Modular Kits for Game Environments w/ Jon Arellano

[Music] [Music] so I'm going to go ahead and uh Jump Right In and get started here so first slide I have for you guys today is just kind of a general itenerary of what I'll be going over today um yeah I'm going to go ahead and just uh pretty much here today just to share with you guys my process as far as it goes um with creating modular kits uh my hope is that you know at the end of the day you guys feel a little bit more confident about breaking down your guys' environments and being able to utilize this kit workflow um I'm going to go ahead and just start off with a little bit of an intro just kind of give you a little bit of work history um and kind of how I got started and started using you know kit Creation in my own work and then I'm going to go ahead and jump into just kind of a general overview of kits um just kind of breaking things down from like you know the bare minimum there's a lot of information that goes behind kit creation and kind of like you know the methodology behind it but hopefully this will kind of give you some you know do and totes some a little bit of benefits um kind of hot plan things out a little bit and uh just some um you know just some things to watch out for and you know really really important as organization um after that we're going to go ahead and jump into the demo part of this uh of this Workshop here which is going to be me just kind of um showing you guys a little scene that I've been working on it's still work in progress um but it I thought it would be a great example of just kind of the kit method um I'll be going and starting off by breaking down a blockout for you guys um test out some scene pieces in unreal kind of show you like that you know that red iterative workflow um and then I'll be going over the difference between kind of doing a hard surface kit versus a more organic kit and then we'll go ahead and jump on to the part two of the demo which is going to be more so the texturing aspect of it I'll show you guys how you know I texture my kit pieces using tilers and trims and then also the more organic method which is using a little bit more of mik masks and then I'll kind of show you guys how we end up blending things things together different methods and different workflows um for yeah how we getting everything to look you know nice and tight at the end of the day and then last but not least I'll go ahead and wrap things up a little bit by touching up on the aspect of kit bashing and share with you all some art station links that I've saved over the years um that I've always found really really useful so hopefully you guys will be able to take a look at that and uh take a look at some great artists you know who've done awesome stuff with kids all righty so to get things started again um yeah like I said and I'm an environment artist at Santa Monica um I've been in the game industry for the past eight years now and I pretty much started off by working on uh MMOs um when I was in school I was actually an intern over at uh Sony Online Entertainment which is ever uh which is the studio that produces like games like EverQuest and I was just doing some props while I was there um I'm going to go ahead and just open up my art station for you guys we can kind of take a look at that scroll on down a little bit unfortunately I don't have any art from back then just because uh you know it's a long time ago and also little outdated at this point so um but my first official full-time job in the industry was actually at Intrepid Studios um which is also another MMO um and it was they were working on the first title which was ashes of creation and that I was would say is probably where I got my introduction into starting to utilize the kit workflow a little bit more um if you guys don't already know MMOs are probably the biggest game you can try to make and it really does help to be um you know to cover a lot of ground by using this kind of Kit workflow when you get to like when it comes down to like optimizing and also just comes down to just producing a lot of different content um you know being able to U utilize kits is kind of where I you know first got started um and uh yeah it's helped out me ever since then and I've started to realize that know a lot of different Studios across the board use a very similar workflow if not that same workflow um so yeah all that to say that it's it's it was a it was a great start for me but um I worked there for about three years and during that time I did a little bit of freelance I did a little bit of you know on some mobile and some VR stuff I don't have any of that up here just because it's more so under NDA but I also was doing some art station challenges um on the side and those really started to open up some doors in the industry in general um I think just being able to kind of like you know show like my process and my breakdown and so kind of like you know how I work really does you know F kind of again open up opportunities at different jobs um so I thought that was a great aspect of uh of doing those um but after about three years you know I wanted to start working on more AAA titles and so I ended up going to a studio called High Moon Studios and working on um the Call of Duty franchise um mainly as a material artist um I was there for about I want to say like a little over a year and uh during that time just learned so much about the entire pipeline for game creation as a whole um and uh you know it really honestly it was it was it was a really awesome job uh but then I got a really really great opportunity to come to Santa Monica up in LA and um work on you know the new God of War which God of War Ragnarok and for the past I want to say three and a half years now I've been up here just working on that title and yeah we're just cooking up some really awesome stuff um and hopefully you guys can you know check out my station when you guys get a chance U but yeah was able to make a lot of content for that one so it's uh it's really fun but let's go ahead and just jump on to the next slide which is um more so uh you know the reason why we're all here to talk a little bit about kits all righty so like I said there's a lot of information about kits that you know I would love to cover and uh you know talk about and show about uh different examples about so I'm just going to kind of just tackle this thing as like a broad stroke at first um and if you guys have any questions or you know want to learn anything else uh any F anything further about kids um feel free to kind of throw them in the chat right um but to start things off um um this slide is pretty much all about the great things that are you know the great things about using kits and probably all the stuff that you'll want to know um when planning things out um I always like to start off by comparing kits to Legos right um we reuse the same pieces over and over and over again in new and interesting ways and uh you know we just find different ways that they fit together and different ways they can like work together um you know within our engine and so the whole point is US creating our kit pieces in our modeling software our Lego pieces you might say and being able to bring them into the engine and just reuse them over and over and over again um you know in all a bunch of cool different interesting ways we start off by building off like you know little set pieces then building out entire environments and then next thing you know we're building out entire worlds right um but as far as the pipeline goes in general um when you do end up using this kind of workflow it does really set you up for you know creativity iteration and just sharing of assets between projects and also other people that you might be working with um if you're working at a studio uh with this workflow too it also does you know set yourself up for Success at the end of production which is really really important and it's one of those things that you don't really hear people talking about a whole lot um but at the end of the day you will have to you know touch all these kit pieces or touch all your art over and over and over again and um you know it really does help to kind of have a non-destructive workflow you might say and honestly this working with kits in general is just kind of a win-win win across the board um I also got want to go ahead and touch up a little bit about kind of like how I like to plan on my kits and some things that you know you kind want might want to look out for or some ways I I kind of think about kits in general um I usually like to think about kits as being you know one or two things or maybe even a mixture of both um but I usually like to separate between hard surface stuff and more organic stuff the hard surface stuff might be a little bit more architectural and it might be just like you know actually like Lego pieces snapping together and you're going to want to have like you know work on your seams and things like that um whereas working with a little bit more of an organic kit is you you it allows for a little bit of I guess geometry kind of mashing together and kind of you know pretty much having a little bit of a seam or something like that but we'll talk a little bit more about those and show you some examples in a bit um another thing you might want to also ask yourself too is like how big of this environment or how big am I going to how often am I going to be using these kit pieces because the larger the environment honestly the larger the kit pieces um a great example of this might be like if you were making a giant you know a giant city right it probably wouldn't do you a whole lot of good to like maybe like make an individual kit piece of let's say like a window or something like that you might want to start tackling things as like an entire floor or an entire building um per se because when you are inside of your engine and you're placing things and you're building things around you're probably going to want to you know make it easier on yourself as far as like being able to build out new content and having you know all that to say the larger the environment the larger the kit pieces right another aspect of kind of kits that I like to kind of plan for is focusing on my large and medium and small pieces um just think of it like a painting right or um or you know treat it like any form of Art and on that note you know uh I usually end up starting off with large and medium pieces first just because you know it's make things a little bit more simple um once I start getting too much into the details like the small individual bricks um you know I can almost just kind of get overwhelmed by how many kit pieces that I have going on but the last part about this is kind of just talking about like the different materials that you're going to be using I usually like to kind of write down all the different textures that I'm going to be needing to texture my kit assets and really kind of deciphering like whether I you know really need an entire 2K by 2K you know table metal if I'm just doing like a wood architectural kit maybe I can get away with using some trim or some sort of atlasing um you know to help consolidate the amount of textures that I I'm end up using um one last little note noteworthy bit that I kind of have under here if you guys saw this little you know warning sign at the very very bottom is that this workflow has 100% you know it's the way to go and I would say the only trade-off or the one big trade-off for this workflow is at the end of the day you might end up having a lot of game object or draw call limits in your guys' environments and this again has to do more so with production but it's worth mentioning um and then kind of how to resolve this but pretty much there is an actual limit to the number of pieces that you want to have in your scene um a great example might be like let's say like a little patch of grass right I plac this patch of grass like 100 thousand times and yeah sure maybe it is all instance and still kind of like working together but there could be uh times where those are still drawing the number of materials you know a thousand different times or maybe it's drawing the game object the the individual plant a thousand different times and so your engine May resolve this it may or may not um but at work when uh when we have this issue come up usually what we have to do is just combine all those uh all those grass patches and then just into one gigantic model right this way it's all being rendered and it's all being loaded up at the same exact time and that you know those thousand game objects now turn into just one and those thousand draw calls now just turn into just one um so just something to kind of keep in mind we will kind of look for pieces in our kit at the end of the day when our environment's all set up and kind of merge them together just so it's not you know super complex and once we do that it is a more permanent state of our environment and we usually don't go back to iterate after that but hopefully that gives you kind of just a general overview of kits um let's go ahead and just move on to the next slide here all righty so another aspect that I wanted to touch on here is um you know how complex should we be making our kits right um I always just kind of as a baseline um I always like to think less is more and to start simple right keep it super duper simple at the very very base um I guess the very very start you can always add to your kit and you can always make iterations and stuff like that and I'll kind of talk to you guys about you know when and how we should be making iterations but I usually like to again treat it like a painting right start off with the broad Strokes get all those base pieces in there and as we need to we'll start detailing up and adding more to this um to the environment little by little um but on that note let's go ahead and say that uh I would say like a rule that I use a lot is I always like to establish the minimum number of pieces that I'm making just to establish the overall look of the scene is kind of like my way to go right so I'll just bring in like one wall you know one pillar or you know one floor piece and just kind of use that to build out my environment as much as I can and if I need things to start being you know looking more interesting or looking different I'll bring in or make new kit pieces right and I kind of just want to do that across the board and keep my kit limited to the least amount of pieces as possible right not only is it going to help you at the end of the day um you know so you don't have to make so much different content but it also will stop you from bringing in objects that you may or may not use right cuz what if you make like 500 rocks and then you bring all those in and you only end up using like three or four you know there was really it was just kind of a waste of time to kind of make all those different variations or maybe isn't if you're just kind of experimenting and planning things out but it is worth mentioning um next up is uh you know one of the basics or I I should say um one of the big things that I always like get asked when I talk about kits is kind of like okay like how much should I be adding and when should I be expanding and so I kind of wrote down a couple different scenario I that I usually find very very useful when expanding my kit um the first one being variation right like when should we be making variance of stuff let's say you put in a wall and you're seeing it seven times you know lined up next to itself um it is probably a good moment or a good time to say like hey I'm seeing a lots of different walls on my screen at the same time I should probably start getting variants going and so that's a good time to start expanding your kit a little bit um I have a little you know image down here for you guys as well just so you can see like yeah just to start creating variants if you're seeing it on the on the screen at the same time it's a good one to to use uh next up if you end up detailing your guys's environments um and you want to start adding more to your kit that's a good time to start expanding your kit um a good example is on the left here let's say like I just put down some walls and maybe some roofs or something like that and now I want to start adding some you know like some like maybe yeah roof pieces or maybe some Edge cap pieces to kind of make my Silhouette a little bit more interesting and detailed um I also may want to make a new kit overall like let's say I wanted to add like you know some drain pipes and stuff like that maybe a whole separate kit just for that um would be really really useful so therefore I'm expanding my my my kit or my scene kit I should say um and then the last one is probably one that we use as Gamers or in game development a lot which is like destruction right if we start to start breaking things apart and damaging our pieces and we need little Rubble piles and individual bricks later on to kind of scatter around or little pieces of wood to scatter around the debris um that's a good time to start expanding your kit right so yeah just one little section right there and then last but not least I will say that the more you use a kit in general so let's say you guys end up making a kit for like a small scene or something like that and you think to yourself you know what I want to build out like an entire environment like with this thing now maybe or an entire levelized scene um the more you end up using your kit the more you're going to want to start adding to your kit and expanding your kit this may be mean just you know doing some material swaps this may be making new kinds of pieces maybe you have an entire kit for you know building set a and that can give you like you know hundreds of variations of buildings but then you might want to do a building set B kit just to like you know get more variety in your guys's environment so on that note that's when to start you know expanding further along but it does all start with kind of keeping it simple at first let's go ahead and keep going on here all right so this next part is a little bit more of like I wouldn't say it's the um boring part but it is super duper important into how we design and how we plan out our kits which is to keep things a little bit more you know organized um and it is really really crucial to the fundamentals of kits um and it's going to play us a very important part you know as we continue to texture and as we continue to kind of bring these Assets in engine and especially if you're going to hand this kit over to somebody else to to use um you're going to want things to kind of work out and all that really comes down to is you know sticking to the grid right I usually like to or I guess what I've learned across like you know working on like Call of Duty and then over at um on God of War is that we usually like to stick a lot to meters for some reason that just seems to be a great kind of measurement size for us to establish not only the Tex density but also the pixels per meter um and it is I have found it to be a very very useful size as far as like making sure that your pieces snap together um and uh you know depending on the game that you're working on your text lency might stay the you know might be a little bit different here and there but more often than not we are thinking in meters um on that point to um keeping your your pieces on the grid and snapping to the grid um just it's just going to make assembly inside of your uh inside of your game engine that much easier and it's also going to make texturing so much easier um once we get to the texturing portion of this demo hopefully you guys will see that there is a reason why we we we end up making pieces and try not to you know have some random piece that's Off the Grid or maybe even like you know a third or fourth you know sticking of a meter we try to keep things snapping to the meters um another important aspect of this is pivot Points pivot Points is a little bit it's going to vary a lot uh you know piece by piece I will say for more of the architectural stuff you're going to want to make sure that your pivot point is in a spot that allows your pieces to snap together and be used together um you don't what you don't want to be doing in engine is fiddling around like you know off of the grid and trying to get things to look just right um it can be really really annoying and honestly when things kind of snap together and are you know snapping to the Grid it's just going to make assembling a lot easier and a lot more you know straightforward um so yeah and then if you guys are doing more organic stuff the pivot point you know I usually like to put my Pivot Point somewhere in the center of my object just so I can start to like you know have the freedom to rotate it around and not have to be you know having a pivot point in a weird spot um that's all it kind of goes down when it comes to or that's all that's what it comes down to when it comes to pivot Points U next up though I want to go ahead and talk to you guys about kind of testing your kit pieces so this is really really important um when you guys are doing early on stuff and I'll probably something I'll I'll touch up on when we do the blockout version or when we're breaking down a blockout is that you do want to kind of test out your kit pieces either in Maya or in engine um over and over and over again just to make sure that they are working together in a very useful way um before you decide to like hey start sculpting these pieces or before you decide to start you know adding more detail to the modeling um just make sure that you're actually making sure that these pieces are going to be useful and that they're working correctly and then last but not least um is more so the naming Convention of it all um you know it's just kind of this thing about staying organized and one thing that I've kind of found thanks to one of my co-workers at um at Santa Monica is that to not use numbers and more so use the alphabet right a great example is just kind of these these bottom uh two uh pieces right here I'll have like wall window a and then my variation will be wall window B and if I need more variants I can call it c d you know so on and so forth um but this is just a lot better than just calling it wall window one or something like that just because then I'll have you know what happens to wall 37 is that wall two variant or is that wall one variant so yeah using the alphabet is just kind of usually the way to go but on that note covered all this stuff let's go ahead and jump right on here oh I should probably touch this or add this real quick here I have this image over here that I to use a lot of times with my students and also something that I kind of like um have found to be a perfect one to one when it comes to Maya um it's going to be a little bit different from you know whatever modeling software you are using but just making sure that your you know modeling software is set up correctly to whatever engine you're working with is is kind of you know fundamental it's a must have all righty so on that note um let's go ahead and get started into the demo aspect of uh of today's Workshop so going to go and exit out of this real quick here let's open up a real all righty so before we start diving in again this is a still a work and progress environment here but to let you guys know what we're doing so pretty much I have this environment right here in unreal and it's still very work in progress it very it started off just kind of like as like just a little corner section of this room and eventually I'm starting to expand it a little bit more and who knows maybe I'll end up you know adding an upstairs to this thing a little bit later on but just so you guys can kind of get an idea of what we'll be working with and what we'll kind of like end up getting towards at the end of the day it's going to be something that kind of looks like this all righty let's go ahead and jump over to Maya real quick here all righty so like I said we're going to go ahead and start off by taking a blockout of something like this as you can see in this blockout I usually like to just go bananas with my blockout in the very beginning just like you can't model enough personally because you can always you know down reses it or even make it a little bit more optimal at the end of the day um or you can even turn some stuff like this like let's say like the ground pieces and stuff like that I end up turning that into texture detail um and you know but I do want to model it in just so I kind of have like an idea of what it's going to look like at the end of the day and um personally in my opinion I don't think you can model too much like I always tell you know people like when 's out model it out right um but we're going to go ahead and just take a section of this guy and just show you how I quickly just like will take a blockout like this that's kind of like you know just a bunch of random pieces um and get it ready to get into the engine so first thing I'll end up doing um whenever I'm doing this stuff is try to stay a little bit organized as far as like my outliner goes um but I will actually end up taking my entire object and exporting it out into the engine so that I have a basically a footprint of my in scene so when I start to put my kit pieces together I at least have something that like I can reference inside of my engine later on and I'll go ahead and show you guys this in a second when we're actually testing out our kit pieces um but I will kind of leave that all in a folder right there for myself just so I can kind of know like hey this is still in the blockout phase and then I'll actually start to pull out things like my kit pieces and my props um as I need them so for this whole environment I can you know spend forever trying to you know turn this into a kit but I'm just going to go ahead and grab a little section which is this left hand section over here let's go ahead and just kind of hide my block out for a moment pull this out here so as you can see these are just random pieces some of them are onto the grid some of them aren't um it just depends on like how I was working for with uh working on my pieces knowing what I know about kits my blockouts tend to be nowadays a little bit more you know I am keeping the great in mind um but if you're not it's still fine you can still go bananas and U what you want to end up doing though at the end of the day is making sure that your pieces do kind of snap to the Grid it's actually better that they are on the grid versus like real world scale in my opinion um obviously you want to do your best especially when it comes to props and and just like you know the size of a doorway but even in general I try to keep my pieces more so on the grid than anything all right let's go ahead and start off with this little section here so in this section I have a couple different things that I might want to split up into different kit pieces um I'm going to go ahead and start off actually with just taking a look at this kind of like you know this little what might you what you might consider a prop um this is probably not going to be a part of my kit it's probably going to be something that I'm going to texture one off I might end up using you know trim sheets or something like that later on if I if I wanted to but I'm just going to actually go ahead and drop this in a little folder right here that I've already labeled kit props for us just so that I know that like hey I don't have to worry about this right now let's go and put in that folder and go ahead and hide that that folder right here so we're not going to worry about that guy at the moment um next up I'm going to go ahead and like work on this wall piece here first so if we go ahead and just kind of move this over for a second here oops we also got this thing let me turn off blur there we go move my pillar off to the side let's go ahead and just work on a little wall section usually walls and floors are like my first go-to just so I can kind of establish just the foundation of my of my scene here um so I'm just going to go ahead and uh snap my Pivot Point for all this towards the edge and just kind of line it up um real quick I want to kind of touch a little bit on Tex ly in general um so like I said before I have my scene set up one for one for for unreal but on that note you know I can spend forever talking about Tex City but pretty much each one of these little squid uh Square squid each one of these little squares is a 512 um you know per meter or one meter long which is about roughly a 512 texture um so if I go ahead and just like you know guest not guesstimate but you do a little math here four of these across is going to be the actual size of a 20 48 and that's actually how I want to start building out my pieces at first knowing you know at the end of the day that what it will take to texture like let's say like you know this wall piece is roughly going to be the size of a 2K across the board same thing goes if I end up making like let's say like a you know 2 meter piece it'll only be like a 1024 texture or if I make a one little piece I know that or sorry a one meter piece it'll just be like a 512 texture so I kind of try to keep that in mind when I'm you know building out my Kies and usually I end up working in a lot of 2ks at first so I will go ahead and you know make sure my pieces are roughly around like four meters all right so on this note let's go ahead and just grab this wall here so honestly it really is just about kind of making sure that you know your vertices kind of snap up in the correct ways so I'm just going to go ahead and grab some of these vertices and make sure that they snap exactly four meters let's say this is going to be my back wall here let's go ahead and grab like something like this I'm just going to make sure all my vertices snap up nice and easy so just go ahead and using like pivot point mode or sorry I guess uh setting my Pivot to uh to my verticy mode just to make sure that it does snap and it's literally just me just kind of moving these vertices across until I make sure that they are you know lining up on the grid all right and then you might see that I actually have some like block out here for what might be you know some wallpaper peeling a little bit later on I may want to put this on all my kit pieces later on or but you know maybe some walls aren't torn up right maybe some walls are nice and clean um maybe this is something that I end up adding as like a separate kit piece all together in this case I'm not I don't want to worry about it right now so I'm just going to go ahead and put it back in my blockout mode just kind of leave it over there because I just want to again just kind of keep it simple at first and if I need those pieces I can always just go back into the blockout um section of my uh scene here and just kind of add them in as a new kit piece or part of all my kit pieces or some of that or maybe I want to make it a variant all right let's go ahead and do this guy right here so I'm just going to go ahead and just kind of snap them over here it looks like these pieces snap up nice and nice and good so not too worried about that let's go ahead and merge that together everything else looks like it's starting to snap up all right so this piece looks like it's all good to go I'm going to go ahead and just kind of merge this down here and I'd probably start to label this guy I'll go ahead and start dropping it in my kit piece uh sorry my kit folder when I feel that it's in a good spot let's go ahead and call this one like wall I'm GNA call it four meter so 4M whoops 4M a right oops I'm starting to add a bunch of different characters in here that I don't really want to add all righty cool and I know that I'm going to probably later on like want to have some you know some different size pieces I don't want to be just limited to this one kit piece so maybe I'll end up making like a 2 meter piece as well so I'll just go ahead and just like duplicate this model over here for a second o actually I'll move this guy off to the side go back and grab this one just because it's already named properly and let's go ahead and turn this into like a little quick little 2 meter piece right here so if I start to grab some of those vertices here and again I'm not worri about unwrapping or anything like that I'm literally just trying to get the block out for my kit um you know work first so doesn't matter if I'm like you know stretching my UVS or something weird all right so I got a 2 met piece here so I'm just going to go ahead and just go down over here and let's just call this one keep it a call this one 2 meter oops I actually didn't put M before so that's my mistake here let's go a and just quickly add that in but it is good to stay organized right that's why I know my pieces and I know that everything in this folder is something that I'm going to end up exporting out when I'm done and in fact let's go ahead and just kind of fix my Pivot Point just so I know exactly where um you know all my pieces would be um go and just kind of line them up right there and it looks like I do want to probably I will I will probably want to have my Pivot Point in a very useful spot in this case I'm going to go ahead and put it right in between you know where my flat plane is um and this is just so I can have give myself a little bit of a back face by the way I've had there's some questions sometimes where it's like hey should I be like even modeling this back faces like isn't that kind of like waste geometry a little bit personally when it comes to lighting I kind of want my scene to you know light pretty well and I don't have want to have to worry about adding you know back faces or double- siding my materials so I usually add just a little bit of a geometry I feel like it's not too much extra to add and if for some reason let's say that like I don't know I'm really running into an issue with geometry at the end of the day or polygon counts um I can always just come back and just delete those back baces but you know whenever I'm developing my kit pieces at first I will give it some sort of thickness and then you know worry about it later on down the line right again it's an iterative workflow so not too worried about it go and make sure that this Pivot Point snaps up and again always good to kind of just test your kit pieces out I'm holding X as I'm moving things on the grid and making sure that they are you know snapping so this is just a great way to kind of also just test your stuff in engine real quick here all right so these pieces look like they're almost good to go let's go and put those off to the side in fact I'm going to go ahead and hide my kit for now just so that's it's off the side let's go ahead and talk about this guy actually you know what turn those back on and I'll just kind of move side here because I W want to make this sure this piece also does SNAP so this is a piece that's also kind of like Off the Grid a little bit maybe this doorway size is actually perfect um you know the way it is but again like I was saying before I actually would rather it be on the grid than not so if I means just you know extending my doorway just a little bit further just to make sure that it matches I will do that if I didn't want you know a larger you know walkway or a larger doorway I'll just try to make sure that my piece even though it's not like you know it looks a little bit offset I will make sure that it's still for the most part snaps to the edge of the grid so it doesn't really matter where you end up putting the doorway itself as long as this is going to be like let's say for instance a 4 met piece if I wanted it to be less like let's say I wanted it to be like more of like a 3 m piece that's totally fine as well but I will have to kind of like accommodate for this doorway and this can be kind of like anywhere you know just depends on the sizing of your of your scene that you're trying to do but in this case let's go ahead and leave it as like a nice little 4 meter piece let's go ahead and just kind of make sure that it lines up with my one of my wall pieces here so I'm just going to go ahead and snap that right there all out of the trims look like they already do for this guy right here I'm just going to go ahead and let's say I want to end up like mirroring this a little bit later on by the way this is a tool that I use a lot A buddy of mine showed me this you know pretty much when I first started in the industry and I honestly I'll will never stop using it it's super duper great but it's this kind of this mirror tool here it's literally just one line of code which is super duper great and if you guys want it I can always kind of share it with you but as you can see here it allows me to kind of make some like you know corner pieces or even just kind of like quickly mirror something super simple yeah I'm just going to give it a little bit of thickness there cool all righty let's go ahead and get rid of this model for a second or that little plane there and then again I'm just going to go ahead and say like something like this all right so this is where it kind of gets a little bit fun here but let's go ahead and start cutting things up so that it works with my new piece here and so you might be asking yourself a little bit like John like why are you uh like why don't you make like let's say like this piece a separate a separate model or let's say like the trim up top a separate model um and pretty much what it comes down to is again I want the least amount of pieces in my environment as possible um and I always try to ask myself too like will I ever need to put this way scotting you know without this wall or will I ever need this wall without this way scotting maybe at one point I might you know end up wanting a piece of wall that doesn't have that way scotting in case I wanted to do like some damage version but more often than not I don't think I'm ever going to place that wng scotting piece without a wall so hopefully that kind of gives you a little bit inside of kind of like why I chose to do you know include it all into one kit piece it's just for ease of placement and then again if I need a version of the wng scotting let's say I want to do like a broken version of waste cting just like on the floor I'll make a version of that right but I'm trying not to get ahead of myself by like being like Oh like you know separating out too many pieces like limit the number of pieces that you guys are making um just so it makes a little bit easier for you in general as far as like placing things in engine let's go ahead and grab this guy I'm just going to go ahead and just kind of FPS who whoa whoa whoa whoa don't clicking things all right let's go a and just kind of deselect that oops should go ahead and deselect this side right there deselect these verses real quick here okay let's go and make sure all this stuff kind of snaps along oops boom all right we'll focus on kind of like fixing that a little bit later but just for the general guide I just want to make sure that I get this piece in here I can always update these pieces if for some reason I get it in engine it's like hey that doesn't really you know snap the it's supposed to or look the way it's supposed to right it's all just kind of at this point still blocking out my entire kit so let's go ahead and just find something like that do select this yeah oh whoops let's go and just kind of snap it to that verticy there for a moment cool all righty and so at the end of the day I'll have something that kind of looks like this let's go ahead and call this one combin really history free Transformations on it don't worry about that mirror right there let's call this one wall maybe instead of wall maybe I might call this one wall doorway and then it will be a four meter piece and I'll just leave it as a because it's its first variant maybe I end up needing a variant where it's you know destroyed or you know whatever maybe it has a wallpaper on or something weird all righty I will also make sure that all my pivot Points or all my models are kind of you know locked up into the same uh 0o to one space so that when I do end up exporting it out you know my Pivot Point is where it needs to be on the model itself um there's lots of different ways that you can like export the stuff out in as like a batch or something like that um usually I end up just doing it by hand just so I can have a little bit more control it does take a little bit longer but unless I have a million pieces um then I might end up starting to use batch export at some point um also real quick here I do have this model for a second here um I wanted to kind of just show you guys why I kind of add this model so I'm just going to go ahead and move this stuff off to the side but more often than not it's actually kind of nice to have an in between piece um not only for breakup of your you know just straight up Geometry but also um it's good just to kind of have like um you know a little bit of variation for you allall because let's say if I had like I'm just going to move this off to the side for a second here let's say I had a wall in my scene that had like you know a bunch of different you know just repeating walls and let's say that I got it to tile you know my tileable textures to tile seamlessly across the board I still would probably want to have something in here as far as like breakup goes and usually I like to think of this as like you know a sandwich technique right if I had like something fair and then I have something you know interesting as far as detail goes maybe I'll end up doing this as like a oneoff prop or oneoff sculpt piece um just to kind of make it a little bit you know some variation or break up of my towable textures or my trims um but I would say like having like some sort of cat piece like this is just really really nice to have um but I'll probably end up having this guy as its own separate piece Al together so let's go ahead and just add it to my kit here for a second let's just call this one like pillar wall hey cool all righty and then so let's go ahead and just drag everything over here send it to PIV point and then I'm going to go ahead and just kind of exse export these pieces out um oh one thing real quick here I wanted to add before I do that for a second here let's go ahead and just duplicate this piece here for a moment and again it's just more so showing off that oops selecting so many different things it's more again showing off that nice little mirror tool is that like why I love doing this is because it allows me to create some like corner pieces and allow them to kind of snap so let's say like I wanted to go ahead and like make this corner piece don't worry about the green it's just basically breaking the material setup but I'm not tooo worried about that let's go ahead and just kind of do something like this just kind of eyeball it for a moment all right so now I have a little corner piece of my scene if I if I wanted to have like you know a place where these kind of like seem up and match up at the end of the day let's go ahead and just assign existing material to it again Lambert for the for the moment I'm going to go ahead and grab my one of my wall pieces here just duplicate it just so I can have it over here make sure that the that these vertices all line up and match up the way that they're supposed to so I'm just going to go ahead and say like grab the vertices like this here let going deselect these guys for a moment I'm just going to go ahead and find that pivot point or that verticy and make sure that it actually snaps to a piece that is already on the grid which is going to be this other section over here just kind of go ahead and make sure it's snaps I'm just holding X by the way to kind of make sure that it snaps to the Grid or verticy mode to make sure that it snaps to the verticy of this model and then pretty much now I have this piece and as long as I put my Pivot Point it doesn't really matter where I put my Pivot Point as long as it's on the grid I can put my Pivot Point over here I can put it in the corner I'm just making sure that my Pivot makes sure that it snapped to the grid but now if I wanted to kind of just experiment with these two pieces I can go ahead and just be like all right let's go aad and just like grab this grab that and I know it's all going to snap together and work together just like Legos and I'll be able to build this stuff out inside of my engine nice and easy Tada right again just kind of making sure that that all works together but it might seem very kind of like straightforward and simple but um you know it's really good to kind of make sure that you have all this stuff down and make sure you have the essential pieces that you'll be needing to build out your environment so now I got all those pieces out I'll go ahead and just kind of put them all in my folder make sure that they're all named properly I'm not going to name it right now just so I can kind of move on to the next part of the demo which is testing out my kit pieces inside of engine I'll just export one each one of these out so I'm going to go ahead and just jump ahead into my unreal scene where I've already kind of imported them so you guys don't have to watch me import each individual one all righty so whenever I have like my environments I don't want to just start placing envir uh my kit pieces inside of my environment um I'll actually want to start testing these out by having it what we call like a what I call like a zoo which is what we call it a SMS or some sort of playground file which allows me to kind of test out my kit pieces and it almost also works as like a checklist for myself like I'll know like hey is there are there some kit pieces that I quite haven't haven't quite unwrapped yet are there some kit pieces that I need some variance of or whatever the heck but also it works as like a general Library for myself so if I ever needed to come back to this or if I ever needed to see like what pieces I you know still have or can use in my scene I'll have them all laid out right here for me um to kind of you know View and easily uh come back to also in case I needed to you know let's say hand this off to a different artists they know what pieces are in my scene and what's part of my kit and they can kind of like you know put things together in their own special way let's go ahead and go to this section right here where I've already imported some pieces um that would be under here hard server stuff all right so like I said before I will actually go ahead and bring in my entire you know block out of my scene as a whole as again like a thumb print or like a a a blueprint of kind of like where I should be placing my models also you might have noticed that I just kind of dragged it into the scene um that's actually not super duper smart the way I have my grid set up is that each one of these meters is basically you know 50 units so if I go ahead and just I want to make sure that I'm placing everything inside of my unreal scene to that grid so this it kind of snaps see how it kind of just snap there the nearest grid um keeping things on the grid is just a very very smart you know workflow and you want to make sure that you're not again having to readjust your pieces and it almost looked like how I was basically you know attaching different models inside of Maya I'm going to go ahead and just kind of grab this wall piece that I have here let's go ahead and throw quickly throw a light so I can kind of see inside of this room and pretty much what I'll end up doing is going like this I'll go ahead and just kind of like save this oh sorry trying to make sure that all my pieces line up they won't fit to my blockout perfectly but they'll fit in a pretty good spot right let's say I'm going to go ahead and just do this piece right there like that and then again it's just kind of using that that block out as just kind of again my my kind of like my stencil for my scene and I'll basically just start to rebuild out my entire environment and when I'm ready I'll go ahead and just like let's say save this scene off as like my my actual scene later on but at least in here I'm making sure that all my kit pieces work together that everything you know works the way it's supposed to and again I'm making sure that everything kind of snaps and again I'll like oh again but I will end up like hiding this on and off to kind of make sure that like oh is this working out the way it's supposed to yeah it's going to be somewhere like right there let's go and just kind of move this over right that's not my doorway that I had here which is this guy and then as you can see right here I ended up updating this piece in general because you know thought it'd be a little bit more interesting but I didn't know that until after kind of got it in and started looking at my environment as a whole all righty oops Yeah so as long as it ends up working you know the way the scene is intended to it's more so that it follows you know more so that it looks good with my kit at the end of the day versus it trying to match my you know one to one of my blockout that blockout again is just kind of a general guide but yeah hopefully that kind of gives you guys a little bit of insight about like the process of building your kit pieces out and then you know end up using them in engine um and quickly I'm going to go ahead and just jump over to a different scene um which is going to be more so of the uh the part about the organic kit pieces right because I feel like this is a little bit different to handle or sorry a different way to tackle in general um but also very very similar so unlike the more hard surface parts of it where everything kind of snap together like Legos um whenever I'm doing more organic uh kits again I like to have my Pivot Point kind of in the center and I usually like to kind of create pieces that are a little bit more so like large medium and small pieces right and kind of just like you know work my way down into the more like granular pieces as we go um some general notes that I usually kind of make or some general pieces that I usually kind of make is something like this where it's kind of like more of like a mound or a way to kind of blend assets together is really really nice to have um it's going to be a simple geometry piece that I can just start to like jam into like let's say like this rock or something like that um just to kind of help maybe bridge the gap between like a piece like this and then like a piece like this all right I also have you know some other little debris pieces that as well that I usually like to use to kind of help you know give detail to the scene and also again it helps to bridge the gap between like certain models and other models but that's pretty much all there is as far as like you know creating your kit depending on the kind of Kit you're obviously trying to do it might require some snapping and it might require just like you know some jamming of models together but I want to go ahead and show you guys real quick here how like um a kit like this would work um and I'm just going to go ahead and just do an aaya for example just to kind of demonstrate all right so I'm going to go ahead and again start off with my treat it like a painting right start off with my large kit pieces so I'm just going to go ahead and grab this rock for a second and let's go ahead and just make like probably one of the easiest environments to kind of do or the most straight forward straightforward environments to do which is going to be some sort of like hallway in this case like some sort of probably like you know Canyon Corridor thing and notice how I'm like when I'm placing these I'm just going to kind of like start to rotate them so so they're not perfectly on like you know 90 degrees I'm going to maybe end it like uh usually when it comes to like organic stuff especially like rocks things tend to kind of grow in a certain way and have like you know movement to them so that's kind of why I'm placing these rocks kind of like angular let's go ahead and just do something like this and I'm just going to create a nice little like Canyon for myself there make it feel a little natural there right cool cool cool cool work smarter not harder just going to go ahead and grab all these kit pieces or these Rock kit let's go ahead and just kind of rotate them over here and just kind of like adjust things as I need them and I would obviously do this in within my engine but just for the sake of this demo I'm just going to go ahead and just do it in Maya kind of make things a little bit interesting that nice little s path or something okay cool cool got something like that going on now next up I'm going to go ahead and start to actually let me go and move this over just yeah this piece next up I'm going to go ahead and just start to grab more of like the medium shapes of my kit like let's say this gigantic Boulder here and I'm just going to go ahead and just start jamming it into the ground or jamming into the side of my wall here if I really needed to blend these pieces together I can always you know use skirts or some other sort of you know model to kind of help Blend or trans help that transition but at the end of the day you know I'll probably end up sharing a lot of different materials um across the board with these guys so they should look pretty similar and kind of fit so I'm not too worried about it like oh like why is there like a really harsh seam or something like that all right and again kind of working on like that nice little s path there every other one little like Leap Frog looking thing go ahead and do this um it's also important to note that like even with more organic pieces what you don't want to end up doing is scaling you know what I mean you want to make pieces in large medium and small forms um just so that you know you're not losing out on text density even if you are using texturing like um like with some sort of like World projection or World align texture you still don't want to like you know these these bakes were baked at a certain Tex density and you know the tilable textures on them um Were Meant to accommodate for that so you don't want to be scaling this stuff just like you know willy-nilly and you know just hoping that it looks good or then you'll have just a bunch of issues with texid dency and texy is really important let's grab some of these more medium pieces or I should say more of these like smaller pieces let's go ahead and just start like busing them around um by the way when it comes to placing these objects I usually like to place you know if I have to place like a bunch of this kind of stuff I'll place like one or two or three of them in a nice like interesting way like let's say like something like this guy I'm just going to go ahead and place it like let's say something like that and then if I find a like a a what's it called a little piece like this that like looks nice and pretty I'll usually end up just like grabbing this kind of stuff and I guess this is more of a set dressing no let's actually like that one and let's go ahead and make this one a little bit smaller like that I'll go ahead and just end up like you know say merging it together or grabbing that cluster as a group or something like that and then rotating them and placing them as a a like a a selection or a group it just makes it sure that like hey this is always going to look pretty no matter what angle you know I'm rotating or what no matter what angle I'm placing these um it's always going to look nice and nice and Blended together yeah pretty much it's always going to look good let's go ahead and do something like that just Jam that in here just a little bit there and then let's go ahead and go back to my kit over here now I got some more of like I guess more of these smaller even smaller pieces I should say maybe some more Pebble pieces but I'm just going to go ahead and just kind of like quickly just kind of rotate this around here I'm just going to place this one just as kind of like a nice little blend and usually when it comes to the more organic stuff I always like to think of it as like kind of like almost like a virus that it spreads usually things tend to grow or even fall in a very like natural way where it starts off with like the source so in this case this is giant rock right and then it goes down to big rocks and as the further I get away from like the bigger rocks I always tend to kind of like have like smaller pieces kind of bleed out um and this works for foliage as well usually there's like a source or where like you know the centered foliage is like probably the you know the patch of grass or the fern or whatever that is you know the center of where it started to goow and the ones that as it kind of like spreads out those are like you know newer pieces and they kind kind of tend to be smaller um but it also works for rocks and and all that stuff um but next up I'm going to go ahead and grab my blend piece here which is my little Mound let's go ahead and just start jamming that right in and I get to kind of rotate this and flip this around here and again this is just blending more so with geometry um you know we can always do a texture pass on this later on as far as like skirting and you know making sure that the vertex blend looks good and whatnot but just for the sake of testing out the kit itself and you know making sure that our kit looks nice and cool you can see here that we're just kind of like getting all this pieces nice and good also you might see like some um sometimes there's like even some Mega scan assets that kind of like look like this anyways that's kind of where you know a good reference point of like oh like you know what kind of mounds and pieces should I be kind of building like take a look at some organic you know kits out there as a reference let's go ahead and just kind of do something like that all right get a nice little right there here and then last but not least we got some nice little Pebbles and in this case these are pretty massive but that's okay let's go ahead and just kind of try probably in scale normally you don't want to you want to make sure that the text you're not breaking text but for the sake of this I just want to make sure that I'm getting a nice little little bleed off there but yeah something like that hopefully that gives you an example of kind of like how we can end up using more organic K pieces they tend to just be very you know they can just Jam right into each other right it's less about focusing on snapping and more so focusing on like you know how can I reuse these pieces in nice interesting ways and how they can kind of like blend together and again it's just kind of focusing on like these big medium and then kind of like you know more of the smaller stuff and just kind of keep working your way down as much detail as you need um but foliage works the exact same way if this was like a giant tree right here right I would basically just have some like bigger plants or some medium ferns or something like that and then I kind of get down to like you know more of like these grassy patches or grassy mountains or something and then kind of get into more of like the mossy kind of stuff or flowers and things like that but all very very similar all right so hopefully that kind of answers some questions there for you guys let's go ahead and jump on over to back to my little PowerPoint in here and we'll jump into the second part of the demo here which is going to be how we end up texturing this stuff right because that's kind of really important um pretty much as a rule of of thumb um I always tend to kind of use more so table textures than anything um I I try to get away with as much table textures as possible just because I want to be a make sure that I am actually sharing um you know texture count because I would say like especially nowadays polygon counts I'm not going to say they're you know out the door like you got really awesome things like you know nanite and uh you know even some cool Tech stuff as far as like LEDs and and things like that that can kind of help you out with geometry but the big I guess like a bottleneck for environments um is going to be how we end up texturing these guys right and if we can share tilable textures as often as possible that's just going to make sure that our kits are you know not as expensive and that we can actually add more to the world because you got to remember um it's not just the environments right you also have characters on screen you also have a effects you also have you know animations like all this stuff has to be accounted for in real-time engines and you know a big kind of save is is how we end up texturing our assets um which is also just like a great note into like why we still build kits right like why we still build things certain ways and why aren't we just like you know going out there and just like scanning something and calling it a day um it's because we do want to make sure that all of this stuff is optimized and optimal um and how we go about that a lot of times is US texturing so I have on the left here I have an examp example of something like if you were going to end up sculpting one of these kit pieces you would pretty much just have like some sort of sculpt and you would end up using some sort of tilable um texture along with some masks and I actually actually have an example of that in unreal for you guys if you need it oh well if you need it I'll show it to you guys in a second um and then I also do have a an example over here where it's less more of the uh it's more of the non- baking work method which is basically just using tileable textures and um and trims of some sort but at the end of the day you will see that they are pretty much all using tileable texturing of some sort all righty let's go ahead and jump over to my other My Scene here all right so I wanted to kind of just uh have my kit all laid out for you guys real quick here so you can see like at the end of the day that I will pretty much have all my kit pieces all textured in the same scene and actually what my scene normally looks like on any given day is probably a little bit more so like this um and not so spread out I could have a script or something like that that kind of like sets them all into the same space but but usually my kits end up my kit environments end up looking something like this right but this is just an example of it all kind of laid out inside of um inside of my for you guys when it's textured but on that note let's go ahead and take a look at kind of a piece like this first let's go Ahad and just kind of put my rock off to the side because we'll talk about the rock in a second but I usually end up having my textures all my textures that I ended up making for this scene whether it be trims tilers or whatever just laid out inside of my May environment and pretty much on a plane that demonstrates the size of this uh of their Textures in this case I'm using 1024s as kind of like my you know size of my texturing method just so I can kind of keep my texture count kind of low um that will make so that it repeats more often but my kit pieces uh but my scene will be a little bit more optimize that way and if I always needed to like bump up for Tex density or something of that I can always bump these up to a 2K and all of a sudden my Tex density is no longer let's say 52 per meter but now it's 1024 per meter right um so there's always different ways that you can kind of upres when you start with like something that's a little bit you know lower uh but this will mean yeah but anyways let's get back into the uh unwrapping part portion of this um so yeah like I said I have all these at the ready these are all of the different textures that I can use to kind of texture um this particular kit piece and let's go ahead and just talk about kind of like how I end up unwrapping so this might be a little bit different if you guys don't use Maya um but it's all pretty much the exact same workflow of just kind of trying to get away with table textures at first and then if I need more detail I can make trim sheets and if for some reason my kit piece still doesn't look you know super duper awesome in some way or another um I could always just go to that route of using tileable Textures in some sort of baked uh baked kind of workflow but let's go ahead and start with this guy first I'm just going to start with the biggest vers biggest uh uh offenders first or the biggest surfaces first which is going to be you know this back B right here I'm literally just going to go ahead and just like Auto quickly auto wrap and pull up my UV editor for a second just so it has some sort so many UBS all right let's go ahead and just kind of put this over here I'm just going to move this all off to the side for a second here this is kind of just my general way of unwrapping let's just go ahead and say like this stuff wasn't unwrapped at all so I'm just going to put off to the side all right so the nice thing about using toall textures and like you know I guess one big benefit to this workflow in general and making sure that your kit pieces are on the grid is that a lot of times you can kind of just get away with just like almost Auto unwrapping your UVS or using some sort of planer wrap UVS let's go ahead and just assign this wallpaper texture real quick here all right take a look at this and when I'm um but pretty much like unless I wanted to make sure that like my wood grain is going the right way or maybe I want to make sure that like let's say like this this face right here oops go make sure that snaps this face which is pretty much that backside sorry if I'm like covering it up but it's pretty much that backs side is probably facing the exact right way or the right orientation um but other than that like this piece right here any place that's going to be using just straight up tibles I can literally just go down to my texo density making sure that it's let's say at a 512 per meter right which is the text density that I was using for this environment um and then right here whoops as far as like 10 20 20 48s um I think I do no I want to keep it at 2K for now but my text tendency will remain the exact same anyways if I go ahead and just click set this piece is pretty much unwrapped right and you might might be asking yourself like John like how does that affect like uh you know like will it tile with itself um if my other kit pieces are also you know my UV seams line up uh properly I can pretty much just make sure that like look at that it like seams up perfectly um and that's because I built my kit pieces in a way that you know the the edge is on the actual uh grid so I don't have to worry too much about like whether or not this thing seams together you know in any form or the other um so it's kind of nice I might want to have a geometry piece in there in between just to kind of you know break up just the overall look of my kit um but for the most part I shouldn't have to worry too much about whether you know the tileable texture actually tiles um but that you know just being able to Auto unwrap and then making sure that things are in the right orientation these this part of my kit or this part of this piece is pretty much done and it doesn't matter where I really move it unless I wanted like you know this stuff to line up perfectly I might end up snapping it like right there for example here just kind of put them over there and then we're pretty much done with that stuff and anytime I'm done with like my unwrap I end up just putting it over to the left somewhere um I can actually use this transform over here as well just to kind of move it exactly one unit over so I don't lose my UVS let's just put it over there for a moment all right there we go but that part of my kit is done that's the easy stuff right so that's why we always like to use tibles when we can um as far as like breaking up that surface I'll end up using things like vertex paint and and uh um you know even decals and stuff like that to help ground it um to make it look like more like that like a quote unquote prop um but for the sake of using tile BS you know we're sharing those textures we're done with that with that section of the piece um the next stuff is going to be more so these like Trims and tibles and so whenever I'm unwrapping trims it's pretty straightforward um as far as like I guess I should say creating my trim sheet I should probably talk about that first um I always tend to create my trim sheets off of the geometry that um I've used for my kit so let's say like even let's say I didn't have a trim sheet quite yet right and I just have this kit piece just off to the side I'll actually end up going ahead and like grabbing like let's say like this whole trim because I know that's going to be an easy trim or maybe even this section right here right I'll just go ahead and just like delete it this is kind of how I plan out my trims as well I'm just going to go ahead and just kind of flip and rotate it for a second there and let's go ahead and say I'm going to start to make my texture piece which is going to be just kind of like whoops this plane over here let's go ahead and make sure that this is set properly let's go ahead and set it to I think it's like 400 will be exactly on my grid oops 200 I'm doing a two a 1024 texture but pretty much what I can do now for this is I can go ahead and just start to let's say like this trim goes all the way around right I'll just grab that little section maybe like select everything deselect that hit delete for a second make sure I just go ahead and separate these pieces but as you can see like I'm going to make sure that every when I everything on my trim sheet I'm going to end up using at the end of the day because it literally was built from my my geometry right I know I'm going to find use for it in some form or another right and so this is how I actually end up planning out my trim sheet is I'll find pieces in my scene that kind of make a little bit uh you know that I know I'm going to that I'm probably going to want to use a trim sheet on and just kind of make sure that I line things up and then I end up sculpting this or even you know texturing it you know in some other program or whatnot but as you can see like I'm actually us utilizing like the pieces maybe something like this might be a little bit weird cuz like you know it's got a lot of different dimensions to it and even those UVS would be a lot flatter so like maybe something for this I might not want like these this entire Archway that feels a little bit weird but now we're getting so more so into like you know making trims than actually unwrapping kit pieces but I just want to kind of just demonstrate for you guys like I probably wouldn't put that piece there and if anything I'd probably put just like a Slither of wood and call that a day yeah and that's actually what I ended up using for this trim sheet as a matter of fact is I have a nice little Slither wood I got some like you know Wing scotting pieces down here that I actually built that are actually built from my way scotting geometry and then I got some nice little geometry breakup of like details and whatnot um but that's what I'll end up using to kind of texture that piece there so let's go ahead and just start off with this guy here I'm just going to go ahead and just grab like let's say like start off with this piece right here actually all righty and I'll go ahead and just like anything that's still work in progress I like to keep over here on the right side of my UVS and everything that's still like you know not quite done yet is going to be over here on my left so let's go ahead and just like grab that piece here sorry kind of hard to deal this with all at one screen usually I have two monitors going on let's go ahead and just assign existing material and I'm going to go ahead and assign my trim here for a second so whenever I'm going ahead and unwrapping these pieces I'm just going to go ahead and just like kind of seam them up together and break it up as I need it so let's go ahead and just kind of stitch together for a moment Stitch all that together it's all good let's go ahead and make sure that it's fully unwrapped so if I go to my unfold and I unfold along like you know horizontally and vertically just to kind of make sure that piece is you know nice and unwrapped the way it's supposed to I'm just going to go ahead and make sure that my text density is proper so I'm going to go ahead and click set for my text density everything looks like it matches up nice and easy and now pretty much I can basically go and look at my geometry piece over here and start to um ask myself like okay like do I need like where do I want to where do I want to fit this geometry on my trim sheet so that it matches up in a very you know realistic way I'm going to go ahead and start off with like the edges first I always think like that stuff that like uh the occluded areas and the edge areas are kind of important to make sure that they have like that kind of detail so let's go ahead and grab like all that whole trim here which is pretty much going to be this whole thing I'm just going to grab this verticy here cut it up and now I'm just going to basically look for anywhere on my trim sheet that looks good honestly like I could find like the one to one piece that I ended up using to bake out that trim or I can just find something that kind of looks you know pretty neat in this case I'm just going to go ahead and find like a couple edges there like something like let's say like where's this exact face here so I can find that face that's going to be this face all right so this face here let's go ahead and just kind of like find something like and if I need to I can always just cut up these pieces so let's say like I want to cut like this piece here because that looks a little bit weird under the side go and find somewhere on my trim sheet that this kind of makes sense let's go and find like a crevice there and pretty much what I'm kind of keeping an eye on the whole time is my trim up here and as long as it looks good on my geometry it does really doesn't matter where I'm putting my trim sheet in fact that actually doesn't look no a little too bad there but again what you were trying to keep an eye on is like the edge wear and the occluded areas let's go ahead and grab like this other face right here as well go and do Flip Flip just to kind of separate those pieces out again make sure my Tex density is all good to go and then I'm just going to go ahead and find somewhere on my trim in this case it looks like like you know let's say like I wanted to like utilize this whole Space here I could kind of scale things up and it probably would look fine but I'm going to try to find somewhere that kind of like makes a little bit more sense in this case I'm just going to go ahead and like find this area right here and sometimes what I'll end up doing too is I'll end up cutting up my geometry if for some reason like let's say I'll look at my trim for a moment I'm like oh that's really cool but maybe I want to like have like that detail you know below it as well so let's go ahead back to my UVS for a second I'll end up adding like an actual like Edge Loop in here just to accommodate for that so let's go just kind of add an edge Loop right there there let's find this little section here I'll just go ahead and just flip it so I can kind of separate it off and looks like actually this thing is upside down so let's go ahead and just like flip and rot that something like that and then for this piece down here maybe I want to just find something that's a little bit more you know subtle not so noisy not too much detail let's just find like let's say like this little occluded area there and honestly when it comes down to this stuff if I have to scale it just a little bit it's not not the end of the world right my texy went from like you know let's say like 5 12 per meter to like 480 something or something like that no one's going to be like oh my gosh John it doesn't look right it'll look fine all right so you got a piece like that going on here um for some of these more archways kind of pieces it's a little bit actually easier to unwrap so let's go ahead and like grab like just this one for example here let's go ahead and just kind of Auto unwrap this for a second I always start off with an auto who whoa whoa whoa whoa didn't look good what did I do did I break something nope Auto unwrap there we go and then luckily if you guys know Maya there's a nice little modifi unitize area there let's go ahead and grab like something like this deselect all that I'm just going to go ahead and actually let me separate this let me isolate it so it doesn't look super duper crazy complex looks like I don't need these pieces under here so I'm just going to make sure that there's no geometry under there looks like somewhere along line I still have like some sort of try somewhere I'll find that a little bit later ons why does it look like this thing is subdivided did I do something weird to it ah look like I added like a bevel or something did out a bevel sorry I made this piece more complicated than it needs to be and that's my bad as far as geometry geometry goes let's go ahead and just kind of modify unitize it still let's see if we can kind of get it right without actually doing this without actually having to worry about that or rebuild it all right let's go ahead and just find our seam here I'm just going to go ahead and say my seam is going to be somewhere around here if I go ahead and just it together let it think for a second hopefully it doesn't crash on me and I think it's done enough thinking I'm gonna press Escape there you go Bo all right so looks like got some weird funky pieces going on here but for the most part see where all these pieces are right here what's going on here like somewhere on the lines I don't know why it's subdivided I'm sorry about that guys it looks like it's like cut up certain ways but let's just focus on the other piece right here let's go ahead and just flip it and set spr it out there I don't know what's going on there for a second here swear sometimes I uh not sometimes but I usually Model A Lot cleaner than this for some reason I don't know what happened but there we go just kind of separate that out for a second there I'll worry about those pieces in a moment let's just grab that General arch for a moment here let's go ahead and just kind of make sure that I grab all these UVS I'm just going to unfold along the V oops not that I got to deselect my outer edge there unfold along the V and now I get something that kind of looks like this select those vertices up in here fold along the V fold along the U oops let's go aad and straighten uv's out for a second let it think come on ah n I'm just like get to watch me unwrap really nasty stuff all of a sudden my bad guys um swear this is usually a lot easier it's probably because my geometry looks like crap all right I might have to jump out of this one fail not of this but hopefully this kind of already starts to give you guys just the general workflow as far as like utilizing trims I'm basically just going to find pieces on my geometry that I would that I like I want to do like maybe like a trim sheet here or towable textures as often as possible and then trim sheets kind of like where I need them as far as the detail pieces one kind of like I guess flow that's kind of nice is always like that sandwich technique if you guys understand it or if you guys know that one I should say um uh is kind of like you know let's say like up here the trim sheet is almost like my quote unquote detail kind of piece and the tilable textures are just going to be straight up tileable textures that I'll have to ground later on uh with skirts and decals um so I always like to think like okay like let's go ahead and just do like maybe this piece won't be might be a Tyler piece and then this can be unwrapped with trim and then this and this will be a tiat piece again and then this will part will be kind of trim um I try to use trims as often as possible though um where I can just because that will actually have that one to one detail that you might see from a piece like this it'll actually have you know that cavity information that that dust build up and stuff like that whereas a tyur tileable is pretty much just like a flat surface that might just have you know some detail in the grein or something like that um so it really is about like trying to utilize this as often as I can but if I can get away with the tilable texture I definitely will uh but I'm going to go ahead and just jump on over to the more organic stuff of this which is going to be this rock guy over here um and then the unwrapping magic for this guy isn't really super duper special I've already kind of unrapped this guy um just as like kind of a general guide here and it looks kind of just like you know a decimated model and that's because it is um the way I unwrapped this one in particular I just went ahead and used like zbrush just unwrap and kind of just selected certain parts of my model um to make sure that it was unwrapped but if I wanted to go ahead and unwrap this with like um like I guess a little bit more of a better unwrap pretty much what I would end up doing is using a technique that I learned from a um a co-worker of mine or buddy of mine Danny carlone he has like a really great uh way to kind of unwrap this stuff and actually let me see if I can find it real quick here um if I go look up his Instagram it's actually super duper great give me a second here let me pull it up for you guys and it's actually this workflow right here which if I open this up just for quick a second and of course there you go it's on Twitter there but it's a little hard to see but you can definitely look um his stuff up but it's pretty much this idea of making a lower poly model unwrapping that and then using what we have in Maya which is the transfer attributes so I basically get get to unwrap a very simple model and then you know transfer the UVS onto a more complicated model uh which is the like the general workflow and you can definitely take a look at that guide but that's probably what I would end up using to unwrap a piece like this um or rym is kind of a great way to go if you guys do know rym um but for this piece just for the uh sake of like um I should say sake of this demo I just went ahead and use um UV uh zbrush's unwrapper and honestly something like this for a rock is totally fine the only time the UV is kind of like I guess like the direction of your UV layout actually matters the most is when you're going to be using things like uh wood grain or something like that in that case I would probably want to make sure that let's say like my wood grain was you know horizontal I would probably want to make sure that my you know my UVS all kind of have like a very like horizontal kind of look um based on where they are but that's the only difference between like unwrapping Like a Rock piece or versus like a organic wood piece or something like that or any type of surface really it's just making sure that you know it goes with the grain of of whatever material that you're trying to utilize but let's go ahead and just jump over to unreal for a moment here where I can show you guys what um what I'm actually setting up inside of unreal as far as the Shader goes and we can take a look at go and get rid of these guys over here we can take a look at that Shader under the hood all righty so I got this giant rock in here I went ahead and textured it um just really quickly with like some substance painter masks and just tileable textures and I can actually show you guys how this is all working out here um pretty much what I have here is I have just like a a general tilable Rock texture and then I also have like a variant of it just for surface breakup which is in this case just a more desaturated version but I can use an entirely different Rock texture if I have one um that rock texture has a normal map and then it also has just some pack channels which are literally just the ambient occlusion the height map I didn't need my normal map in here sorry my my my metalness map in here so I just have my roughness map in channel one you know my AO in channel two and then my uh height mapping Channel and my blue Channel just in case I need it but that's pretty much all I needed for as far as like table textures go and what I ended up importing for this unique uh kit piece is all I ended up needing was a normal map and then a pack Channel which is basically just a couple different masks that Define the look of my rock so I know it's kind of hard to see in here but this is one for Edge wear I also have one for you know occluded areas which is like the dust buildup and you know dirt and stuff like that and I also have another one that is just for General surface breakup but those are the three masks iend end up using for pretty much any sculpted you know piece that I'm trying to texture as I'll have yeah again one for edges one for cavity information and one for surface breakup and this way it will allow me to kind of utilize you know this Shader setup to get lots of different variation to it and texture all my kit pieces um pretty much once you have this setup going you can actually end up texturing all your kits that are sharing the same tile BS an infinite number of ways and let's say if I needed like a new rock kit or something like that I can literally just swap out like the tilable texture of my um of my Shader and I can get a whole new look right maybe in another Shader I end up like you know making like some I don't know white rocks or something like that or maybe some sort of obsidian rock or something like that I can still use the exact same sculpt but allow myself the freedom to you know have a different look for my area let's go and take a look at the Shader under the hood real quick here just to kind of show you how it's built up but pretty much what I have here is I have four different layers to my texture um in this case I have the tileable texture one and these are all by the way just material functions inside of unreal um yeah layer one layer two which is basically just the same exact texture um I also have a mask or a a Shader in here that's literally just for color information right now but this is pretty much going to be what defines the edges of my my rock and then I also have something right here where I could probably t uh what's whoops loaded off screen where I can probably actually tile like a dirt texture in here if I really wanted to um just to kind of get you know better looking but in this case just for the example I just kind of had just a simple color but each one of these can be their own tilable textures if I needed them to be um but for the sake of this there just going to be some simple colors but yeah pretty much I have four different layers to define the look of my kit models and for Kit piece this can all kind of vary um you know but it just depends on like a sorry for Kit piece I can always to kind of change the look of each different rock as I need to um and just allows for just a lot of uh you know Freedom um but let's go ahead and take a look at this um Shader exactly under the RGB M Master here so as you can see it's actually not super duper complex F what's going on um each one of these material functions is being called in here so I have like my rock Tyler I have like uh the rock Tyler that's kind of like more desaturated so my second Rock tyer and pretty much it's just an alpha that's being uh that's telling like hey where should like a you know this one show up and where should this one show up so one little Alpha basically controlling that whole blend and by the way these are like roughness metalness you know AO occlusion all that stuff it's all being Blended Within These material functions here and I'm basically just tackling it in layers right next up I have like my dirt layer and then it's just one single mask that is being um you know called on and then the last one is just going to be like you know Edge wear which is being called in for my red Channel and I just have a simple texture for that and again this this these material functions can hold an entire table texture if I need it to be um what really where the magic really comes in hand or I guess where where this like texturing this kit workflow really comes like into play is kind of how I'm blending the normal Maps um of these tilable of these tileable textures and adding my unique model in here so if I go ahead and just kind of put these UVS over or these two maps over here um so normally when you guys are like texturing like a prop or something like that right you'll probably texture something that's like just a color map you'll bring in your normal map and maybe some sort of like pack texture which is like your roughness your AO and all that good stuff right um but when you're doing this workflow all you really need is two textures for your bake so every single one of my rocks will only have just two textures instead of you know your normal probably three or four um right and that's kind of like where you start to save in this workflow is that all I ever need for like that one rock is this anal map which is basically just you know the bake of my model and then I have something like this which is just a couple different masks defining the look of my right everything else is going to be utilizing the same tilable textures um and then I actually also have down here uh a detail table texture which I can just kind of like overlay normals on top of my model just to get an extra you know specific detail especially if my rocks are a little bit bigger than you know my average Grid or something like that or larger model in general um but at the end of the day it's all just being kind of Blended in and you know yeah all good to go but let's go ahead and just take a look at kind of whoops go and save this out here that's just the master material that I have going on here this is just the material instance real quick here that I have um pretty much I just sent a quick little ptin to like my dirt and my color and then I just have the weight like the number of how much I'm tiling my textures let's go ahead and take a look at a rock here let's go and just kind of run around it here all right just so I can kind of see what these guys are doing in real time oh whoops sorry about that I just kind of s there at this it's all right all right anyways so if I go over to my detail Ty texture I also have something that's for the intensity of my detail tileable normal there a parameter for that but if I go ahead and control like let's say like you know the detail tiling of my rock like let's say these are the big forms or these this is how much my my actual tilable texture is tiling on my model I can kind of just mess with that and allow myself to kind of like you know make up for the tech leny by the way the numbers that I end up putting in here like how much I end up ping my texture is actually dictated by in Maya my UVS right because we want to keep the text density as best as we possibly can right if I grab these UVS and I go ahead and say get I'm looking at this and this is like roughly you know about 64 texal per meter right um because this is such low res as far as like what I'm trying to aim for which is a 52 texture perimeter I'm going to start to want to tile my tileable textures inside of my game engine to compensate for the lack of resolution so if we go back over to Unreal real quick here obviously this thing is really really low res as far as like the overall like normal map bake and if anything I would probably want to make sure that my sculpt is a little bit sharper um to make sure that that bake is really coming through um but as far as like resolution goes I'm going to probably want to make up for it with my tileable textures so in this case I'm going to go ahead and tile like let's say like a 2K texture about like you know four different times and then I'm going to start to want to add some more of the more micro detail with this kind of like micro tilable texture so end up with something like this and this is pretty much how we always end up like you know texturing large assets or even teching texturing any sort of like um you know kit that requires the same kind of materials and then you know just different masks um you know per Rock I should say um but this is just one little uh way that we kind of go about like I guess one this is the the method that you would probably want to go about texturing more organic pieces in general even if it was like a pillar or you know some sort of architectural piece you still probably want to utilize pobles as much as you possibly can just to limit the number of materials that you're bringing into the engine um because if you just start bringing a bunch of oneof props and stuff like that not only does it take away the flexibility to kind of like let's say like change all my you know tinting of my dirt to you know whatever color I want we get a different look going on um but it's also going to like just cause more uh memory on like the like your your texture limit it's going to you just kind of push you above that texture limit because you're bringing in a new tileable texture each time CU from here on out let's say I wanted to texture all my kid pieces this way All I Ever Need is just these two textures right and then I'll be good to go for each model and these will be different uh material instances or material functions for every Rock but that's pretty much like kind of how we go about texturing organic assets right um let's see here let's go ahead and jump back over to my see how we doing on time all right doing pretty good let's go ahead and jump over to the last couple slides here that I have for the demo so we talked a little bit about texturing with kit models and how we kind of go about using tobl and textures um but now I wanted to kind of just touch this up I don't really have an example for you guys as far as like I mean I guess I can bu up something in that scene that kind of replicates us but it is worth noting that I have four different ways that I usually go about or four different ways that we almost always go about kind of like blending assets together and making sure that they look like props or they look grounded or they look you know awesome together um and it just really depends on like you know how much detail you want to add to your guys' environments but more often than not we almost always use some form of you know vertex blending to kind of break up those tileable textures um we'll end up using like four or five you know different layers of tibles um to just get surface variation and to help ground these acids together and help blend them together like let's say like I had like a you know a dirt floor with moss on it and then that rock that I had also has like a moss Shader on it I can start to blend my kit pieces together a little bit more organically right um I also have you you can also utilize things like decals that are like floater floater geometry and that can kind of help round models together it's also great way to kind of like let's say like you know instead of like a a like let's say like I know it's kind of hard to see but actually let's go back over to my kit real quick here I have an example of this let's go back over here actually have an example of this real quick here but I don't know if you guys can see this okay here but I do actually have a little skirt model on my actual kit piece that allows there to be some sort of transition between my ground and my floor I also have it right here as well just to kind of help blend that stuff just a little bit better and it's just a little something a technique that I kind of learned um on like you know working on Call of Duty is that we end up skirting a lot of different models to kind of help you know ground them just a little bit better um but yeah just having a little bit of a transition there is also a great way to kind of like help blend your kit pieces um even even better or more seamlessly um the next one is also just like World projection so this is like if you wanted to get you know snow or you know Moss or anything kind of just World projected on your guys' kit pieces you can definitely go this route um for more organic stuff and it's probably the way to go and then last but not least is like skirt models and stuff like that so again I do have another kit piece here I kind of utiliz that which is this guy real quick here so this is just a little bit of a mound whoops turn off my grip for a second here just I can kind of utilize this guy but pretty much this will allow for just like a more seamless transition between my kit models right and we use this a lot for Organics or even if you're doing like something that's a little bit more you know Rubble pieces or whatnot and it's just a great way to kind of like you know help seam all this stuff together right help with transitions right help blend things together is kind of the name of the game for this last little bit um but I will only end up adding this stuff to my kit towards the end or even worrying about this kind of stuff once I get kind of like the foundation of my kit ready to go um but on blending with textures you know I mean these are kind of like the four big ways that we use a lot um and the next up here I also have blending with geometry which is uh pretty much like what you saw with that rock kit where it was kind of just like jamming pieces in I usually end up using some sort of like Rubble pile or even some sort of like scattered debris which is kind of like that little cluster of Pebbles that I had going on and then also we have some things like you know foliage right is a way to kind of hide seams and transition things together um so yeah like let's say you had like a rock kit and you had like that architecture kit that I had you know having some foliage on both is going to help you know blend between the two uh pieces there right um but that's pretty much what I got for those two and then one thing that I also wanted to kind of touch on real quick here as far as like kits goes is just more so the um thought or I guess the practice of Kit batching right um sometimes you'll have like somebody create a kit for like let's say like some sort of architecture or something like that and you know another kit that's for like you know maybe some like metal pipes or something and the idea of mashing those two kits together to build out even new kit pieces is usually what we refer to as kit bashing right it's basically taking an asset and just constructing something new out of it um I have this example over here on my art station if you guys wanted to check out um but this is pretty much a kit that I created purely just for props with inside of um um Asgard and it was basically just so I can kind of like start to fill up the scene a little bit without having to like Outsource too many different props or even add in too many oneoff you know uh you know textures right because each one of those props has again their own color their own roughness their own you know normal map their own oneoff stuff but in this case I'm basically just reusing this exact same kit and once I textured it with one Shader these are all sharing the same shaders right it's not like I had to make a new Shader for each one they're all pretty much the same maybe I made an instance of one of these shaders if I wanted to like tint one of these wood pieces but for the most part they're all the exact same and so I'm limiting the number of draw calls that I'm bringing into the scene um at the end of the day but having little kit like this can just allow you to make a lot of different variations and a lot of different pieces that you might not have you know known how to tackle so yeah just another way that we can utilize kits a lot and then um yeah we're getting towards the end here um so I guess kind of wanted to uh sum it all up um pretty much up at the end of the day you know when it comes to kind of doing kits um is that we are trying to create an optimal and reusable assets um using a pipeline that's very non-destructive as possible um this way we can always go back to any spot in the process like if I need to go back into zbrush or something like that and uh you know make some changes it's not going to just completely mess up everything that I ever wanted to like I was ever doing right um because I am using a lot of tile bues and because I am using a lot of like you know reusable kit pieces um I can Bas I don't have to go back to my my environment inside of unreal and kind of like you know fix things if they're like oneof and stuff like that so it really is all about kind of consolidating the number of assets and the number of materials that you guys are bringing into the engine kind of like contr in that footprint um and if it seems a little bit excessive as far as like games go and you might be thinking like oh you know like we could start adding more to games and stuff like that you also got to remember that you know this is just one part of game creation you know I mean there is other aspects to games as far as like you know characters and and and you know animations and effects and all that stuff and we are all you know fighting for that budget a little bit and it is really a give and take and if we can be more optimal with our environments in general um we can just allow for more variation right like if I make a very optimal kit that has is sharing a lot of different you know assets and textures um you know I can allow for you know more props in my environment or you know better lighting or you know better Shadows or something like that or you know even just more effects going on um so it really is about kind of like you know caring your own weight and I've I have found this to be very very useful in general you know when it comes to joining the industry is that like utilizing this kit workflow even in my personal projects has you know allowed me to be I guess more useful on the job as far as like being able to hold my own um so it is something worth demonstrating in your guys' portfolios I think if if games are what you want to end up doing um and then on that note um I also do have some like really cool art station links that I've just kind of found really really helpful um I'm not going to open up each one real quick here I actually have a another window open up um but some people have just done you know even better examples than I have on my RN station of just like different ways that you can kind of utilize kits so this one right here is just a great one for you know kit bashing um highly recommend you checking out that link and this is from like six years ago like it's it's a very well-known technique you know this this kit stuff but it is worth kind of practicing and getting your hands um hands dirity um on your own I have another one up here just for like different kind of kits for just like you know let's say like ways you can blend things together making like debris and Moss and stuff like that so this one's Al a great one um there's another Link in here about like kind of like how to utilize you know Tri sheets that I always reference all the time um another great one here just about like you know making it just like more of a smaller kit like for pipes and stuff that and having that just being reused across the board even with different textures and different shaders it's all about just kind of how your shaders are hooked up but it's using utilizing the exact same K pieces and even the exact same trim sheet which is great um another one right here if you guys are just looking to kind of check out some architecture in general like this uh this kit I imagine has probably an interior kit as well if if if you're planning on walking on the inside um but it's all just reusing the same kind of pieces just over in different ways and making sure that they kind of snap together like Lego pieces right and then last but not least um you know Teemo the the the man the myth The Legend um he has like just a really really great breakdown on his art station about like doing rocks and more organic pieces and kind of how he ends up building all this stuff and blending it all together um so highly recommend you guys check out these links um but these are just ones that I've kind of collected over the years and uh that I like to kind of keep out the ready in hand in case I need to reference or or even talk about it right um but yeah that's pretty much all I got for you guys today um you guys have any questions though feel free to ask [Music] away thank you so much John arano for taking your time and sharing this workshop with us these workshops are only made possible because we have so many lovely patreon supporters and I want to thank each and every one of them for making our community a thriving place for Learning and growth if you also want to become one of these artists and level up your own environment art skills then please head on over to Beyond extend.com where you can become a member of our Community where we also offer weekly work reviews a 250 page book full of tips portfolio reviews and much more all of the links can be found in the description down below stay creative and I hope to see you [Music] there

Channel: Beyond Extent

Views: 29,189

Keywords: Environment art, Gamedev, Game art, Gameart, 3D, Games, Environments, Personal Growth, podcast

Id: 77xPHfzciiY

Length: 86min 47sec (5207 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 12 2024