Rockify - Complete Workflow (Blender to Substance Painter to Unreal Engine 5)

hi everyone my name is Joe G in this tutorial I'm going to be going over the complete Rockey workflow from blender to texturing and substance painter and importing the asset directly into Unreal Engine 5 so to begin with we're going to install Rockey into blender so go up to edit preferences and inside of blender preferences you find the add-on shelf and we're going to click on install now on my desktop I've got my newly downloaded Rock ify plug-in zip file and I'm going to click the zip file and click install add-on and it should say down at the bottom modules installed and if you type in the search just rock you should be able to find the rock ify plugin and make sure that little tick box here is ticked and there's some information about the plugin there as well I'm going to go off of preferences and inside of blender in your vort just hit n this little shelf will come up on the right where you'll have a little tab that says Rockey and click on that and you should be able to see the plugin now at the moment I've got the blender default scene loaded up so if I go up to file new and then General uh this is just the sort of default cube with a little lighting setup uh we don't need any of the lights or the camera so I'm just going to delete those and you'll see that there's this little default Cube so if I go to Rockey and I start changing the if I start just you know generating clicking generate you'll see that it looks a bit strange it's like for some reason the rocks are slightly weird scale and and you're not really getting very good results uh this is actually normal behavior uh this is simply happening because the rock is actually just way way too small uh the Blended default cube is only 2 m across uh so this is a something we're going to hopefully fix in a patch in the future that will hopefully get slightly better results with the 2 m Cube um but for now we're use we're really mostly focusing on assets of about 10 m to about 100 m um which is really more the kind of rocks this plugins aim for so what we're going to do next is we're going to go to modifiers and you can see that rockety has actually created a modifier called GN uh that stands for geometry nodes it's the system that is sort of taking care of the rock generation behind the scenes uh but what we're going to do is we're just going to remove that modifier go back to my default Cube and I'm going to actually scale that default Cube up so if you want to get good results just scale up the default Cube until we've got something that's a little bit more the correct scale so let's have a look at what scale this is now about 40 m okay that that seems about reasonable 40 m is a is a bit more of a cliff sort of scale and now if we go through these plugins you can see that we're getting much more uh realistic results and we can actually go through and and try a few of these different presets so there's Granite um Limestone so limestone's nice it's got this kind of shelfing Granite is more sort of this uh yeah kind of smooth surface and then volcanic is this got really Rocky sharp surfaces uh you've also got stall tights and uh stall mites so that's you know come from the ceiling and from the floor and those are for more like caves and these work really well when you you know kind of make the sort of more pointy looking shapes so by actually manipulating the cube you can see that as I manipulate the cube around uh you're getting actually different results um so for instance here with the stall mes we could make the cube really really thin really really small uh we can even you know duplicate the cube and make another little separate one off there and have something like that basically you could even move it all the way out so you can use this to generate you know different size rocks and different shape rocks uh I'm going to go back to the uh volcanic preset I'm going to make that cuy a little bit bigger and if at any time you want to see just your primitive shape you can click on the modify Tab and untick this little real time display modifier and then you'll go back to be able to see your sort of default Cube so I'm going to make a sort of interesting shape now uh by making this a little bit thinner I think and then I'm going to add probably a little bit of make it a little bit thinner at the top and I'm going to go in actually to the Primitive shapes and I'm going to make a few Edge loops and then let's see grab those Edge loops and make them a little bit more interesting so twist things around a bit like that um maybe twist that like that a bit and I'm just trying to make this shape look a little bit more organic and give it some more you know interesting interesting shapes you can also go in and just change the verts as well well a little bit so once you have a little bit more of an organic primitive you'll be able to see that that's actually being reflected in the uh generated mesh as well and if we make for instance parts of that thinner or thicker you can see how that's that's working to generate that and if you want to make the whole asset I think the whole asset could be a little bit bigger um let's just scale it all up I think that's now slightly cooler to have it a little bit bigger scale and this is really a nice creative stage where you can s tweak the object to your heart's content like you can really figure out where you want to put detail and how big you need the object to be and what sort of propor potions you need the object to be as well and doing it in real time like this allows you to work really really fast I'm just going to move a few of those around I'm trying to create a sort of spire or sort of Tower and just make it something interesting more interesting shapes the better and of course the great thing is you don't really need to worry about you know topology or anything like that at this point there's nothing um needed for that okay great I think that's um that's a really nice interesting looking shape and I think we should take this now and try and get this textured and into Unreal Engine so we have this really cool Cliff shape but as you can tell all of these are sort of just random different pieces of geometry and you know if we go to the wireframe it's like they're all just clipping into each other and obviously for real time this isn't very useful uh because this wouldn't be very optimized at all have lots of meshes intersecting each other inside but luckily we have with Rockey a remeshing function so if we click on our shape and then click on remesh rock it might take a little bit of time because it's got to use the voxal modifier uh to remesh the asset but once that's done you can see that now we have a nice sort of contiguous mesh and it's all manifold and this is now real time ready to poliy another thing to note is you can actually tweak the resolution of the remeshing by tweaking the voxal size and the decimation ratio parameters so if you need more triangles or less triangles uh try reducing the voxal size to increase the poly count and increasing the voxal size will decrease uh the poly count uh so that's really up to you um and if you don't really want to touch that stuff just leave it at the default settings which I'll do for this tutorial so now we're finished with the remeshing we're going to want to UV our object now in order to do that uh we're going to want to actually collapse this modifier stack uh but before you do that you might want to save a copy uh of your scene uh just so you have an earlier version so I'm going to call this one rock uh 01 I'm going to save that and then I'm going to go and actually uh start applying the modifier stack so you'll want to go to the very top modifier the one that says GN and click this little arrow and click apply and what we're doing now is we're just going through the whole modifier stack and collapsing it and that will mean that it won't be Computing the remesh and decimation modifiers all the time and that's the main thing that's kind of slowing down Blender at the moment because it's a lot of uh stuff to compute to sort of retopologize the mesh and remesh it and once that's done just hit save and you'll now notice that your blend file is now a lot faster and blender you know working a lot quicker again uh that's because it's not having to compute all that remeshing stuff so the next part of the process is going to be UV mapping and to do that we're going to be using blender's smart UVS so go up to UV editing the tab and I'm just going to zoom out a little bit hit F to actually Focus the object and from there I'm going to hit Tab and I'm going to go to the polygon faces mode face select mode and I'm going to hit a to select all of my faces in my mesh after that I'm going to go to the little UV dropdown and I'm going to choose smart UV project and I'm just going to leave all the settings on the defaults and then hit okay and there as you can see it's actually generated a some UVS now they're not the best UVS in the world obviously it's just an automatic unwrap uh but this is actually pretty much good enough for substance painter and it'll do for the purposes of this tutorial now obviously if you did have a little bit more time you'd be able to go in and you know use the tools to sort of create some uh UV seams you know going into those edges and and marking them for seams um and then actually you know unwrapping The Rock manually but for this tutorial we don't really have time for that so so I'm just going to use the smart UVS and uh try and get into the engine as quickly as possible so now that the UVS are done we're going to export this as an fbx file so make sure you have your object selected and we're going to go up to file export fbx and I'm just going to save on my desktop uh an fbx file I'll just going to call this one rock 01 and on the uh preferences here I'm just going to select limit to selected objects and then hit export fbx now for the texturing we're going to be using substance painter and I'm going to create a new project so I'm going to go to file new and in substance painter I'm going to have the option here to create a new project I'm going to select the new file and the file we're going to choose is the fbx file we just saved from blender so rock 01 fbx and make sure you select that one make sure you also choose the document resolution I'm going to choose 4K so 496 and I'm actually going to change the normal map format to direct x uh and that's so the normals won't be flipped in Unreal Engine uh so once that's done hit okay and after that we're going to want to bake the mesh maps and these are really important because they're going to allow us to use a Smart material so go up to mode bake mesh maps and just choose 4K from the list make sure that's selected uh you do have the option to use a high definition mesh if you would want to go into blender and remesh a really really high poly count and and have your own you know really really high Poly High Definition mesh that could be millions of polygons if you want um but for the purpose of the tutorial we're just going to use the uh game ready mesh um and just use the one we've just exported and everything will work just fine with that too so just leave all these at the defaults and click bit selected textures and now it's going through and it's baking the normal Maps the ambient occlusion Maps curvature position thickness all of those will be computed once that's done click return to painting mode so as you can see everything's still looking gray and not so great uh but that's because we need to still apply a smart material luckily Rockey actually comes with a smart material that's purpose-built for exactly this in order to find that I'm just going to go to my desktop so inside the Rockey zip file which you downloaded from blender Marketplace just open that up with your zip editor or you can even open up in Windows and just go into that zip file and find rock ify resources substance and there's a file called cliffrock spsm and just I'm just going to drag and drop that onto the desktop so just extract that into the desktop and then I'm going to go back to substance painter and I'm going to go up to file import resources and I'm going to click add resources and I'm going to choose my Cliff Rock s spsm and I'm going to make sure that's coming in as a smart material and it's going into my project and hit import now you should be able to see in the assets panel The Cliff Rock smart material and we can simply drag and drop that over onto our layers uh stack I'm going to delete the layer one from there as well and now you can see we've automatically got some really nice texture detail going on on the Rock there uh and you can also go in and and change uh you know some of the settings uh inside of that smart material just by clicking on the folder you can see all the various layers that you know kind of contribute to uh the effect here and you know different colors you can tweak uh some you know tiling variation on some of the texture work so normal maps and things and um yeah a lot of this is done through just you know triplanar projection of of different textures and then it's also using obvious of course the curvature and the ambient occlusion as well um to you know automatically texture the object and it's really drag and drop so as long as you have UVS as long as you have um baked your uh your map mesh Maps right here uh you should get fairly good results in substance painter automatic basically one thing to note is if you ever see that You' got some sort of really hard edges appearing inside of a substance painter or in unreal uh you can actually go back into blender and fix that uh by just right clicking your object going shade smooth and then exporting that fbx so we're just going to reexport the fbx with a smooth shading and then inside of substance we can actually go to asset uh sorry edit reimport mesh and it's just going to reimport that with the correct um shading and we can also then go into mesh Maps again and just bake them uh bake all of those mesh Maps again uh so they'll all be nice and smooth this time so that's just something to to worry about because yeah sometimes obviously blender will automatically uh export with hard edges uh so if you want to make sure you export with soft edges you'll you'll hopefully get some slightly softer looking more organic results so now that we have our textures we can actually export those as texture files by going up to file export textures and I'm going to choose my desktop and I'm going to make a new folder called just textures and I'm just going to leave everything on the defaults and click export and it'll give us a bunch of different Maps but the only two that we're going to really need are the base color and the normals uh because we're actually going to be deriving the roughness uh from the albo in the engine to save on some texture memory so this next step is going to be an Unreal Engine and I'm just going to load up a completely new project so I'm going to go file new level I'm going to make a basic project and yeah this is just a completely blank level and unreal so I'm going to import our Rock uh to do that I'm going to go to window content browser and I'm going to make a new folder uh called Rockey if I can spell it properly Rockey there we go and inside of there I'm going to import a mesh so I'm going to go to our desktop Rock 01 fbx and I'm going to import that and that's the same fpx file that we exported earlier exactly the same one that we imported into blender uh sorry into substance painter and I'm just going to drag and drop that into the scene that's a really big big asset uh you can also you know of course tweak the scale inside of the uh mesh import settings uh so inside of the static mesh editor you could change the import scale if you want if you want something smaller or bigger but yeah now we've got the rock imported into unreal but of course we have no textures yet uh so to import the texture files we're going to go import into our textures folder and I'm just going to choose the base color and the normals uh sorry normal direct X and that's going to import all of our files I'm just going to save them all and this is a bit of a habit of mine but I like to save them with the correct naming convention in unreal just so that everything's neat and tidy uh so tore uh Rock underscore 01 _ n yeah this is just a sort of default Unreal Engine naming convention it really helps you organize your files and make sure everything is nice and easy to find so we have uh static mesh Rock and we have our two textures now because I am using uh brushify um I'm able to actually just copy a material uh from brushify um instead of having to build a material from scratch so obviously if you don't have brusher you just create a new material here you'd call that like underscore Rock and then you'd you'd probably have to you know obviously start from scratch by basically adding your texture samples in there um and constructing a material in Unreal Engine and obviously on YouTube there are plenty of tutorials about how to build your own materials uh for this tutorial though I'm going to use one of the brushify uh materials it's called the brushify near mesh material so if you go to my brushify folder go to materials uh you'll find this mcore NE mesh master I'm going to create a material instance of that and I'm going to copy that into my Rockey folder so now I have this material instance I'm going to rename that to miore ro 01 so what this is is basically just a preconfigured material with a bunch of settings and and nice like features uh that come with brushify um everything's really nice and organized and there are tool tips for everything um so obviously this is a really nice useful thing and and it's a way of kind of you know giving you a head start because you don't really need to build a very complex material from scratch yourself so I'm going to tick alido and normal and I'm going to drag and drop my two texture maps onto my albo and my normal I'm going to hit save then I'm going to go to the static mesh editor and I'm going to drag and drop my material instance onto the material slot and then hit save and as you can see we've now got the material showing up on my rock there's one more really great feature uh that comes with the brushify near mesh material that I'm going to want to use which is if you notice when I get really really close to an asset like this um it's really not holding up very well so if I go into the brushify material I'm going to do a couple of things one it's a bit too bright so I'm going to darken it slightly and the other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to enable uh detail mapping so this basically just adds a nice extra level of detail um which will hopefully just help it to hold up a little bit better uh at very close ranges it's a little bit wet looking with that that low uh we can also uh tweak the uh roughness as well just like how rough the surfaces we can go to our buffers um buffer visualization here by going lit buffer visualization and choosing the roughness here if we tweak the roughness contrast we can try and get a little bit more variation in the roughness pass so you can see there's actually a little bit of roughness being derived from the Albedo and if we get close you can see there's now some more details now a lot of this just doesn't look very good right now because of the lighting the lighting in this basic level is is not very nice if I move some of the light around you can see you know how much better things can look and obviously this is quite a low resolution one uh we only went went for about 80,000 on the poly count um but if we wanted to for instance you know do a much higher resolution version uh we can go in and and do that as well and I'm going to do that right now just upgrade some of the poly counts on the asset just to show you guys you know just how good it can look if you if you go really crazy with polyc counts and use nanite and this is the exact same asset with a slightly higher poly count I simply went back into blender open up my blend file and I decreased the voxal size in the remesh modifier that allowed me to increase the mesh to about 500,000 tries at which point I exported it back into substance went through the whole workflow again just baking the maps again and uh baking the textures reimporting those to Unreal and now I have slightly higher risk solution version of the exact same asset the great thing about this workflow is because everything is saved and all of the parameters are saved away in all the different source files everything is non-destructive so you can now go in and make tweaks and changes to the asset at any time during production this example scene was created using assets generated with Rockey Rockey can be used to generate a variety of assets and once they're imported into a game engine like Unreal Engine the possibilities are endless Rock IFI started its life as an internal plugin for generating rock formations for brushify the brushify underworld pack and the brushify floating islands pack are a couple of examples for how Rock IFI can be used to create imaginative realtime scenes I really hope you guys enjoyed this video and I hope it inspires you to build assets of your own using Rockey thanks everyone joar signing out

Channel: Joe Garth

Views: 8,872

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Id: 1HyBtKwmXAM

Length: 27min 5sec (1625 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 30 2023