Simple Game Assets in Blender - A Complete Tutorial

hey guys in this video we're going to be designing a game asset here in blender completely from scratch so I'm going to show you the modeling process the unwrapping process the texturing process pretty much everything you need to know to create a game asset so let's get started now I am going to be going a little bit quickly in this tutorial so if you're brand new to blender and have never touched it we have a free course on our website for beginners called hard surface jumpstart so check that out if you're brand new to blender but most of you that watch these videos should have a basic understanding of the tools so I shouldn't be going too quickly so what I want to do is I want to start with a cube and I just want to get the general proportions of this model now usually when I'm making assets I have a reference Board of reference photos but I'm going to be making a really simple asset in this tutorial that I don't think we need one right now so what I'm going to do is just scale this Cube up maybe that size and scale it a bit on the Y I just want to have like a rough you know size here is really all I want so I think this will be good and whenever you're scaling an object mode make sure you apply the scale otherwise your bevels will be a bit biased notice it's not even whereas when you apply to scale it is so just press Ctrl a and apply the scale and also I'm using cavity for those nice Edge highlights if you want those so let me go into Edge mode and press Ctrl alt left click and we'll bevel that chamfer it rather make this a decent size and I'm going to control alt click these edges again and we're going to Bevel this now usually in my tutorials guys you'd see me doing like a crazy amount of segments and that's when I'm making concept renders when I'm not worried about making a game asset if I am making a game asset usually what I need to do is make sure I'm using a reasonable amount of segments so I don't need to go crazy overboard on it one or two segments here is going to do just fine so to scroll up get a nice bevel like this and then Q with hard Ops to sharpen it and we're going to have this really nice looking bevel and I'm going to scale this up a little bit higher on the Z I think it'll look good and then apply the scale again cool so now what I want to do is drop in a loop cut here and then split that with a bevel control B we're just going to move it to about this point because what I want to do is I want to take this face and I want to scale it in maybe move it down a bit and just kind of get like this cool looking little shape here on the top not sure exactly what this will be but it's going to be a cool sci-fi looking object it's kind of what I'm going for and then if I shift click on sharpen it'll catch um and move the mouse to the right it'll catch this um area here so that's good so I think it's a decent decent shape there on the top and what we can do is we can symmetrize down to the bottom and you can either symmetrize with hard Ops by pressing alt decks and go into symmetry or what I prefer to do is use mesh machine and just alt X and edit mode it's a quick way to do it and then we're going to kind of have this um shape here I'm going to scale this up just a bit more symmetries down and if the shading ever collapses you just have to shift click on sharpen again and just adjust it basically it's just the auto smooth angle needs changed so very simple all right so I definitely like how this looks um we're gonna eventually add bevels to this but for right now I just want to get the cuts in place then we can deal with that so what I know I want is some sort of cut here in the side of this piece and actually before we do that as a matter of fact I am going to Bevel this so I'm going to alt collect these edges and then Ctrl B to Bevel these and since this bevel is going to be a little bit larger it's okay to go a bit higher on the segment so it's more round so I'm going to go with um what is that four segments right there and I'm going to make this a decent sized bevel maybe that size and then symmetry so the bottom and we can also bevel the top here as well but I'm just going to use two segments on this one there we go and just to get rid of these nasty sharp markings we can press Ctrl shift click on sharpen that'll get rid of them so now we have this soft looking uh piece right here I want to scale it a bit higher on the Z but don't actually scale it otherwise it's going to kind of skew the bevels instead if you want to do that what you should be doing is moving the geometry up like that instead of scaling it then it's going to maintain the size of those bevels so it's a little bit too high I think a little bit higher let me just a little bit more I think that's a good size cool so now what I want to do is I want to introduce a little detail here on the side now I don't want to go too deep in the detail placement and how things work Rio actually just made a video on his channel very recently on detail balance if you want to watch that video and kind of how detail balance works but I'm just going to be adding in the detail here as I model so I just want to scale this up maybe move this in a bit and we're going to have a um a difference Boolean so shift click on this piece q and then difference we're going to have this shape maybe scale it a bit more on the Y move it in a bit more now this is the tricky part guys let me apply the scale and let me actually go into wireframe view so I'm going to press alt V wireframe okay and what I want to do this is the tricky part I want some more or less match when I add a bevel in here I want some more or less align up the edges that are added here with the edges that are on here and that's going to just make it it's going to be easy to connect these up and have minimal shading problems so what I need to do here is scroll up and just figure out how many segments I need well I need one two three three should be fine on this one and I'm just going to kind of have to you know eyeball this more or less this one's going to be a little bit tricky but I'm just gonna you know try to get these more or less lined up you don't have to be perfect I'm going to show you how to deal with it but I think you know the five segments here is fine because we have five segments on that one and what I can do is symmetrize it over and we're just going to go ahead and um shift to to hide the cutters cool so now we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and apply this Boolean awesome so before we add any sort of bevels on this side what we need to do is kind of clean up the mess that was created here by the spoolian so you probably can't see it there's a really close Edge right here we need to dissolve that out with Ctrl X it's way too close and then what I want to do is I just basically want to merge these together we can press M merge that at the center um M to merge that at the center as well actually on this one I'm just going to merge this one to this one if you're using the Machine Tools add-on you can just press the one key to merge it it's going to be a bit quicker the issue with sliding either of these if we slide this it disturbs the curvature notice this bevel has a natural curvature to it but if we Slide the vertices down it kind of removes that natural curvature so you kind of have to make a compromise here but that's all right so do that and then we'll do a quick symmetry over here and then to the other side and now we can do is we can add in our bevel so let me uh let me actually symmetry to the bottom as well there we go now to add in this bevel around this cut what we need to do is we need to select all these outer edges and you could just control click them or with mesh machine you can select an edge and then alt click that same Edge and it'll select it for you so now we're going to do is we're going to Bevel this and I'm just going to use a one segment bevel we don't have to go too high now notice when I bevel this it kind of starts overlapping right here now to fix that I could turn off the loop slide but what that's going to do is it's going to move the inside edges which I don't want either so we actually need to do is give blender some guidance edges here because this when I bevel this area it doesn't know where to create an edge so for example you're going to see kind of how this Edge moves up when it's created you see what I mean then it starts overlapping so we can do is we can use the knife tool press k and add a guidance Edge and then right click you can add one here and then add one here cool so now when I actually bevel this it's going to Bevel along those edges which is perfect exactly what I want and I'm going to Bevel to about this point right to where these edges are overlapping and then I can just dissolve those out um so they're kind of hard to see but maybe I'll make this a little bit closer so I can see them better but basically this Edge is really close so I'm just going to go ahead and dissolve that one out and we'll just symmetrize this whole thing and then we don't need these guidance edges anymore we can get rid of them to solve that and then dissolve that as well and then maybe I can just kind of slide this up and make this a bit more uniform but now the bevel is going to look a lot cleaner you see what I mean so every time I'm doing this I'm basically just symmetrising to make sure it's even on all sides now right here these edges are also pretty close what I'm actually going to do I'm going to dissolve these two out and then I'm just going to connect this one to here with the J key and then connect this one to here with the J key as well and then this one's going to connect here and we can just symmetrize it all so now we basically have not that the quads matter too much for static game assets but we do have quads here which can be you know a beneficial thing for us cool then we'll just symmetrize that to the bottom as well and now we have this really clean let me turn on cavity we have this really clean looking effect here now if the shading is a bit strange all you need to do is just adjust your auto smooth pull that up a bit and you'll be good to go so yeah I like how this looks very soft very clean looking all right so let me go to this side now and we're going to do basically the same thing okay I'm gonna go in here I'm going to scale that up sometimes it's easy to go into wireframes you can kind of see like where everything's lining up might help you and we'll just apply that scale you know run a difference Boolean like that then just kind of do the same thing so when we add in the bevel here we just more or less want to line that up as much as we can it's not like a huge deal if you can't just try to get that kind of nicely lined up just going to help us out and I'm just going to scale this up just a bit on the X cool so it looks good and I know it's kind of messy but it's very easy to fix so let's apply this Boolean now all right and now we're just going to have to let me get rid of this Edge very very close to the other one so Ctrl X to dissolve that these we can go ahead and merge together I'll actually just merge that one up and then just like we did on the other one we'll dissolve these two out and connect this one here connect that one there and then just do some symmetries and now we're going to have a really clean uh looking mesh all right now I do want to Bevel around here like we did on the other one but before we do that I also want to add in another additional cut here I'm trying to think where exactly I want to position that cut so part of me is kind of a tough choice part of me doesn't even want this cut to extend all the way to the top so you know what I'm gonna actually undo this real quick recall that cutter and I'm just going to move this down I think you know maybe putting the cut to about there will provide a bit more of a nice visual detail balance not too sure what I want kind of a tough choice I think I'm going to put it there instead I just like how that looks so what I'm going to do now is bevel these we're going to need a bevel on the inside there actually as a matter of fact before I do that I want to add in the final element so the final element I want on the side is just a cube kind of scale that Cube and then exactly like we've been doing before we'll apply the scale and then we just more or less want to keep these you know bevels kind of matched up so they'll kind of merge together nicely so notice we have one two three edges here so on this one I'm going to want to get about three as well like I said it's not that big of a deal it's not that deep on this one so don't worry too much it just kind of helps me out so we can go ahead and run our difference Boolean there looks good they could probably go a little bit deeper to be honest so I just recall that kind of pull that in and you know what I'm gonna I'm gonna actually make one more segment on here I think it's a bit too faceted looking without it cool so there we go and I can just move this in a little bit deeper yeah I definitely like how this looks looks a lot cleaner cool so now at this point we can go ahead and just start working on our Boolean so first of all let me go to how do I want to do it first thing I'm going to do is apply this Boolean okay we're going to apply that one because it's just going to make it easier to Bevel around here for us without having to intrude on the other geometry so let me dissolve out this Edge right here it's a little bit close control X and then same up here Ctrl X that one and then we're just going to have to do a few merges here I guess we wouldn't have to but it might help if I kind of get these merged in see what I mean kind of merge that one there it does hurt the curvature a tad bit but it's not really not really a huge problem to be honest cool so now what I'm going to do is click I'll click with mesh machine we're going to make a nice one segment bevel here and since these beveled in a little bit close I'm just going to slide these over give us a bit more space same for up here just kind of slide that down a bit kind of slide that down a bit and it looks good and symmetrize the other side and now we have a pretty clean looking bevel on this one now at this point we can go ahead and apply this bullet and then do do the magic on this one as well so once again a really close Edge there we can dissolve that out and then at this point um just merge this one to here do some symmetries makes life easier and then down here on the bottom we can dissolve these out and then just you know change up the connection points connect that one there connect that one there with the J key just merge that one there merge that one there you get the idea at this point cool and then we're going to symmetry to the other side so now we have a pretty clean looking setup here and the last thing I need to do is bevel this entire portion now when I bevel it we're going to overlap with this Edge for sure so I'm just going to dissolve that one out as well going to be our best option so we're going to Bevel that and we are going to end up getting some overlap so I could turn on the loop slide feature and adjust that or what I could do instead to prevent that from happening is I could add in again some guidance edges so I could kind of guide you know where this is going to Bevel so now that we have those guidance edges it's not going to have that big of a deal or be that big of a deal looks good and then we can just dissolve out these guidance edges we don't need those anymore and then if we just want to keep this more or less even we can slide that up try to keep these edges here as even as possible a little bit of a mess right here I just noticed let me see what's going on let me merge that one there one's fine we can just kind of slide this down trying to figure out what exactly happened down here interesting you know what I'm gonna do just going to do that I'm going to connect that through and then we're just going to clean this up what happened here this should be flowing down nicely more or less like this so it looks like we just had a little bit of a mess going on right there and then this one we could just merge in there we go so yeah some balloons can sometimes be a bit of a pain to deal with from time to time but if you kind of know how to handle the topology you'll know how to fix it so now we have this really clean and soft looking mesh we can symmetrize over let's just take a look at all the geometry here it all looks pretty clean no real issues no massive problems just going to kind of look down here it looks decent enough see what I mean this one's a little bit wider as we go up so I could you know slide that over a bit if I wanted to probably more and more about it than I should to be honest but you know there's a bunch of different options this is honestly good enough to me cool so if we go into matcap you're going to see we do have some pretty nasty uh shading problems you can kind of see that so if we add in a way to normal modifier that's going to clean everything up very nicely for us okay so you can kind of see the difference here's the before and here's the after it kind of flexes the shading makes it a bit cleaner and now we have this really clean and soft looking mesh and this is why I really recommend you guys use bevels because imagine these are all hard edges it would look really weird and unappealing but these bevels really make it look a heck of a lot cleaner so we don't really need these we can dissolve those out it's not doing too much for us we don't need this one either or this one either we just need the base geometry that really defines the mesh you see what I mean this looks pretty good as well now let's talk about the elephant in the room that a lot of people tend to ask about and it's the fact that we have n-gons in this mesh so if anyone's telling you you can't use n-gongs in a game asset and they're just using that as a blanket statement they don't know what they're talking about you can use n-guns and game assets so long as the game asset is static and so long as you triangulate it beforehand and the software you're using in my case blender now if you're making a game asset that's going to be exploded into a million pieces or used in some VFX or needs to be deformed or bent you're going to need to have clean consistent quad-based topology but in this case is going to be a static game asset kind of like if you're playing Mass Effect or some video game and you're just running by a bunch of crates in the scene they're not moving they're not exploding they're just sitting there and for those I guarantee you they're using a very simple mid-poly bevel technique weighted normals all that good stuff without stressing about the n-gons and the mesh at the end of the day everything is triangulated automatically so n-gons aren't really even a thing you can see if I add in a triangulate modifier we no longer have guns they're gone so when people freak out about n-gons or triangles they probably don't exactly know why they're probably following some tutorial that I just told them hey don't use n-gons but they don't really know why so when I make these tutorials I really want to get you guys out of that mindset because it's not that big of a deal if you know how to handle it and I'm going to show you that whole process but before we triangulate this and set it up for export we need to unwrap it so let me just make sure there's no issues here I don't see any this all looks connected very nicely to me I don't see any real problems here and we have how many tries here about 1500 tries on this one so not too bad there's different recommendations for you know what's too high of a poly count it really depends and nowadays graphics cards are so powerful that and you can see like even in our real Engines new stuff a poly count is mattering less and less in less nowadays so yeah I'm not too stressed about how crazy the poly count is as long as it looks decent which it does so now we're going to go ahead and unwrap this model now UV unwrapping is a whole Topic in and of itself I could spend a lot of time discussing this but it's gonna kind of divert away from the topic of this video I'm going to show you the essentials of unwrapping what you really need I would recommend downloading our free UV unwrapping PDF on our site it kind of goes through like like a checklist almost of what you need to do to unwrap properly and it's good to have like on a second monitor or something whenever you're doing your own unwrapping so I'll link that guide in the description like I said it's a free one it should kind of give you like a general guideline of how you should be unwrapping your models but I'm also going to show you how we're going to approach this one here so when we unwrap we need to add in a checker texture I just use default blender's default one because it looks good so we're going to go here into the Shader editor I do not like using nodes so don't freak out if you see nodes here we just have to connect up the Checker texture that's it so we're gonna go here to image texture new we can make it 4K I'll just call this UVS and then we'll change this to UV grid and then we're just going to connect this up to base color and we're done cool we can also name this material UVS as well so now if we go into material mode we're going to see a checker texture but it's all distorted because right now it's not unwrapped properly right now if we go into the UV editor it's just like a big jumbled mess okay so we need to do is go up here and turn on live unwrap so whenever we add in our new seams it'll automatically unwrap so how do we approach unwrapping how do we think about it how do we know where to play seams and basically what do we do to unwrap our model properly well like I said that's a whole in-depth topic I even have an entire course dedicated to UV unwrapping which is why like I said I can't discuss every little thing in this video but I'm going to show you the way I think about it so when you're unwrapping your model you want to picture it like origami you can have like a 3D shape but then you can flatten it out like an origami so it's the same thing here now with hard surface models the way you want to do this is you want to place your seams on hard edges now since we beveled every edge here we don't technically have any any hard edges here so the way I think about it is if we didn't have any bevels on here which areas would be the hard edges and it would basically be all the edges where we added a bevel so for example if we didn't have a bevel like here for example this would be a hard Edge you see what I mean it's very sharp so basically what you want to do is you want to place the seams kind of around these areas so first of all the first one I'm going to put here is going to be [Music] um let's see let's put it around this area so right click Mark seam and then we're gonna do the same thing on this side and we could just symmetrize but quick enough that way now let's press uh U and re-unwrap it now we want to change the method from angle base to conformal conformal is a better solution for hard surface models that are more angular or more like hard edges and more angular models you know like Organics are going to be better for angle based you can kind of see the difference here so what we need to do is do the same thing kind of on this side we can Mark a seam around this area Mark Sim and then around this portion as well we'll go ahead and clear that and you're already going to see how much better this looks now we don't technically need a seam in here reason being is because we already have a set of seams kind of enclosing this space so these Checkers should be able to flow through here very nicely I'm going to clear that one out and we don't want to clear out any of these other ones because these kind of hold it together otherwise it's going to kind of spill and start distorting so we want to kind of have that one held now the last thing we need to do is we need to place a seam to fix all this nasty Distortion around here so what I actually want to do is place a seam here on the top and a seam here on the bottom and what we're going to actually do is go into the UV editor here I'm going to just remove this Checker texture so you can see it now if I go into face mode and press the L key you can see how this is selected now the analogy I give people is imagine you have a piece of paper and you tape both ends of those papers together you're going to have a paper ring now if you want to flatten that paper ring you just have to remove the tape and then flatten it or cut it whatever so basically the equivalent of cutting that paper ring or removing the tape is to add in a seam so you can kind of see if I press the L key this kind of has a ring pattern you see what I mean it's like it's in a ring formation it's all connected it's cyclic but to kind of flatten that out we just need to put in a seam that connects these um the top and the bottom here together so like I said UV unwrapping is quite a complex topic eventually you'll get used to it the more you do it but what that's going to do putting the seam right there is it's going to act as if we had to bring a paper and remove that tape and it's going to be nice and flat now you're going to kind of see how that looks and yeah it looks pretty clean the entire model has more or less a decent unwrap here now I technically didn't really need to put any seams in this portion I just wanted to kind of show you the thought process now if I remove the seams up here let me just right click and clear and then clear out this area as well you're going to see it actually flows through here pretty nicely and the reason being is because we kind of have this whole entire thing held together by this top area this bottom area and this seam right here so I could technically remove literally all these other seams we originally added because we don't really need them it's going to flow through more or less decently but by having those seams there it's going to hold a little bit better in this case but we technically don't even need them all we really need is we need a the seams here on the top on the bottom and then something to kind of flatten this whole entire portion out for us and if you want like a more obvious example here I'll show you if I were to take a cylinder the way we unwrap a cylinder is we put a seam here on the top and the bottom edges so right click Mark seam and then to get rid of this ring we just have to flatten it out with a seam and we can just apply the scale and unwrap it again so that's how you would unwrap a cylinder and if you kind of look at this in like a silhouette of a cylinder we're basically doing the same thing it just has a little bit of a different shape you see what I mean this is a pretty interesting topic because this technically would be um topology wise the same as a cylinder you could basically morph this into a cylinder if you were to like pull out vertices and things so you just kind of have to look at it and like its general form picture this as a cylinder and kind of imagine how you'd unwrap the cylinder but apply it to this one and you're going to see and we did that we actually have this really really clean unwrapped it does get a little bit skewed here on these Corners the way you could fix that is to you know keep adding seams in different areas to just make it even more flat because you can see it's a little bit it warps a little bit up and down around here but if you're going for like a basic texture and substance painter this isn't something I would really worry about too much but if um you're working on a team and they were very very picky about it you might need to you know use these edges here that you use before you know what I mean and just get yourself that nice um have this held a little bit cleaner so yeah it's um more or less a pretty straightforward process once you intuitively know how to do it but in this case the unwrap was pretty simple and in a worst case scenario guys if you want to quickly whip something together you could always use a Smart UV project and that's going to automatically unwrap it for you the issue is it's not very accurate as you can see here so yeah I don't really ever use Smart EV project anymore I used to not anymore um the regular unwrap is the way to go with a manual marking of seams but if we kind of go around here and look at it from a distance this more or less looks nice and consistent a little bit you know kind of warped around here and like I said if that bothered you enough you could simply just drop the seam back in here but the seam is going to be visible around that area so it kind of depends what you want I'm not a big fan of How It's kind of skewing right there but I already know my texture is going to be like a grungy type so I'm not too worried about it just pick up our unwrapping PDF on our site guys it'll kind of guide you through this if it's a bit confusing but there you go very simple unwrap and it looks good and also another resource I love throwing resources out there because I just have so many different topics I could talk about I'd rather just give you the video you can watch so I have a really long like three hour tutorial on my channel called game assets and blender a complete workflow something like that it's like a Sci-Fi door off my editor put it on the screen watch that video I have two actually watch the first one it has like 300 000 views or something crazy uh watch that one it's a really really informative in-depth video and I go a lot deeper into the unwrapping process on that that video and lots of people loved it I think you will as well so uh yeah lots of resources I have for you guys I try to have that nice balance of free products and paid products because I want everyone to get the same opportunity but at the same time you know I still want to be able to make a living doing this type of stuff so the more advanced stuff we do sell but like I said we have a ton of free resources out there so you don't have to pay for anything um what I want to do is I want to take this piece now and triangulate it like I said you guys need to triangulate your models beforehand if you're working with n-gons and things like that and this is super easy to do guys all you do is you go to add modifier triangulate and then tick on the keep normal so it'll maintain that clean shading so now anyone who's freaking out over the fact that you have n-gons and no longer has a foot to stand on because guess what you don't have n-gons anymore look at that super scary not scary so like someone when this is turned off someone's gonna be freaking out when you turn it back on they're magically gonna calm down so this is like um this triangulate modifier is basically like the uh anxiety reducing modifiers so you know the the quad people out there will uh have a nice calm relaxed uh relaxed State when you drop this in I don't know what I'm saying but I'm trying to make a weak joke here anyways uh one thing I do notice though if I go into matcap there is a little bit of a see that shading streak right there it's very very subtle but I can see it easy way to fix that what you can do is you can tick on the face influence feature turn the weight all the way up to 100 and that'll actually Flex the shading even more you can kind of see the difference so that is something I would definitely recommend doing so now our shading is going to be absolutely Flawless on this model even though we have n-gons on the mesh so like I said it's not the end-ons that cause the shading issues it's basically the topology and how all of that is being ran so very clean love how the model looks and we can go ahead and prepare this for export so some people ask me do I need to apply my modifiers before I export and the answer is no you don't because when you export from blender all the modifiers are applied automatically so no need to apply or modifiers unless you want to I don't see a reason so what we're going to do is we're going to just rename this I'm going to call this guy I don't know this game asset because what it is now we're not making a high poly version so I'm going to skip the baking process I have plenty of bacon videos out there if you did have a high poly version but we're just going to hop straight into texturing like I said I want this tutorial to be simple and to the point so there's the model I also like to go into the object data and drag this in so they have the same name I don't know if it matters I've just done this for years so and it's never caused me issues so I do that and the material if you want to rename the material you can as well let's rename it to game asset and there we go so now guys we have a clean model we have a really clean unwrap and we also have a triangulated match so this is going to work inside of game engines inside of substance painter uh things like that and one final thing I could mention sometimes what I'll do is I'll run like a knife cut if the triangulations are too long sometimes I'll try to like split them up by you know kind of having some extra Geo in here to make it less stretched but in this case it's not really that big of a deal sometimes this can cause random errors but I don't really see it happen too often anyways let's go ahead and Export this mesh so I'm going to go to file export fbx and we'll just call this game asset01 if you had a high poly version you could do like underscore High underscore low but I don't and let's also turn on the selected objects button and then export fbx so now we can hop right into substance painter so I use substance painter for texture and you can also use qixel mixer I just don't have any tutorials on that software I prefer substance it works kind of like Photoshop which I'm more used to I'm going to go to file and then new and here we're going to load in our fbx file double click on that document resolution 4K that's fine and this is going to be fine we don't have any baked maps to import we're going to be baking those Maps directly here inside of substance so we can just go ahead and click ok and you're going to see the mesh is going to load in just fine no issues at all see what I mean so we're going to do now is we're going to Let's remove this empty layer and let's go to texture set settings I'm gonna go to big mesh maps and looks like they added in some new stuff but basically here all I really want to bake is you could bake like an empty normal if we add in like normal stamps that's fine change this to 4K we're going to bake the ambient occlusion which is the Shadows it'll detect like areas where there should be more Shadows the more concave areas and the curvature is going to be good to detect where the edges of the mesh are for if you want to add in like Edge wear for example position is good if you wanted to add like dirt buildup it would detect the bottom of the mesh and then build up dirt from the bottom so position is a good one to add thickness I I don't think we really need that these are probably the only the most important four that we need so yeah we're gonna leave it at that and then click on big selected textures you're going to see there's the normal you're going to see the ambient occlusion gets baked and it detects that then we have the curvature and then we have the position so they're going to kind of see if I remove the ambient occlusion looks a little bit weaker but with ambient occlusion we have this nice little Shadow effect we can even preview it and here if I go to ambient occlusion notice it kind of has like these um Shadows kind of in the more concave areas which is pretty cool yeah it looks good now before we even begin texturing this this is where I would really recommend Gathering some reference photos now people some people have issues with reference photos I don't understand why they're meant to give you ideas and inspiration for how you want to approach your own model so I'm going to go ahead and kind of show you my process for collecting reference images and how I do it so the first thing I would recommend is downloading pure ref pure ref is a free software not really even a software it's like a you like load it up and you can drag and drop images so I guess it is a software but it's free just download it and what you can do is you go to like Google and just drag and drop images and you'll have like a reference board here so the way I usually like to work guys is I like to go to Google and I'll kind of type in like the general theme I'm going for so this thing I'm making substance I don't know what it's exactly going to be but it's going to be kind of sci-fi looking so for example you could look up like some crates here for example this is funny here's hours from a long time ago damn anyway so you have that um also like one of my favorite games is Mass Effect so if you wanted some inspiration from Mass Effect you could type in like Mass Effect crates and if you wanted like some references from like the crates inside of Mass Effect you could do that now I'm not a big fan of the actual detail balance on most of these models but then again this game is quite old um I'm really looking for texturing ideas so for example this could be really cool for texturing so I'm actually going to bring this over to my other monitor you're not gonna be able to see it but basically what you do is you just drag and drop that image in here and boom there's your first reference image you could go in and you know grab another one you could scale these down it's a super easy to use software guys and all you're really going to do just collect a board of references give you some ideas and just um what I'd recommend doing is go into like games you're inspired by or films or even artists and just take a look at what they're doing and just get ideas from that you know there's no need to reinvent the wheel and just doesn't make sense so let's see I'm just gonna I'm gonna gather my own off camera and I'll let you do the same so you guys don't need too too many um I just collected a few I could even go to like my art station page and just find people I follow and then like see who they're following so I just found some random reference photos some Mass Effect stuff some thing from Alien Isolation also uh Sergey T Atkin has some of the best game environments I've seen he has some really really good artwork so check out his page I really love the types of designs he makes as well but basically what I'm going for here is not to ever copy a style but to kind of see you know more or less like what are they doing what makes what do I like what don't I like like for example I like how this edgewear looks this is something I can I could incorporate into my own design or maybe some little like you know things like this where it says authorized Personnel you know there's all sorts of little little ideas you can get from these types of um reference photos so you're not copying this is the diff difference between copying and using reference photos for inspiration is you're going to develop your own style but get ideas from someone else and if you think people aren't working in groups and you know bouncing ideas off of one another you would be crazy because that is one of the best ways to get really good at what you do so what we're going to go ahead and do I'm going to drag this to my other monitor you're not going to be able to see it but you should kind of get the memo you know what I mean you should kind of have your own board as well with reference photos and what I'm going to do is go back into substance and we're going to start texturing this ourself and I kind of have like one monitor with the reference photos and then on the other monitors like where I'm working on my wide screen so if you have a second monitor guys even if you can get like a cheap one it's always a good investment I think I got my my original secondary monitor was like 50 bucks on Acer refurbished so really good investment to kind of save you some time better than hopping you know in between tabs and out of tabs that would be really really annoying so anyways we're going to go ahead and add in our first material so let me go ahead and open up the materials panel I don't know why the window is closed let me go here to reset the UI there we go and now we're going to have all these different materials so what I'm going to look for are what we call Smart materials and if we go here these are materials that have different effects built in like edgeware and things like that so smart materials are really fun to start off with so you could kind of try out like which ones do you like you know you could try the steel you could try like the stained and just kind of see like which ones fit the vibe and which ones don't some you're gonna like and some you're just not gonna like actually a lot of them you're not gonna like you just have to keep playing with these until you find a shape you really like and you can see there's a very obvious seam right here so seams are unavoidable the best solution for seams is to Simply when you bring this into whatever game engine you're working in is to place it in the scene so that way the sea seam cannot be seen tongue twister right there if you hold shift and right Mouse button you can also rotate the hdri which is pretty cool so I'm just going to keep playing with some of these different you know steel materials and see what I like and see what looks good I've also found that the Plastics that substance painter has are pretty cool so you could try like a plastic I know it doesn't really match the vibe but it does look kind of cool but I think I think a metal is going to be our best bet so we're just going to keep playing with these the steel painted is pretty awesome you can see we have all that nice Edge wear on there as well this is a bit too intense though now this one right here the steel painted um not this one but this one this one's actually pretty cool I like the overall look I don't like how nasty this edgeware is um coming in though so what we're gonna do is we're going to adjust that so you can kind of see this smart material is a bunch of different effects built in you have like dirt Edge damage now the edge damage we need to significantly reduce down so I'm going to go here to the mask and under where it says curvature we should be able to really drop that balance down and make this um a lot less significant it's just a matter of how that curvature is actually baked in you could even drop the opacity a bit I don't want any crazy edgware on this I could even add in my own if I wanted to I just want a little bit so I'm just going to pull it up right before it starts hitting the areas that just make it look weird so just a little bit of edgeware like that I think would be good you can kind of see before it starts hitting in a bit of a weird fashion this looks a lot more natural I think so that looks good you could also blur it um I don't see a point in that but you could so usually what I'm doing guys I'm just kind of working backwards I don't really build my smart materials from scratch takes too long I think it's a waste of time a substance already has some pretty decent ones built in which you can simply tweak you know here and there you don't have to know all the ins and outs of substance although it certainly helps if you know more about it because then you know how to do different effects now I don't like this green but I think like a red or a blue could be kind of cool so we go to like you know the cyan color that looks pretty decent I like that we could also go for like a more gray look if we wanted to go for like a Bluer go for like a red if we wanted to I think the red could be kind of cool and you also want to think about like what do you want your primary color to be like for example in here the primary color here is blue then we have like the secondary metallic brown color and then like the yellow that really makes it pop so you could do that type of thing and that's how I'm using these reference photos is to get an idea of how do I want the base colors to go and things like that so you should really be able to see the difference between copying and using reference so I'm going to make this one pretty dark red there's blue it kind of depends you know what type of style do you want I certainly don't want this to be green but maybe if this is like a I don't know some environment friendly thing this could be a green thing you know what I mean it really depends on the style you're going for and the context of where this game asset is going to be placed you know what I mean so I can't give you a right or wrong here you have to figure out what's going to be the best for what you're doing so I'm actually going to make this just um just red I really like how this red looks and I think a good contrasting color would be you could do like a green um one really easy way to know which one is going to be like a good contrast if you look up like what's the opposite of red that would be green you can just type that in on Google there's like a color wheel and you could use like inverse colors to really complement each other although they're opposites but it's not really a requirement so I'm just trying to think of what could balance nicely with the red and I think a nice neutral gray would really do it so this is where we can start kind of experimenting and making our own effects so usually what I do is I try to find another um another like metal that I think looks good so for example I just kind of dragged these on and I just look at you know how they look well I like it as that secondary material or not and I just kind of drag these on and just take a look what looks good what doesn't that's actually not too bad keep note of that one this one's all right as well I kind of like this one so I'm gonna go with this actually I think this is better now what I want to do when I you know drag and drop is I don't want it to affect the entire mesh like it's doing now what I want to do is only have this effect certain areas of the mesh so what we can do if you're familiar with masking or photoshop things like that if we right click and add in a black mask this will conceal the entire texture now to reveal it since black conceals it then white is going to reveal it so check this out notice we have this grayscale slider here what we can do is you know drag this to black or to White now if it's set to Black nothing's going to happen when we try to paint but if it's set to White it's going to reveal that see what I mean and also if this is like somewhere in the middle it's just going to slightly reveal it so usually you're just going to want to go to one or the other you don't want to like slightly reveal it unless you're trying to do something fancy anyways we're going to do that and then I'm going to press alt shift left Mouse button and I'm going to paint this in here so I'm going to click shift click down I'm just going to keep holding shift and I'm just going to you know more or less get this painted in here and then we can control right Mouse button and then just kind of fill in the blanks here pretty good just be nice and easy you don't want to accidentally paint outside of it unless you're doing that intentionally is so what I want and this is fine I think now that's just a random line right now but what I want to do is add a texture to this now to do that we're just going to open the folder and I'm just going to add in a new let's do a fill layer here and what I want to do is I want to turn off everything except for Heights and this is just going to give us like height information so you can kind of see like actually I'm not going to even play with that slider I'll just show you here what I'm going to do is I'm going to use a texture on this so for example there's like this diagonal texture I thought was pretty cool so you could like you know increase that and get some cool effects there was like this one which is pretty cool and that looks a bit weird and there's also this one which I thought was cool because you can make like these straight lines so if I change the Bend Value I can make this like straight which is pretty cool and then we can also increase the number of these and just kind of play with it that way you see what I mean now we're going to kind of have this cool effect on it so I don't want this to actually go across this all the way up I don't think so what we can do is go back to this mask remember the mask we used to reveal this and we can just paint black back onto it and just kinda do this and just kind of reveal part of it so maybe I just have like a you know only goes up so far I think that would be kind of cool and yeah like that now it's not on the other side I could have added in a symmetry beforehand to the other side but it's not that big of a deal plus the other side we're not going to really see because there's that nasty seam there that would ideally be hidden so that's pretty cool let's also add in a just a regular layer above that we're going to add in a normal stamp here so let me go to normal and here in the um in this normal slot we're just going to find some sort of uh normal stamp here forget which one it's in I think it is which one is it this one we can type in Normal we can just kind of play with some of these different you know normal effects so you know I can paint this in just adding like a random normal stamp don't want to make it look weird but you know some of these could work pretty well now I'm actually going to change this shape to like a rectangle and we can increase the hardness and we can rotate it control left Mouse button so now it's going to be like a much better effect unless I spoke too soon other direction I think so I want like you know more or less a rectangular one here I don't think this rectangle is going to be the best option we'll just go back to go back to that Circle just increase the hardness but you kind of get the idea here right um there we go I don't even know what this is we're just trying to see like what type of different stamps we have I wish there were a bit more to choose from in here unfortunately there's not too many um you can always make your own or probably find something to download maybe I'll wait on this I'm not really not really feeling it right now now I want to do the same thing to this side so let's go back in here let's change this back to White to reveal it and we're just going to paint some of that in here as well so can hold shift and right right Mouse button to um did I say rice mount mouse button that's not what I meant um shift right Mouse button will adjust the hdri rotation so this looks really good going to just kind of work on that kind of get some of this in there that looks good we could also try to get it in here I don't know if it's going to look very good but I'm just gonna see it might actually look good maybe it won't I don't know best way to find out is to try so I'm just going to kind of sloppily paint this in real quick so I have an idea it's actually not too bad I kind of like the uh the aesthetic on that actually looks all right so now I can be a little bit more accurate with this painting and really just try to get in you know into these areas here yeah that looks good I like that it's gonna be like some sort of generator or something now what I probably should have done I didn't even think about it there's a symmetry option here so that way if we change this to like y for example or Z whenever I paint in something it'll mirror to the other side I just forgot to do it not a big deal we can just do this side as well plus it's not going to be perfectly symmetrical anyways so I'll just go ahead and quickly do this I'll have my editor speed this part up Okay cool so we have that then we have the front and if I ever wanted to remove any of these details at any time change it to Black and you can paint it out not a problem really um versatile here now I'm gonna maybe go back to the normal stamps again I'm not too sure like not too sure what I want to do maybe just a thought maybe I could make like the bottom portion this thing as well I don't know if it would look weird that way it might check this out what I could do is find some sort of dirt so I'm gonna go here to the smart materials and I could actually drop the dirt on here and that does not not the effect I wanted let's try let's see what do I want to do let's search for like a really basic material here that I think could look cool like a like a rust or something we could generate some rust on here that could be cool just type in Rust and I think there's two really decent ones you have the rust fine and you have the rust course this one's going to match better I think and we're going to right click to add in a black mask and then we're going to right click again because we're going to generate some of the white areas to reveal it just automatically so we have a few different generators the dirt one is going to kind of just naturally apply a layer of dirt you also have like metal edgeware if you want on the edge that wouldn't make much sense um so yeah there's a few different ones here you could use you have like this dripping effect looks a bit interesting you also position like I said that position maps go in to detect the bottom or the top and in this case we actually need to invert that to the bottom and we can maybe make this rust a little bit you know on the darker side here and you could also adjust like um go into the mask go to the position just kind of adjust the balance you can make it higher just kind of make it lower so now it just kind of fills in this portion a bit more makes it look dirtier and it's a lot more natural you see what I mean can also play with the contrast which usually looks fake if you go too high keep that low you also blur not going to mess with that I could go pretty high and I could actually drop the opacity so just a very very like thin layer see what I mean it's just very very subtle dirt on that thing I just think it looks better all around looks a bit more natural like it's actually in an environment you know what I mean I want to keep you know certain details clustered in a certain area ideally up on this upper portion so when I'm out in detail it's going to be like my main goal is to really bring some more visual appeal doing that um what I could do and this is just a random idea what I could do is take this steel gun mat and then just duplicate it and just delete the mask here because I'm not going to need that um right click and then remove mask and then we can just make our own again so right click and add in a new mask and what I'm going to try to do is make like um to go up here change to a rectangle type in rectangle make our brush rectangular and I'm just going to try doing hold shift like a strip of paint across that I don't know if I want the same texture I just want to see more or less how that looks it's kind of interesting but I think what would be better is to remove let's go in here remove that fill layer and then just have like the basic you know color instead do something like that it's not going to need to continue all the way through it's going to probably go from about here to about here just seeing how that looks maybe a different color again this is where you could use references for ideas like for example I could go up to some of these and kind of see how some of these lines are placed or even up here as well you can put like some text with like that red contrasting element maybe not red on this one because it is red but you get the idea this is kind of how I'm pulling ideas maybe like a yellow could be kind of cool let me delete this and just add in a regular fill layer we can make this yellow maybe like this looks like a vomit type of yellow I don't like that or like an orange like a blender orange could be pretty cool I think blender is Orange is actually I don't remember the hex code for it I can just eyeball it it's more or less like that and then add in a black mask and we could get like an orange strip of something so let's see what type of Alphas we have in here I haven't really looked we could try like here's an arrow we get like an arrow or something kind of indicating like a certain portion and this where we could actually use the Symmetry tool and they get like a perfect setup like that you see what I mean and then we could go on here and maybe take like um you know a rectangular element and work on that I wish it was skinnier um there's all sorts of different ones you could use you'll like the square would take the square and like shift click across you know I just think it looks a bit weird not gonna lie and this kind of needs to indicate that it's pointing to something we don't really know exactly what this is pointing to so I'm just kind of playing with ideas in my head is all I'm really doing on this one I should probably just focus on adding in more height elements so I'm going to go here I'm going to turn off every single thing except for height maybe I'll leave color on but for right now we'll do height because what I want to add in here are some um some height elements so right now we have like the color color is pretty cool um so we could keep the color but really I just want to paint in height elements so let's right click and add in a black mask I'm going to turn I'll keep the Symmetry turned on and let's change the alpha to that rectangle again you can use this one and we're going to need to rotate the brush 90 degrees and then we could add like um like a visual anchor up here that could be kind of cool this rectangle is just not doing it for me I'm going to use a square because with this what I can do softer with this what I can do is I can kind of paint up my own size if I wanted to like that could be kind of cool and then on top of this I could reveal some of um which one this one right here so I could kind of paint that in if I wanted to issue is it's still going to have that texture which I don't particularly want so maybe instead of doing that I could just turn the color on here so it actually shows the color you kind of get the idea then you can play with the height you can make it go in make it go out just kind of see you know what visual elements you like but this is a nice visual anchor on the model again we recently made a tutorial on detail balance which I'd recommend watching detail balance is incredibly important especially for um when you're making game assets that's the issue with like some of these old Mass Effect models is although they look cool this is just there's too much detail everywhere it's too symmetrical I mean this is an old game don't get me wrong so there's new techniques that have came out but just too much detail going on on this one in my opinion cool model but um I focus more on the specific elements of a detail balance here to make it look cool and I think with 70 30 we can balance everything up here on the top very nicely again this is meant to be like a Sci-Fi shape not going to go too crazy on it what I am going to do is I'm going to drop the edgeware down just a bit the edgeware is a little bit too heavy I just don't like when it's that heavy and we could drop the contrast a bit or increase it yeah it looks good we could also try experimenting again with some of the colors maybe at this point a different color could look cool maybe like a white and that could look pretty decent this is more like sci-fi looking I think that white that looks really neat undo it that was the red I don't know it just kind of depends like what you're feeling do you want like a darker element this looks more sci-fi looking very contrasty I think I like that I'm going to leave it then we could use maybe like a strip of red to um kind of accentuate some different tertiary colors on the model so for example what I could do is I could duplicate this base metal and then paste it up here and then we can go back to like the red color that we had before on this base model and then add in a black mask and we can just kind of paint in our own you know little visual anchors using Color if we wanted to you know do something like this could be kind of cool probably not that big but just like right along the edge could bring a bit of a visual interest to it I just don't want to over balance it and I don't want to under balance it it's a very intuitive feeling to use hell placement this is awful it's probably going to need to be a bit higher so it's not too monotonous this could be okay still not feeling it what I could also do is try not there but like right on the edge it's not too bad and I would probably need to extend to the top you know then you kind of have this cool yeah it looks cool I like that see what I mean in terms of placement this is so much cooler than if we just had like a random line sticking like this especially if it was the same size as this line if it was um it's hard to explain guys but if this line here was the same length as this one your eyes are not going to be able to rest there's going to be a clash of um visual appeal here because these are the exact same size and they're both very contrasting elements so your eyes are going to be bouncing and not being able to see the entire shape as it should be whereas if we have this kind of up here on the top according to 70 30 we're going to have a much more balanced looking effect so it's all about feeling you really have to learn how to feel the stuff it takes time but you'll eventually get there let me also turn on actually this is fine I'm going to go here because I already have symmetry on the other side and do something like that honestly I could probably get away with going all the way to the Top If I wanted to I don't know I'll have to think about that one I just focus on the front I definitely like how this looks I don't want to make this whole area red I think it's going to look a bit weird that actually could be okay I just I don't know I'm not feeling it what I could do is maybe do that for like the bottom portion and make like a cool little little shape there I don't know just random thoughts guys I'm just kind of winging it here seeing what I like you know what feels good to me what doesn't that's kind of cool that shape I don't know it's random uh random thoughts really I think I found a shape that I like I'm gonna do something kind of like this so now it kind of pulls in a little bit and kind of brings a bit more attention towards the center versus if this was just a line see what I mean I don't know I think it looks cool so we have that and if we put something here in the middle like a whatever it might be that would really bring all the attention right there to where it should be while this is just kind of you like um this is the resting point and this is just kind of accentuating down here the resting point and really making the model look a lot more visually appealing so I say we go right into let's add in a a fill layer we'll go straight to height and we'll add in a black mask and we're just going to search for a cool looking shape like any of these now I need to make sure the height is higher than zero so that way when I paint something in it's there so I want to find some sort of cool thing this is kind of random not going to lie I want to find something that just fits naturally do like a biohazard or something you know what I mean this is like a container probably need to rotate it I found a good stamp this one here it's like a square with a line through it you can put that right in the center and I could also go back to the main one here go to color and give that a color now that's way too way too pulling what I probably need to do is position this right and here more or less turn that color on and that could that could work that I could get away with and I could change this color to like if I really wanted it to pull I could change it to like um you know an orange or yellow but this is too many colors at this point I want to use like three main colors here and I think this is um this is a good one I like this so this is what I mean guys when you're making simple models in blender you don't need to go crazy on the model you need to know how to balance the materials and the textures even if the model's simple so modeling is one thing but having that balanced design like even the Boolean Cuts I had in here really accentuated the balance of elements that I ended up adding here inside of substance painter okay this is cool I like this um trying to think if I want to add in like um a layer of gray on the top I don't think it's a necessary nor will really make sense what I could do is add some elements on the top I don't know if people are going to really see it though you know the main elements I really want to be adding in are kind of visual anchors whether they're functional or not they can really contribute to the form so that's kind of why I add them the best type of visual anchors are ones that enhance the function of the design and simultaneously are valuable visual elements that really enhance the form as well those are the best type to have now sci-fi you have a lot of creative freedom because you can have more implied functionality whereas you know in terms of engineering sense it might not work but it's sci-fi so you could be on some different planet or in a different universe or whatever it might be you really have some creative freedom there um okay so let's add in I think what we need is a visual anchor down here to kind of balance from the top um let's just do a regular brush layer here so that's a normal and we're just going to do a really simple really simple stamp down here somewhere I'm going to turn on the Symmetry and this is not meant to be large it's meant to be very small as a matter of fact so if I go too big it's going to pull way too much but if I go you know small like this it's going to be a very small visual anchor that is noticeable but it's not pulling this is not pulling attention really at all but it kind of enhances the overall form of this mesh which is cool what I'm going to do is go back to our um I think the default one is called shape so I'll go here to the alpha go to shape and I'm going to use this layer here that we were working on earlier for these little stepping looking things I don't know what they're called and I'm just going to kind of experiment with some some of those effects down here and I'm going to make sure the hardness is all the way up and just literally and just kind of play with these probably not going to add them in I just want to see like you see what I'm going for like a like a formation like this I think could look pretty cool given I'm able to balance it correctly so I think what we're going to need here is that rectangular shape again we can just use a square so that way I'm not using like that circular element I could go down to here see what I mean I'm just trying to think like I like how that looks I just don't know how I want to incorporate it so they could do is make the strip up through here and I'm being sloppy with it intentionally because I just want to quickly get some ideas and just see how it looks if I don't like it and then boom I'm done just undo it I'm just trying to give myself a visual idea here and I think I think I found what I like let me change the rotation here to zero and do that and hold shift paint straight down kind of do I don't know something like that is what I'm going for just trying to figure out how I can get get this as straight as possible if you guys haven't noticed yet I'm not a pro and substance painter by any chance but I know like all the essential tools you need to get the job done so I know basically everything you need so if there's like some things I could do quicker feel free to let me know this is cool I like this now this is really looking like a Sci-Fi object um for the bottom here I'm already kind of intruding on it so you know what we might as well just paint this in No One's Gonna See the bottom anyways I could have actually deleted out the bottom faces but if I wanted to rotate this on its side in a game then it would have been like an empty void so that's why I didn't delete it but yeah technically it's going to be standing upright this is um this is cool I like this very nice so I don't want to drag this tutorial out too too long I think we're at a point where this is looking you know sci-fi enough and this could actually I could picture this in a game like a mass effect or an alien isolation type of game so really cool stuff and what I want to do now is kind of add in like some final remaining details maybe a bit of dirt some um just to kind of enhance the model we already have a little bit of um that dirt effect on here and see the difference guys just a little bit of dirt or rust or whatever this is just a little slight amount on top of it really kind of it it softens the model almost you see what I mean this is too bright and it's just you know kind of calms it down which I like this is not meant to be like a super eye pulling object it's meant to be like a small calming type of object that kind of sits in the um you know in the scene so what we're gonna do here is just kind of play with that some more so we have let's type in dirt some different ones in here there's just the regular dirt that we looked up before um this one already has like default effects on it built in I'm going to delete let's remove that mask and yeah there we go make our own cool so that's like the base of dirt and we could once again add in a black mask here add a generator and then generate some dirt now it's a little bit more dirty but way too heavy we're just gonna need to do a very very slight layer so you kind of see a slight accumulation of dirt you know inside of here kind of play with the contrast so it Blends a bit more interesting you see that now it's kind of like piling in the corner now we're going to need to do is adjust the edges mask in a bit the grunge amount can also go lower I don't want too much here if this is too high it's gonna look terrible I just want a very very small amount very small accumulation of dirt I guess this is on like a on like a spaceship you wouldn't really have dirt or maybe you would I don't know we can ask Elon maybe he knows um that could be cool and let's see you got the scale you could play with the scale you know I'll let you guys experiment with these values and just see what you like dirt level once again not too high keep that low and just turn this off and on to really see the difference see it not just kind of accumulated in there a bit better cool stuff so I encourage you guys to keep doing this on your own just searching for like what what effects you want maybe I could add in some more dirt or more grunge or more Edge wear really whatever I think would look cool so let me maybe add in another I already have the dirt here but let's add in the dirt again and we're just going to remove that mask and we're going to add in our own and maybe generate a little bit more of just regular dirt on it like that but on this one we're just going to seriously actually I think that's the one we already did isn't it so maybe let's do like um like a dripping effect so just a very very slight you know slight amount on there we could do a little bit less of the intensity play with these sliders here 's the rust spreading amount increase that smoothness a little bit same with the drips I want this to be like not super Sharp and we could just keep playing with this a little bit more contrast a little bit more of the spreading we could click on the seed and just kind of you know move it around and then what we could do is just drop the opacity a bit so now we just have that very subtle layer of dirt that's kind of sitting on it and now this looks cool you could even change the color if you don't like the color just go in here to the dirt base and go to actually I think it's already predetermined for that one unfortunately but not really that big of a deal I think this one's fine and there we go so this is basically our our final result guys so I don't know if there's a way to I know in Photoshop you could alt click the layers and see like the before and after but I don't know how we do it in here but if I turn everything off there's the before and then if we just go through each of these you can kind of see how we built up the detail on this model and we got that and then we got a little bit of that red and then we got that thing and then that and that and that yeah I think this is fine here so what we need to do now is we need to export our texture so that way we can use this inside of a game engine so I'm going to go ahead and go to file export and there's going to be a few output templates here we're going to need to make our own custom output template now I actually have two right here I'm going to remove one of them this is my custom template the one that says underscore copy basically it has an ambient occlusion Channel whereas the default one does not I'll show you how to add that in duplicate this PBR metallic roughness and what you need to do is um I'm going to remove this emissive channel because we don't have any emissive materials do that and I'm going to go here to Gray and then we're going to just copy paste one of these and just rename this to AO and we're just going to grab the ambient occlusion input map as a gray Channel and now we're going to have is an ambient occlusion channel so when we export this and you know plug all the textures up we'll we'll have our ambient occlusion which is what we need I don't know why it's not there by default but it isn't not a huge problem because we just added it in here all right cool so now we're going to go to settings I'm going to change the output template to that PBR metallic roughness copy Channel or um preset I made I'm going to be using a tiff 8-bits and dithering and if you're just rendering this object you might want to use 8K because it's going to be higher quality 8K is going to use a lot more vram when you're rendering especially if you're using it in blender and loading in those textures 8K is going to be very high vram usage and memory usage so if you're gonna render I would use 8K so long as your computer can handle it if you're below like eight gigs vram on your computer you might want to go with like a 4K instead anyway since this is going to be used in a game engine I'm definitely not going to use 8K we could get away with like 4K or 2K really depending on what your requirements are I'll go 4K for just you know high resolution here so it'll look better and then we're just going to click on we're going to click on export here just wait for it to export it's usually pretty quick for a 4K resolution or lower and then what we're going to do is we're going to load all of this into Unreal Engine now once you're here in Unreal Engine all you have to do is right click and then import I think or is it under content we can do that oh right here outer import and then we go to import assets and what we can do is we can go ahead and load in that fbx that we exported the same one we used in substance painter click on import and you're going to see we have the asset one thing I probably should have done in blender by the way guys is I probably should have repositioned that origin point so it was at the bottom which I guess I didn't do I thought I already did that I don't know anyways I'm just going to go ahead and re-export this make sure that origin point is at the bottom and it's in the center of the world selected objects and let me just go ahead and um I don't know if I really need to delete this all out I'm just going to anyways and delete this and then delete the material let me just re-import this and it should actually drag in normally so what we're going to do is drag this in and there we go now it's going to actually drag in normally and we also have the material and the material should be applied to that by default and what we need to do is connect up the textures and things like that so let's import these textures as well all of these click on open so wait for those to load in then we can just double click on this material and you're going to have a basic node editor here don't get too scared I know nodes are annoying I don't like them either but these are very easy to set up so what we're going to do is we're going to delete out that random stuff and basically we're just going to connect these up base color goes to base color right the normal is going to go to normal the roughness is going to go to roughness but we're going to actually it should be R to roughness red to roughness easy to remember we also have metallic that's going to be blue the way I remember metallic is you know metals are usually cold if they're in a cold environment so blue is cold that's how I remember it and we also have our ambient occlusion it's going to be our green channel here actually let's do RGB um I believe and then the last one we have here is what are we missing the height information let's see how this looks as it is though I'm kind of curious and go ahead and do that and we're going to rotate it this actually looks good I already see all the information I need from the normal map which is perfect and this is our game asset here so very simple very straightforward you're going to see it's actually quite reflective for some reason Unreal Engine does this thing and where it like makes it more reflective um what I'm going to do here to adjust that is I'm going to find my little roughness node right here and what we can do is just double the roughness and the way we double the roughness is by adding in a scalar parameter which is just a number basically we click on it the default value is going to be 2 so double basically and then what we're going to do is we're going to add in a multiply let's see this one and what we do is we basically just um connect these we're going to go here the red goes here and then this one's the value of two so we're multiplying this roughness by 2 and then we connect this to the roughness and now we're going to have is a the roughness is going to be basically double so a little bit a little bit more rough as you can see is what I'm trying to say and you're going to see this is a very very clean and simple game asset and there are absolutely no issues with this asset no matter which way we look at it it looks completely clean and good to go now a few things you guys might want to consider which I didn't mention in this video but are also important one is scale I can't tell you what scale you're using for your game I can't tell you what the normal size object should be for your game if you're like if your first person character is a mouse the scale is probably going to be a bit different than if your first person character is a human being you know what I mean so I didn't give this a specific Dimension to set up with so for example it looks like this is five meters high that's probably a bit unreasonable this is probably like I don't know human height if not smaller so in that case you would actually want to scale this down the average human height is 1.8 meters so you'd actually want to scale this down a little bit smaller than that and then you could re-export this into your game and it would actually be a smaller object like I said I can't give you the right value for this because I don't know the scale that your game is going to be using so make sure you keep that in mind the second point I want to make is that we didn't really consider our Texel density now what Texel density is is it's basically the easy way to think of it is the resolution of your textures so for example if I um let me reconnect um let me go in here let me reconnect that UV Checker so I can kind of show you practically going to go in here add in that texture and then let me just find that UVs I guess it's not in here we'll just make a new one there we go and then connect this up so right now we just have a Default Resolution and what would happen if I scaled in these UVS if I scale them in notice these get bigger which means the the checkers get bigger which means the resolution is getting smaller and if I you know scale this into a pixel we basically are just going to eventually get like one solid color so basically the smaller these are or the I'm sorry the bigger these are the um lower the resolution is going to be and likewise the bigger these Checkers are the higher the resolution is going to be but we want to make sure we're staying within this parameter here now the reason I say this is because this object is most likely going to be sitting around other objects in the scene and if you're working on a team for example or if you're freelancing someone's probably going to give you a taxal density value meaning if you had an object and there was an object sitting next to it with half the resolution this one's going to look really sharp while this one's going to look more blurry in comparison it's not going to make sense it's like if your mouse on your that you're using is super blurry but your keyboard's really sharp it doesn't make any sense and just it it can't really exist you know what I mean so textile density needs to be uniform relatively inside of your game now I can't get too far into this because we're making a single game asset here but uh textile density is very important so if someone ever gives you a certain value to work with you're probably need to use an add-on that calculates the textal density and you can use like Zen UV for that for example so if I selected this face I could actually click on get TD and I could see that value and if I wanted to set you know if I wanted to set the textual density even lower put like 64. that's going to scale it in so say everything was 64 around it you could set that and scale that in so that way the resolution of this piece will be the same as all the other pieces around it and this gets pretty complex for example assets are really far in the distance are not going to need to be super clear so you get away with lower there's just a bunch of different situations you run into which is really just going to come with experience but most of you are probably just doing this for fun and if you do have a certain value you need to work with maybe you're in a studio and they say this is the value then you're just going to have to research textile density and simply use an add-on like zenuv to set that textile density but in this video I just kind of made the resolution as high as possible if that's a little bit too much just buy our game asset course 2.0 we go into textile density and explain that in a lot more detail more than I can possibly explain in this video I just wanted to make sure I mentioned that because textile density is very important but in this case I'm only making a single asset so can't really compare it to anything so that's really the only two things you need to consider is that relative scale and also the textile density can matter as well and that's why I'm saying you know game assets while they're easy to make there's a lot of different things you have to consider and that is simply going to boil down to practice but everything I showed in this video I showed you like 90 of the primary workflow and the other 10 are just bits and pieces you'll pick up over time so I know this is a long video but I hope it helped you I hope it provided you with some value and the last thing you guys are going to want to do is render this piece out so for that I just recommend watching any of our videos on rendering and how to make a good portfolio piece because when you make a game asset you naturally are going to want to make a good portfolio piece what I would recommend doing is loading all of your textures here into blender so the node Wrangler add-on enabled you can just press node Wrangler comes with blender you can just turn that on and you can press Ctrl shift T and you can load in all of those Textures in here directly in the blender and you can just go ahead and you know make a nice surrender for your portfolio but like I said I have videos on that if you want to learn how to render inside of blender so I hope this video helped you out hope it provided you with some value and all I'm asking for this video is just drop me a thumbs up it does help me with the algorithms I think I don't know that's what everyone says so drop me a thumbs up leave a comment subscribe but really I just appreciate you guys you know watching the videos that's really what matters at the end of the day head over to blunderbrows.com if you want to check out some of our more premium products you'll probably find a ton of cool stuff you like over there we also have our game package if you want to learn more about game assets but that's about it guys thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 10,588

Keywords: blender game assets, blender game asset tutorial, blender game design, blender game asset modeling tutorial, game assets, game asset modeling, blender hard surface game assets, blender tutorial, blender hard surface modeling, blender 3d, blender guru, blender donut, hard ops tutorial, boxcutter tutorial, blender 3d modeling, 3d modeling blender, blender, 3d modeling, how to model game assets, hard surface game assets, blender mesh machine, mesh machine

Id: Vc7pW8VCcek

Length: 88min 39sec (5319 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 19 2022