Planning & Creating Trim Sheets For Games - Trim Texture Tutorial Part 1

what's up everybody welcome back to polygon Academy my name is Tim and we're back with another tutorial for you guys so the last video I put out on trim sheets it was super popular I know a lot of you guys got a lot of value out of that which was awesome I loved seeing you guys as a response and feedback but there was a bunch of questions in the comments as to exactly how I created the trim textures themselves because that video was more of a broad overview of the thought process and workflow behind using shrimp feeds more of like a why video and I know you guys want to see the nitty gritty details so that's what this whole four part series is for so part one this video I'm going to be touching on exactly how I plan out my trim sheets and we're gonna be creating a base mesh for use in ZBrush this can give us nice clean results because like if you've seen any of my previous videos you know that like I'm really stress on planning things out and starting with a good foundation and that's exactly what we're gonna do in part two we're gonna be taking that base mash into ZBrush sculpting it adding all the fun details you know cracks and damage and stuff like that while keeping the mesh tileable then in part three we're gonna be taking that high poly mesh into substance painter and baking it to a flat plane as well as using some smart materials to create a texture really quickly and effectively and then in part four it's gonna be more of a broad overview of some UV tips and tricks that i use to quickly and efficiently unwrap my models because a lot of you guys had questions about oh you know curved surfaces stuff like that how do I get my UV is into flat clean strips for use for the trim texture so I'm gonna be showing you all my little UV tips and tricks so it'll hopefully you know take a semi complex model that looks kind of intimidating and you'll be able to use UV that in like 5-10 minutes and hopefully cut your asset production time in half I know it's been a while since I released some content so I'm gonna put out the entire four part series all at once so if you're subscribed to the channel it'll show up in your feed if it helps you out be sure to hit the thumbs up button and if you have any questions or need some clarification you can always drop them below and I'll be happy to answer them so that's enough out of me let's hop over the computer and get started alright so here we are in the side of 3d studio max just a blank empty scene usually when I start my trim sheets I think about what is the final texture resolution going to be in this case I'm going to be building a 2048 texture and what is the Texel density going to be so when I build things to scale it looks right in this case I want to be going with a Texel density of 512 pixels per square meter this is something in games like Uncharted and God of War usually go for on especially console games I'll Texel density is its own subject I'll probably make it a tutorial on that and but basically I know if I'm using a 2048 texture it's gonna be covering about 4 meters worth of geometry so that's where I'm going to start with a 4 meter plane and just make sure it's on the the world origin that's gonna make things a lot easier I just snap to 0 0 0 I usually don't add any segments to it and I also usually rotate it about 90 degrees just so it's facing upwards because what I'm gonna do is actually create a biped for scale reference so that is in or is it here it is biped and I'm just gonna create about uh or is it a height 1.8 - I usually use my own height as a scale reference just so when i'm building things I know what can look correct in terms of the the amount of level of detail that I'm adding to things so I just add him down here that's cool and so when I'm first starting out how I divide up my trim sheets is I know I'm probably gonna need at least a one meter especially if it's something like a concrete or tiling the ball texture I'm gonna at least need a one meter high section of trim because in a lot of games cover tends to be exactly 1 meter high for design metrics so what I'm gonna do is convert this to editable poly I want to divide it in half just by connecting these edges first off so that's a 2 meter and a 2 meter piece right here so if I divide this in half again so there you go I would have - 1 meter tall trims which are going to become extremely useful next thing I'm going to do is what I usually do is I start dividing this up into 1/2 meter trims and on this top one I'll usually divide in half to have some thinner strips because like these are the kind of the ratios that I find the most useful a lot of people they might just take some of these edges and start adjusting them to be slightly different like widths and I don't find that really effective because I know I can always map it to the geometry and adjust the actual squash and stretch the geometry a bit and that's could be a lot more useful because if all of my lines are evenly divided into you know half meteor quarter meter it's gonna be a lot more useful in terms of using this texture according to metrics that comes to creating assets that fit in the game as well as if you standardize where all of your trims are say this is gonna be a concrete wall texture or a stone wall texture or something like that basically if I want to quickly make a metal variation if all of my trims are using the exact same dividing lines instead of having to take that asset and change the UVs because if say you know on your metal one this one's actually like too small trims like that and you know you have another one down here it's I mean that means if I want to map that the thin strips I have mapped on the stone wall texture to the ones on the metal one I'm gonna have to actually go in adjust the mess and adjust the UVs instead of just keeping everything consistent so if say on the stone and the metal one is all of the strips are in the exact same place I can just swap the materials and that asset is gonna quickly be another variation with just a drag and drop instead of having to go back into max Edit UVs change things around so if you can standardize the way that your trim sheets are set up across the game production it's gonna be a lot better because say you have a window frame that's mapped to you know some peeling wood strips of a trim texture well oh we need a metal variation of that window frame instead of you know going in making a completely different trim sheet and trying to remember where all your different trims were laid out you can just take the exact same layout this base like basically your your preset locations of all these trims create a metal one swap it it's gonna be a lot easier so now that I have my set established standardized trim widths that I think are gonna be pretty useful for creating a wide variety of assets I'm gonna go ahead and break these apart into you know their own separate models but I'm gonna quickly shape out and block you in my overall trims I'll just time-lapse that out and anytime there's an important piece of detail I'll stop and you don't give you guys some notes you so for any horizontal tiling trims where you just want it like a continuous strip of detail you actually don't need these end cap phases because when it tiles this is all going to be seamless on these ones they're gonna be individual like brick blocks so that's why I actually kept all of the interior detail if I grab these elements and move them apart you can see that this is I'm going to sculpt them into bricks and you might notice that I'm not actually not adding edge bevels at this point because I know inside of ZBrush want to go in and start chipping up the edges it's actually gonna bevel out that edge naturally and create these so by keeping these seams really nice and tight in the beginning of my base mesh when I once I start subtracting away from the mesh by carving it and sculpting it in ZBrush that'll add those edge highlights for me automatically and I don't have to go work in and worry about adding support edges and like high poly modeling this at this point for most of these basic shapes because I'll add all the detail inside of ZBrush later on you so for this trim piece here you can see I kind of want these extruded like knobbly details and because this thing overhangs the mesh usually if you look at it in the say the front view this is exactly how your normal map is going to look so you can see what I did here is I took this bottom edge along the underside of this overhang and just pulled it down a little bit and that adds some extra added depth to your texture because if it's exactly flat with this top edge if we look in the unshaded view you actually don't you won't really see it you'll see like a thin little lip of detail once you sculpt on it but if I undo that you can actually see now that it has some sense of depth and actually probably what I'll do is I'll even take these little knobbly pieces add an FFD on the front of them and give them a bit of a little bit of squash and taper just so when I look at it in the front view you can see now even like right now you'll see a lot more of the form and it'll give this a better sense of 3d geometry even on a flat trim sheet so that's the little tip these overall edges along the tops and bottoms of the individual trims I know they're gonna be sculpted and that's gonna add a little bit of bevel to but for anything that's overhanging or inside into things don't just do a flat inset actually take those faces and scale them in a bit test so show that really like there's a groove or an overhang there so now that we've blocked out the overall thickness and kind of general look of our trims I'm giving you this super simple very square blocky shapes but if you want to spend a lot more time you can create some really cool complex flowing curves and stuff like that that always looks really good but for this example I just want to really show you the the basics so we're gonna keep it something super simple the next step so I have three blocks here a tiling horizontal strip of stone that's gonna be the just you know a very basic thing that you can add a long long flowing walls and stuff like that great for modular pieces some concrete tiles here more of like a curved ornate kind of thing that you might see on like you know the top of a wall piece or around the column or something like that this one here is gonna be more of like a band strip with you know two little trims at the top and bottom and then inlay detail we're gonna add all that in ZBrush this one here is like an overhang with you know some knobbly detail and then this one here is just going to be another thin basic strip of chunky tiling stone great for adding just little edge highlights around small details and stuff like that but before we move on we're gonna need to prep this mess for use in ZBrush so what we're gonna do is I'm just gonna quickly go over the mesh and make sure everything is kind of like evenly quad it out and that way when we subdivide the mesh it's going to subdivide nice and cleanly and evenly and we're gonna have an easier time sculpting this also on any edges that I want to be like a hard edge I'm gonna go in and crease them so for example if I isolate this mesh what I would how I would prep this mesh is I would I know I want these to remain hard crisp edges here here and here what I'm going to go in in 3ds max here and you see this edge properties I'm just going to crank up the crease on this maybe not quite all the way to one cuz I do want it to be a little bit soft but you can do a test and see how it's going to subdivide by just adding a quick turbosmooth modifier obviously the ends are all getting all messed up because there's no edges all the way to the end but what I'm gonna do is prep this whole mesh just grab this and connect all these until it's everything's roughly you know kind of a square evenly subdivided polygon something like that probably is fine you don't have to be exact with this I just like to have my meshes kind of evenly quad so it's subdivides nicely and then any edges that I want to remain hard creased instead of going in and adding tight little support edges because that's gonna bunch up all your polygons in ZBrush along the edge of the mesh and you're gonna when you start to sculpt damage on it it's gonna fold in on itself and not look good so by just using the crease you can actually get some nice results and what you can actually do is what I usually do to test it how it's going to subdivide is so you can see when I added the first turbosmooth modifier to it it just subdivides it with that crease and then I added another turbo smooth on top and that's pretty much gonna be what happens when I subdivide the mesh inside zbrush and if I want this to be a little bit of more of a harder edge I'm just gonna select all these edges I've creased something like that and I'm gonna just crank that all up to one and actually if you do show end result you can see by just cranking up the crease it softens or hardens these edges I still want them to have a little bit of softness to them that way when we render out our normal map it's not gonna be like this super sharp one pixel line of normal map information it's gonna actually be a nice soft bevel and it's gonna read better on our mesh so I'm going to go through and prep each one of these objects for use in ZBrush for all these all of these tiles what I'm going to do is select all of the edges because I know all of the edges I want to remain nice and crisp until I sculpt over them so I just select every edge on the mesh and crease it if I had done that on this curved piece if I crease all these individual loops it would give it a really faceted look but that's why I only creased the edges I wanted to remain Hart but for something like you know these stones and bricks the quickest way to do it is just select all the edges crease boom and then I'm going to go through and actually chop these up into evenly sized polygons also while I'm working on this and starting to prep this mesh for ZBrush I'm not too worried that the quads on this bottom trim they don't have to be the exact same size as all the ones on the smaller trims trying to keep everything in the exact same it's gonna drive you nuts as long as everything is just kind of evenly sized out across the different meshes each one of these is to be its own sub tool inside of ZBrush anyways and it's gonna be subdivided individually so some of them might get two or three levels of subdivision and then some of the ones with the larger polygons might get four or five and end up all being the same kind of overall density it's totally fine you all right so now that our mesh is being evenly divided up yeah the polygons are all different sizes and stuff like that some of them are a bit more rectangular that's totally fine I just want the meshes to evenly subdivide nicely in ZBrush when I actually go in and start sculpting as well as I've just quickly gone through and named each tree no trim abcdefg we're not here to learn the alphabet let's move on so I'm just gonna export these out and then in the next video we'd be bringing these into ZBrush and start sculpting and when I export I usually just use the Z brush preset export it as an obj and name it the exact same thing as the mesh inside of Max so now that they're all exported you'll also notice because they all started from the same plane and I just detach them they all share the same pivot it's directly in the center of the mesh and actually all at the origin of the world zero zero zero that means when I import them into ZBrush as sub-objects they're all going to be aligned perfectly with each other exactly the way they are here in max I'm not gonna have to move them around and it's just gonna all work out perfectly alright so we've got our trim she planned out our base mesh created we're ready to bring this into ZBrush and start sculpting adding all the details basically the fun part and so if that'll be coming up in part two of this series I'll leave a link in the description box so you don't have to go searching for it and I'm super stoked to dive into ZBrush this is really where the fun begins and you get to really get your hands dirty and just start getting really creative now that we've got a really solid foundation to build off of if you enjoyed the video and learn something smash that thumbs up button if you didn't you absolutely hated it hit the thumbs down I don't take it personally and if you have any last-minute questions that you need clarification on something drop them down in the comments below and I'll do my best to get back to you thank you guys for watching see the next video [Music]

Channel: Polygon Academy

Views: 91,840

Keywords: trim texture, trim textures, trim sheets, trim sheet, trim texture tutorial, trim sheet tutorial, 3d art tutorial, game environment tutorial, 3d game environment workflow, 3d modeling, game development, environment artist, environment art tutorial, Polygon Academy, Polygon academy tutorial, game development tutorial, 3d game art tutorial, game art tutorial, pbr textures

Id: DipfrjCgYW8

Length: 17min 22sec (1042 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 03 2019