Mobile game assets | building low poly models | Theory | Atlas Empires

hello and welcome to GABA Media I'm grant Abbott and today I'm going to be talking about the workflow behind making low poly assets like this and a bit about the artistic pipeline for making game assets from concept art to sending the model to the developers in later episodes I'll actually be breaking down and modeling one of these game assets and in other episodes I'll be painting the assets but in this one I'm just going to give an overview about my thought processes when I get a piece of concept art and how I turn that into low poly objects and thinking about the painting workflow so it can be optimized for games so here's the concept art that I was sent so this is from the sort of lead artists we call him Chris ham loser and he's done some lovely work with the concept pieces here's the log storage the stone storage and here's the one I'm working on the moment which is the gold storage and now there's some limitations and you always get this when you've got a game company that you're working for and that will be things like polygon count and texture sizes the biggest limitation is the texture map size all this needs to be on one 512 by 512 pixel texture map and we're not using any normal maps or glossy maps or anything like that it's purely just a diffuse or albedo as you might call it so a simple color texture map so here's the models so far and you can kind of see how I've interpreted the theme I've tried to where possible keep as close to the original artwork as I can let's take a closer look at this section here and I'll talk you through and break down how I've done this so if I take this wooden stake here this sticking out of ground and I go into edit mode first of all you'll notice that all of them are selected that means they're linked objects so if I change one thing here it changes it on all of them and that's a really important part of this particular jobs workflow to get that texture map size down all these objects will be sharing that one texture map it has its challenges but it will mean it's possible to get all this texture onto one small texture map because not only do they share all the sort of transform details and polygons but they also share the same texture map I can actually go into look dev mode now and you can see the textures they look a tiny bit rough close up but hopefully you can get the idea you can sort of see the pixels as well because with that close in and you can see them on the lock there you can just about see the pixels and this is probably as close as we'll get it's more likely to be viewed from about this sort of distance where it's absolutely fine you can also see it's fine that these share the same texture map I could increase the variation by perhaps rotating this one round and then it has a bit more variation so now they look slightly different from each other but it's not essential in this case what I want to show you is with this door how I go about planning and making the low-poly assets so if we zoom in on this door you can see that it's got tiny notches in it but if I go into the actual topology itself you can see that I've hand drawn the gap between the planks in this case and then created some holes where I've felt it's needed having said that with this particular one I am changing my mind on it because I think it's too high poly for what's needed if we're viewing it from about here and if I go back into object mode you can see that there's not a lot of difference to be seen there if I click off there perhaps this notch helps slightly to add some character but is it really necessary you've got to ask yourself I think this one here certainly not needed it's only when I get round to here that I can see through it this notch here is behind the lock so that's not necessary either I could possibly have a couple of these if I've got the polygons to play with so what I've done to show you examples of this this particular shape if I go into edit mode and select all I can see that that's a hundred and four tries now I work in try so I've just triangulated it I have actually modelled it in quads and then perverted it to triangles all render engines game engines and everything like that used tries so any quads you have are just converted to tries when rendered so when we're talking about polygons were always talking about triangles actually quite a lot of developers talk more about vertices than they do faces so that's worth bearing in mind as well but if we go across this one so this is actually three separate planks and interestingly that's 84 tries whereas this one is 104 try so this one is actually higher poly than the three separate plane so why would I want to combine them together like that well in this case it's actually texture space there's a lot of space wasted in between each Clank and if I go in and try to paint that it's a little bit awkward I have to hide this area paint there hide this area paint there it's not too bad but it's just the time it takes but also the texture space so there's really no need for that better still though is this one here so this is really limited I haven't converted this to triangles yet but blender tells us it's 38 so this is half the triangles of this one and I can paint in the difference between the planks with just a sort of deeper darker line so I can use my texturing to give the illusion of that gap in the middle and especially when we see it from around this distance that'll be absolutely fine so we've managed to have our poly count just by thinking about those things and you'll see in fact if I turn off my ambient occlusion at the moment but that looks almost flat anyway so the difference between the two is minimal but there is a big difference in poly count so they're back to solid mode for a moment other things that are worth thinking about when you're designing your concept art is circles and cylinders so if we take this one here for example now the frustrating thing with cylinders and circles which obviously appear a lot of the time is that it's quite unavoidable to have a reasonably high poly count on them because you're trying to make that curve seem more like a curve so here you can really see the edges in that lock it's not too bad from this distance though see always having to make up your mind how many polygons to put around your cylinders for some of the smaller cylinders you need slightly less because it needs less to make up they're sort of curved shape but for the bigger ones you'll need more so actually think about in your concept art whether you need the cylinders in this case I think they look great so I can understand why they're put in and you don't want everything to be really blocky and square so you will have to use them a lot of the time but for that reason there may be some instances where I want to change from cylinders to sort of cube shape just for ease so in this door for example if i zoom in on that I have kept the shape from the concept after in this case but you could argue could we have this as a square and therefore have less polygons for it having said that I don't think it's too many polygons in this particular situation now just sort of reiterating about that modular approach if I go into edit mode you can see that this door is shared three times and this beam here is shared even more times that's how we're managing to get all this information onto one texture space because all these objects share one texture area that's this big now you may notice if i zoom in on one of my stones that I have beveled the edges it's tricky to know when to bevel and when not to but you always have to think about the distance you're viewing your object from so if I'm about this sort of distance I can still see the bevel so it is possibly worth it whereas on this object this side supporting beam here I think it would be hard to see a bevel therefore it's kind of pointless to have one and I've just used the cube now if we look at the steps for another example and I'm going to edit mode with those and come around to the bottom here you can see that originally this vertices when I modeled it if I grab and the y-axis was all the way back over here and it's probably worth saying that it's fine to have these overlapping faces that's not a problem I get asked that all the time though it's not an issue to have overlapping faces like this and it can reduce polygons in fact but overlapping this much is pointless so I've brought this forward to as close as I can so that I'm not wasting too much texture space which is all important now an argument could be made for whether I need these inside faces of this block here and now let's have a closer look at that block I'll go into edit mode here so we can't see that face in there but we can in here which is a bit of a pain so at the moment I kind of need it but can I change my stairs so it overlaps this slightly and therefore get rid of this face in here which is actually an end on so if I triangulate this by selecting all and press ctrl T you can see that there's a fair few faces in there that I might be able to get rid of or minimize and therefore I can use this nice big area of texture space rather than have it wasted so that's something I'll be tidying up shortly so hopefully that gives you an idea of how you can go about making your models like I've said I will go into more detailed tutorials about specific models and I made them and to a sort of detailed rundown so you can see me actually make the model but I thought I'd show you the actual workflow in this case the next stage for me now after a bit of optimization is to organize my files and name them so you can see there I've got lots of collections and things that's really important when I'm unwrapping objects especially when you've got lots of linked duplicates like this then I'll actually unwrap by marking all the seams and then I'll be onto texture painting once I do that then I'll send the models off as OBJ's but all separate OBJ's that they can bring into unity and test out and make sure it's all working people have been asking me about lighting well no there's not much lighting going on the lighting will be absolutely minimal because it's a mobile game so I have to do some tricks with the texturing and they'll have to be some tricks as well the other end in unity and so forth and I'll leave those for further episodes do remember to comment below with any thoughts or questions you have and that will inform my later series I hope this is all helpful to you and I'll see you next time

Channel: Grant Abbitt

Views: 35,279

Keywords: understand, texture, paint, how, to, learn, blender, tutorials, 3d, art, graphics, game, material, guide, easy, sculpting, sculptor, sculpt, painting, tips, tricks, pointers, workflow, gameassets, blender2.8, gamedesign

Id: wcal1bcbsXQ

Length: 9min 59sec (599 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 01 2019