms of its intricacies you paint those intricacies on so the tiny feathers I'll be painting on but I want to give the illusion that it's not solid at the back so I creates a few notches but only a few you can see I want it to come in a bit for the beak so it is slightly defined and you can see I'm generally getting the shape here but again it's not as detailed as the actual concept arts and I'll be painting the feathers on to reduce the poly count the same for the wings at the side getting the right shape and size based on the concept art was her slow going for some reason it took me a while but it's really important that you get the shape right before you start getting on with any details and you can see at that point I thought well the base doesn't quite suit and match up compared to the concept art so move things around adjust them as you need adding a few sort of notches and glitches in a sense to your mesh will help give it character so if you've got the polyester spare then adding a few extra ones just it here and there to create a little notch can help you can see also that on the loop cuts off and do a loop cut and then join them together and merge them together whether where it doesn't matter where it won't really be seen you're always thinking about your silhouette you see and so look around your model think about the silhouette and where you need a tiny notch here and there that's when you put it in but the rest of the mesh try and tidy it up so it's got as few polygons as possible I'm doing the same thing here so I sort of bevel an edge and then just cut out those faces and fill in some faces it's fairly straightforward it's a nice technique to create a little notch and notches are quite nice like a safer character you can see my mesh need a lot of tidying up here but it's fairly simple you just delete faces and add them in with the fill face tool most people seem to get caught up with trying to make it all in quads and keeping their mesh really beautiful topology but in low poly work like this where it's going to be painted on you really don't have to worry too much even when it comes down to the smooth shading you can see those bowls look horrendous at the moment there's too much smooth shading going on but when you get your texture on there you highlight the edges and you create the crevices with multiplyin screen brushes which I always tend to use I actually decide to move away from the concept art a little bit at this point I was going to put more bricks in the base as there is in the concept art which you can see on the right hand side there but I felt it wasn't quite necessary and it was adding too much polygons for not much gain so Chris is fine with me doing that where I need to change the shape very slightly or make some adjustments to save on polygons he's happy with me to do that and we seem to have a good understanding about what's needed I think that's really important when you're working with people is the communication aspects and to just be okay when the changes are asked for I've known lots of people that I've worked with who get really grumpy when there's a change made and they have to do things over that's just part of freelancing that's part of how these things work and you as a freelancer need to work with clients and be accepting of those changes and therefore you will get employed again because you'll be someone that's easy to work with this part is for the broken-down Eagle temple so you can see I'm sort of making a broken up mesh here I was experimenting with different techniques of how I was going to make this mesh the important thing to remember when doing this is that your painting will show the highlights and the crevices so your base mesh doesn't need to look exactly like it should in the long run so you've got to paint on those lines paint on those highlights so you can see here originally I started with lots of bricks and sort of piled them up but I think the poly count was too high really then it wasn't necessary so I looked at it again and thought what I'm gonna do this all with one mesh also I'm repeating meshes where I can a lot of the time that will save on texture space occasionally I'll paint one model which is very similar to another one and then I'll bake the texture from that one to the other one and then just paint those extra details that I need but that obviously takes up more texture space the most important thing in this particular project is actually the texture space and more than the poly count you can get away with a fair few but the texture space that can get quite tough if you haven't got the texture to work with so a 512 texture by 512 is quite tough when it comes to some minor details and then you're got really pixelated images when you're painting and that can be quite tough I'm actually painting on 1024 by 1024 and then it will be squished down to 512 by 512 but it's better to paint on a higher res because you just get that more detail to work with nan it just becomes a bit more blurry when it's squished down I should say compressed too how not squished down you can see me unwrapping here I'm using live unwrapped so when I add the seams you can see them instantly generally speaking anyway sometimes you need to just from your unwrap I'm not sure whether that's a glitch or with us what I'm doing but you can see that it's nice and two-point-eight that you can select everything in edit mode and unwrap it all together onto one map makes things much easier so there you can see the final model it's fairly straightforward ready for painting and low poly and you can see the wireframe just here as well so trying to keep those polygons down as low as possible but to give me enough information to paint on I would have liked to use the plug-in which is a UV mapping plug-in but it just doesn't seem to work on my system I've seen other people have the same sort of problem and same glitches but it's not a big problem because I actually quite like to have a bit of spare UV space in case I figure out something in the model that needs adjusting and I need some spare texture space just to add a texture in on a recent model I was working on I forgot a whole entire model in the set and I had to try and find texture space all over the place to fit it in it worked in the end so that was okay but it just goes to show it's kind of helpful to have a bit of space so you can see I've moved on to the textures now and I'm just highlighting the edges and crevices it's sort of a simple way to that I do every model it seems I usually sort of block out colors or fill in the colors first and then add some variation to those colors so dab on a few separate different colors that are variations on that main color so you can see lots of different Gray's and a few sort of purpley Gray's blue eaglet grays and so forth then I highlight in fact then I do the crevasses in this one because they're brick so I like to know where the bricks are it's a bit like when you're doing a sketch and you have a black pencil and you're marking out where the shadow is in a sense in these sort of highlight areas that's exactly what I'm doing on the models I highlight where the shadow is going to go and then where the highlights are going to go with a lighter brush and then I do sort of details in between just sort of creating swirly shapes on the rocks that usually works as sort of the crevasses and the ridge is the grain of a rock as it were and it seems to work quite well I feel like I went very strong on my highlight here I usually use a slightly softer brush or a lower strength brush but I really wanted to push the boundaries in terms of the contrast between the light and dark areas so I thought I've got a experiment a bit more I like to experiment just a touch with every piece just move on that a little bit and try something new out there it may fail but it's only been sort of five minutes wasted and I'll have learnt something because even whilst I'm doing these projects I still want to learn and improve all the time so the same thing for this aspect of the model I have got it on the principle psdf where I can see the edges and then I switch between that and the emission shader where you don't see the edges lots of people have been telling me there's quicker ways to do it but actually I find it very quick to do just to go to the main texture press ctrl shift and got flat shading with the principal shader and just emission shader gives me that no shading look which will be the end result of course so same process again finding those crevices marking out exactly where my stones are going to be then doing the highlights and then just going in and doing a bit of variation character and the main sort of ambient occlusion I sort of paint in here as you can see I'll go around and add that all in and these are all joined together I did actually separate the bowls in the end but I modeled them originally they were all part of one mesh it was just easier to paint them as a separate mesh then I could fill it in without having to highlight some faces and so forth which it's just a bit more time-consuming you have to be very careful when you've got a mirror to not add too much detail and too much character because that's obviously going to be mirrored across to the other sides so in this case it'll be mirrored four times so although I really want to go in and have that really cool character to these things you have to be very careful doing that because it will just show up loads you can see there it's mirrored across the other side that sort of dent in the rock and it's just about possible because one small crevice there but too many of those and it's really noticeable so you can see it's slowly coming together I'm using a smudge brush a fair bit because when I'm painting if I hit a corner it suddenly highlights that corner because it doesn't go round the corners in a sense the brush I think that it is a bit of a limitation with the texture brushing in blender I don't really know how they'd get around that because I'm not a sort of a developer but I feel like or I've heard that other programs don't have those sort of glitchy issues now one thing I'm finding very tough with this sort of modular design is metal because metal will sort of reflect a light somewhere in your scene and when you're hand painting you tend to sort of fake that so you put some highlights on one side as if the Sun was sort of hitting it well obviously with hand painted stuff especially when it's been mirrored you can't really do that so you have to be a bit careful now with metal your highlights should be the same colour as the metal which is why we have on the principal shader we have that Slyder that makes the reflected light or the highlights they give off a bit of the color from the actual material so you shouldn't go to white with your highlights otherwise it would look like a dielectric material we can see what I'm doing with the highlights here and that gives it that sort of metallic look and that is what's quite tough when you've got a mirrored object because you get that highlight going around in this case it's always on the outside so it doesn't really make much sense but you don't notice those things you have to fake a lot when you're hand painting because you're faking the lighting so now onto the Eagle and starting to paint these feathers and this kind of fun really because this is something new that I haven't done before so really wanted to experiment a bit here and find out how and what was going to work the best and what wasn't now I was tempted to actually paint or shade in the edge around the edge but that doesn't really make any sense and then I figured that out as I went along that I don't need to actually draw the feathers around the edge you can see me smudging them out there and you have to highlight those obviously it sounds obvious but you have to sort of experiment a bit and work these things out in your head sometimes you can see I'm repeating the textures here and using them for my broken-down Eagle temple there or ruined temple and you can see me changing the mesh and that's fine to change the mesh and I've got a tiny bit that I have to fill in so I just copy another bit of the texture space and that's fine you can get away with things like that especially if they're on the back of the model it's very likely that these models are going to be viewed from one angle you can move around the models but it's more likely they'll be viewed from the front angle so although I am very careful throughout the model the back side is the side that I'm not as worried about as the front side however I am very aware that the player can actually turn around these models so I do need the back side looking okay so you can see me again I'm pasting these things and moving across the other side and in this case there was obviously a texture from where I'd painted on some ambient occlusion so I couldn't really use it like that so I had to sort of adapt it slightly and know that it would be changing the UVs on the old one as well so the sharing you v's does have its limitations but I think I got away with it in this case moving it around and distorting a model you've got to be careful with again because of the UVs and you can see here I suddenly realized I'm not gonna be able to see that other side so I need to put the back end of the eagle in there as well and I used a few rocks to hide the texture because it just seemed a little bit light where it should be dark so just put a few rocks in there to make it look a bit better I did some adaptation to the mesh as well you have to be very careful there though you can use edge slide because that doesn't move your UVs but adapting the model too much and it will stretch your mesh so there we have it the eagle temple hopefully you're enjoying this series do check out my playlist if you want to see more do leave a comment with any questions you have I'm trying to go through them slowly in each episode to give some sort of tips and tricks and thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Grant Abbitt

Views: 20,420

Keywords: understand, texture, paint, learn, blender, tutorials, 3d, art, graphics, game, material, guide, easy, painting, blender (software), blender 3d, blender paint, blender painting, blender texture paint, blender texture painting, blender tutorial, cartoon, gabbitt, hand painted textures, ideas, painted, style, stylized, coc, clash of clans, world of warcraft, blender 2.8, 3d modeling, mobile game, asset design, game design, gamedev

Id: sTc0AHjRrf0

Length: 16min 23sec (983 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 30 2019