Simple Game Props in Blender (Hard Surface Modeling Tutorial)

I remember back when I was learning blender I was really really interested in making props for video games now props are mainly like the background elements you see you have crates you have containers you have you know pretty much everything they're basically what make the game the game right because without those props you don't really have a game you just have an empty environment so in today's video we're going to design just a simple prop here and blender so it's going to be some sort of crate I'm going to show you the full modeling process the UV unwrapping process the texture process optimizing the mesh the whole shebang so let's hop right into it now I'm going to be talking a lot about visual design where to place elements things like that however I go much more in depth into these rules in our blender training over on our website I'm going to link it below it's totally free and it kind of covers all the different elements you want to make sure you're using when you're uh actually designing in blender so we'll be using some of them in this video but at the minimum watch that training because I go into a lot more detail in how you can Implement these strategies so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to scale this a bit on the z-axis I kind of want to make this more or less kind of thin and also if you want to get this nice Edge highlight that I have go up here go to cavity set it to both and then copy my settings here and I'm also going to make sure we have the buold tool add-on enabled so just make sure you turn that guy on on unless you're a hard Ops user um then you don't need to do that cool so what I want to do is tab into Edge mode and as always I do get this question a lot I'm using the Machine Tools add-on it is free it allows you to go in and out of edit mode very quickly and uh you can get that on gumroad for free install it in the blender so it just kind of saves time going into edit mode so what we're going to do is press control alt and left click on these vertical edges here that's going to select all of them in the same length and the same same direction and what I want to do here is I want to Bevel this so just give this a nice round bevel now nowadays poly count really isn't as important but you know back in the day or maybe for a different software usually I would get this just round enough like for example you know maybe right here to the point where I can't really see too much fasted in but nowadays I'm more so going for Quality so if this is too blocky for you just give this more segments bace basically so going to go here and just scroll this up this should probably be a good amount of segments here I'm going to make this a nice round bevel maybe a little bit more just like that just use 12 segments on that one then I'm just going to right click and then choose shade Auto smooth we're going to get this really nice kind of beveled area here now I'm going to scale this just a bit more on the z-axis just because I want to and now what I want to do is tab into face mode we're going to take these two faces here we're going to press I to inset them okay and we're going to right click and we're going to choose Bridge faces what this essentially does is it takes the two faces we have selected and kind of fuses them together it makes a hole and if you want to scale this in a bit more make sure you press alt s and not s because what s will actually do is it'll start scaling it inside whereas alt s will maintain that direction it'll scale it along the normals so we're going to press alt s right to about there and then what I want to do is scale this a bit on the Z like that and if your shading goes a bit weird all you have to do is go here to the normals panel and just drop this Auto smooth value don't go too far or it's going to break that you're going to have flat shading just make sure it's high enough to capture these edges here there we go now one very important rule of 3D design is utilizing a strategy called Echo going in this allows you to get more intricate visually appealing detail without having to really think so much about where to place it now um there's many different ways you can do this but really what you want to do is you want to take an existing kind of element or Direction and Echo it repeat it and you can do this in a million different ways that's up to you I'm going to show you an example here so I'm going to tab into Edge mode and ALT click on these edges here going to press contrl B and you're going to see the is a little bit skewed so make sure in object mode you press crl a to apply the scale you can see that scale is not uniform so crl a apply scale and now when I run this bevel I'm just going to do one segment we're going to have a much better you know bevel there there we go so far so good now what I'd like to do is go into edit mode again we're going to press control R add a loop cut here in the center so I'm going to click and then right click then we're going to press control B to Bevel that and then I'm just going to press e to extrude right click to cancel that Extrusion and then alt s to scale in I'm not going to go too far it's going to look weird maybe just a little bit right here like that basically just a supporting element in this area and then I'm just going to scale this a bit on the Z as well just like that and now you're going to see we have a pretty interesting element here but it will look a lot better if we introduce some bevels around these edges here you'll see what I mean so let me alt shift click all these edges right here and we're going to Bevel it and we only need a few segments here nothing crazy just like that make sure your auto smooth is catching it might have to increase it a bit and there we go now we have a much softer interior detail see what I mean so that looks great and I'm going to do the same thing to this upper Edge I'm going to Bevel this one just a little bit I just think it's going to look cool really make it you know kind of a nice combo of softer edges and harder edges and that really gives you a much better hard surface kind of sci-fi look to it which is awesome exactly what I want and then finally on this outer portion I want to do the same thing crlr to add a loop cut click and then right click to cancel and contrl b e to extrude right click to cancel and then alt s scale this a bit on the Z and then just same idea going to introduce some bevels here nothing crazy and if you don't want to if you don't want to have to keep adjusting this basically you'll just need like an extra segment or something so it's not so blocky and that should uh fix that problem and now we have this really clean upper portion this here is going to be the top of our crate so I definitely like how this looks very clean very simple now what we need to do is make the bottom portion there's many different ways we could approach this so the easiest way I'd say is the cube you just add in a cube um before we do that we need to move this 3D cursor back over here so shift s cursor to world origin and then we're going to press shift a to add in Cube and kind of move that down and then what you could do is you could just bevel this manually this is a perfectly okay strategy uh however it's not going to be the most precise because see that it's kind of sticking out we're not exactly where we need to be even if I use the same amount of segments which I believe was 12 it's going to be a little bit hard to line up so for that reason I would just recommend stealing the geometry that already exists very easy to do we're just going to go into Edge mode okay we're going to alt click on these edges here shift d to duplicate um don't know what I just did there found the issue I accidentally turned on snapping turn that guy off don't know what I did but anyways there's our duplicate set of edges and then P separate by selection now we're going to have the main piece and we're going to have this piece down here you might have to click a few times to be able to select it but there we go and then we're just going to go into vertex mode and basically select everything and just extrude this down on the z-axis so really easy you can make this as tall as you want I'm just going to make it you know reasonable right click to shade Auto smooth and just like that we have this really clean result right here now the only problem we currently have is that this piece right here has no thickness to it see what I mean it's just basically two-dimensional there's no thickness so what we need to do is we need to go in here and we need to add in a solidify modifier and I'm actually going to press forward slash on the numpad to isolate the view and we can solidify it but you're going to see we have a problem generally when issues like this arise it either has to do with bad uh geometry like overlaps and things like that or it has to do with normals those are generally the two c Brits the first thing I test always is normals you can just press shift n with everything selected that'll recalculate everything and uh fix the problem if that doesn't fix it make sure you have no like overlapping edges or things like that sometimes that could cause problems as well but most of the time it's just an issue with the normals all right I'm going to make this a little bit thicker here you can go in either direction since I want to move this kind of inside I'm going to go in the positive direction here just have something kind of like that and then once you're happy with it you can just apply the solidify modifier and uh you'll be good to go awesome and then I'm just going to make a chamfer here just a one segment bevel on this interior Edge just because might look cool I don't want to go too heavy on the repeated elements because it can cause overwhelm eventually it becomes something called sandwiching where you just have too many elements kind of repeated so I'm actually going to leave that one alone I don't want to go too crazy on it um but what I'm definitely going to do is introduce some more echoed elements in here as well so again we'll just add in a loop cut and bevel it to make this one pretty large so that way I have more room to add in a bevel and then to extrude right click to cancel and then alt s to scale in here along the normals and then just s and then Z we're going to scale like that okay and then alt shift click on all of these edges here and we're just going to introduce a decent size bevel on these areas and you're just going to see it looks so much more interesting on the inside just by introducing you know more repeated elements It's usually the most basic tools that get you to where you need to go but it's you know the design skills you have in your head and how to use those simple shapes you already have to make it look more visually appealing and again that's why I'd really recommend checking out that training I'm going to link below because we go in depth into all those different principles lots of Juicy information in there you can check it out so now down here at the bottom um I do want to fill this bottom area in there's a few different ways we could do it I'm actually going to make a separate piece for the bottom so what I'm going to do is alt click this area again we're going to duplicate it with shift d p to separate by selection and then I'm just going to press the F key to fill it in and then just extrude it down a bit now we're going to kind of have like a separate piece here on the bottom looks kind of interesting right and then here for the inside the only thing I don't really like is um the fact that we kind of have like these flat areas now in order to to Bevel this there's not really an edge right here because essentially you know there's no face here on the bottom so we're probably going to want to add that might be a little bit tricky in this situation but what we're going to do is add in a loop cut then we're going to alt click on this strip of faces here and you can't just press the F key it doesn't work like that what we're going to need to do here is we're essentially just going to need to scale this entire thing in we're going to press um in this case going to press s shift Z to make sure it's not scaling at all on the z-axis then we're going to press zero that's going to scale everything into one point and then a really easy way to get rid of this stuff is to select everything press X and then dissolve or limited dissolve here set this to like 0.1 it should uh capture the flat areas only and if you still have weird geometry just press um contrl X to disolve that have some issues here let's also try pressing M and then merge by distance you can see we just got rid of a lot of vertices there and then contrl X to dissolve out that Center vertex that we scaled everything into so a little bit of a tricky one but that's a really easy way to just you know solve that problem there and there we go now we have a nice and basic shape I'm going to unhide this guy here on the bottom and now what I want to do is just take these edges alt click them and we're just going to Bevel it and then make some more segments here and we might have some issues down here interesting so I found the problem remember when we dissolved out that vertex you want to be careful this is why you need to understand guys how to you know identify all these different topology and shading issues if you haven't yet bought the hard surface accelerator course we do have a ton of information on topology and shading that type of stuff in one of the sections just because it's such a a major player in 3D modeling if you don't know how to solve it you're just going to be punching yourself in the face it's annoying uh but basically in this case when I dissolve this vertex I'm going to press contrl X Watch what it did it kind of snapped this Edge back here so when I tried to Bevel this it wasn't hitting those edges we need to make sure this one's dissolved as well so usually these issues you run into that I hear all the time I can solve them within 5 seconds because they're very basic issues you just have to know where to look right so now what we can do is alt click introduce our bevel and uh we are looking good so at this point if you want to get fancy if you want to make this look even more interesting you can like for example I could even go in here and just start introducing like additional detail if I wanted to right I could could do something kind of shallow like that add some bevels to it and then I just kind of have like you know some cool elements up here as well again be careful with it because there's a very fine line between echoing detail and just straight up sandwiching your mesh so you could kind of you know if you have that sandwiching issue which we kind of have here a lot of elements in the same direction you could always try biasing the same detail kind of towards the bottom there so with all that geometry selected I just kind of slid that down and you can kind of get away with that as well that actually looks pretty cool kind of just you know makes it feel more balanced right think of it like jewelry for a model right if you if you just wear completely plain clothes it's kind of boring but once you introduce some jewelry there it kind of fills the Gap right same idea with uh models basically um you know all this visual design stuff applies not only to 3D but you know architecture designing your house addressing everything and eventually the more you do it the more you kind of develop that eye for it now only thing that's bothering me is this is below the Grid it's kind of weird to look at I could disable the Grid it's fine uh I just don't like to I think it looks cool so what we're going to do is unhide that one we're just going to move this up can hold control to snap it and just move that on the top of the grid more or less doesn't really matter as long as it's above it and now we have this uh cool looking crate here now my challenge to you is to design a hatch for the top basically like an opening right so that's my challenge to you play with it see what you get uh for right now we're going to move on into the UV unwrapping stage now for those of you who don't know UV unwrapping is the way we Define areas of our mesh so that way we can texture it the way texturing Works especially in like substance painter or something is whenever we add textures to our model it actually adds it to a two-dimensional version of our model and then projects it kind of folds it into origami into the three-dimensional version so basically what we need to do is we need to unwrap this model basically flatten it kind of like origami so if UV on wrapping is tricky to you I understand but it's actually not as hard as you think because I'm going to show you the easy way so make sure you have um just a material added to any of these basically um so what we're going to do is make sure these have the same material if they don't you basically select the two without the material and then you shift click on the one with the material and then you copy the material it'll add it to all of them awesome so we're going to go one by one the first one I want to start with is the middle piece because it's the easiest so we're going to go in here and we also need to go into look Dev mode to see the material now we're not going to you know make materials right now the reason I'm using this is because I want to see the unwrap so what we have to do is go here to the Shader editor and basically you press shift a texture and then image texture here going to go to new make this whatever size you want set it to UV grid and then just connect this up to the base color here like that and what that's going to do is it's basically going to add in this Checker texture but right now we can't see anything so the easy way is to press U smart UV project and do that the issue with blender's smart UV project feature is it's not good you can see these really visible you know seams kind of an areas they shouldn't be there's multiple seams and we don't need that this is why I always recommend unwrapping this on your own so first thing we need to do is go up here to options and turn on live unwrap so that way when we add our seims it'll automatically update the unwrap so with hard surface models basically what you do is you add seams to the hard edges basically the areas where if you swiped your finger on it it would probably cut it so these hard edges right here right so I'm going to go to select select sharp edges and we're going to right click let's go into make sure we're in look Dev right click Mark seam and this is going to be a good start now if I go into you know top view notice how we kind of have this circular pattern all the way around this it's kind of a circular pattern now in the context of UV wrapping let me go into the UV editor here select everything and also I need to remove this map I don't need that cool so what we have here is something called a ring you can kind of see it looks like a ring because it's kind of you know circular now imagine you have a piece of paper you take both pieces of paper and you tape both ends together you would have a circle like a piece of circular paper right if you wanted to flatten that Circle you would have to cut where you taped it same idea applies here to flatten this circle out this ring as I call it we need to just cut it so we can cut it pretty much anywhere and the way we do that is we hold alt to select the strip of edges we need to make sure these are connecting the other ones right click to Mark a seam and we're done boom so now what that's going to do is it's just going to completely flatten that out for you it's no longer a ring kind of taped together it's completely flat and obviously you're going to have a seam wherever you place it but you just want to make sure you place your seams in areas you can't see them since this is a symmetrical object on all the axes except z um we can just put this anywhere basically and I usually put this right at the end of the bevels I think it looks better so that looks great now these two here on the top are fine we have to also do the same thing to the inside now what I see a lot of people do is on the outside they'll put a seam and on the inside they'll put another one like on the other side right and and you don't want to do this you want to actually be consistent about the placement so that way you have a SE in one area of your object and that's it so let me hold alt and put one right here to Mark the seam and we're also going to have to put one here on this bottom area Mark the seam there and you're going to see it's a little bit kind of tilted but that's uh that's okay and now what I want to do is unwrap this again and make sure we're set to conformal conformal is the option we have to use for hard surface models okay and that's just going to be a little bit better uh in terms of the unwrap now this is a little bit tilted don't worry we're going to fix that now if you're just using like a grungy texture this type of you know tilt to it doesn't matter but if this is like a wood texture the wood would be kind of like tilted it would look weird um so basically what we can do is we can use a tool called UV squares and you can get this I believe for free on gumroad or blender market and basically you just install it you go here you go to two grid by shape and that just will straighten it out for you you have to make sure everything is made of quads in this case it's all quads right all these faces are have four vertices so basically if I press two grid by shape it's going to do it for us it's going to look a lot better and now everything's straight obviously we have a seam here you could always try like moving this to see what you know types of results you can get sometimes you can kind of blend it together but um you know it's not always going to be perfect but there you go so that is a nice clean unwrap I have absolutely no issues with this at all I'm very happy with that and now we're just going to move on to this one this one's a mess as well so again select sharp edges right click to Mark the seam choose an area now we want to be consistent again I know this is a separate object but make sure you're consistent with a seam placement you don't want a seam here and then you have a seam on the other side for the top be consistent with it we're going to put the seam right here following that one as well as a matter of fact I'm just going to choose this strip I don't want it to go over quite yet one piece at a time and if I press the L key in face mode you can see it looks very clean can do two grid by shape to straighten that one out looks great and this top piece this is actually okay this is an example of a ring that doesn't matter cuz it's on the top area but if you wanted too you know can Mark a seam down that area as well and I'm also going to do the same thing on the inside here right click to Mark the seam and we're going to make sure everything's looking good let's just isolate this view real quick and as long as the checkers look clean and consistent you don't have to stress too much all right awesome so make sure you save your blender file you don't want to crash and the last one down here uh this is going to be really easy um just select the sharp edges Mark the seam and again just be consistent about where you place this seam right here because we need to get rid of this ring put it right there and there we go now we have a pretty clean unwrap no complaints so now the question is how do we unwrap everything together because we unwrapped all of these separately and the issue with that if I select everything is a lot of these are overlapping so if I had a texture here projecting in this portion it's also going to project onto the overlapped areas it's going to be no good so we need to make sure we unwrap everything together so select everything with the a key in edit mode here and press U to unwrap it and it's going to be okay now although I said these top rings are are fine technically they're going to occupy space like imagine imagine you had like a like a plastic pipe and it was like a circular pipe right like a hula hoop kind of and you wanted to pack this into a suitcase it's going to be much more efficient if that hula hoop was like completely straightened out right you could pack it like up in the corner and it would be nice and just out of the way versus if you just have like a big circle you'd have to like shove in right so the same idea here it's not going to pack as nicely because we want to get these islands as efficiently packed in here as possible so in those cases that's actually is a good reason to at least you know put a seam here on the top because at least we can you know use the UV squares to flatten that out and get us a much better packing solution so I'm going to do that um let's make sure those are those are both cut which is great here we should be fine I think we need to go to the top here now we just have one big end gone here on the top very easy way to fix it let me go into solid View you're going to see right now we have a connection point which is great so if we press contrl T and Alt J as long as the you know edges here have like a one to one correspondence it's going to just triangulate it and then turn it into quads basically so really easy solution there we also have to do it on this portion contrl T Alt J and for some reason we have some weird geometry down here let me contrl X to dissolve that one out looks good to me awesome and now I can just take this area here add a seam and now I no longer well it looks like I have a ring but it's actually cut it's just you can't see it if I try to use the two grid by shape it would flatten out just fine versus if there was no seam there it actually wouldn't it might do something sometimes it works like in this case it did uh but just to be safe add a seam and you'll be good to go so I think that sorts out all of our Rings maybe we're missing no I think that's it cool that was the one that was kind of giving us the fake out so now we just have to select everything here U to unwrap and essentially once you've unwrapped it um what you want to make sure you do is you number one make sure you're setting in formal again very important number two we need to take all of these pieces one by one you might be able to do multiple at once you can try and go to two grid by shape in this case it worked and these guys we want to make sure are nice and straight as well two grid by shape sometimes it just has a hiccup and I think it's a bug you have to do these separately just undo it a few times until it works and then just with everything selected we're going to go ahead and go to uh I would highly recommend getting UV pack Master if you're serious about a game asset workflow this is a non-negotiable like get UV packmas period I I can't even stress how important this is okay but if you're just doing this for fun or whatever and you don't really give a then fair enough um we're going to go here to UV average Island scale that's going to make sure everything is even and then we're going to go here to pack Islands blender does an okay job at this and I also forgot to flatten this one out as well let me do that real quick so again average Island scale pack islands and blender is going to do an okay job um but UV packmas is going to do a much better one it's going to find a way to fill this in much more efficiently we have a lot of empty space we could be utilizing so I'm going to go here to UV packmas very easy you have to go here to Advanced options turn on normalize Islands that's the same thing as the average Island scale I tend to use herur istic and I use the search time Max search time 10 seconds just like that and then at that point you're ready to just click on the pack button and it's going to get us a decent result packing obviously we can't pack this too much more efficiently however what we can do is we can delete faces that we're not using and we're not going to see for example here on the bottom you probably won't even see this face unless it's tilted to the side but you definitely won't see the faces here in between these two pieces right right so I'm going to go here I'm going to go to the face mode delete that face and then I'm going to go to this one here and delete this top face and you're going to see there's no visible difference the only time this would cause a problem is if you plan to use a bevel because if I add a bevel here I'll just add a bevel modifier right it's let me make this smaller it's not going to be able to Bevel over that because we deleted the face so be careful if you do want to add in a bevel you're you're going to need to make sure you actually have that face so I'm going to undo it and um I'm going to keep the faces because I'm going to add a bevel modifier not a bad idea I'm going to use one segment we call this the mid poly strategy and I'm just going to make this a lot smaller you can hold shift and then I'm going to go to hard and normals and basically as long as you have the copy attributes add-on turned on it comes with blender turn it on you can select these two shift click on this one and then contrl C copy selected modifiers and then bevel and it'll copy it over and now we'll kind of have this clean you know separation from the bevel here which is uh awesome you won't need to re unwrap this you should be fine and um but in this case we can't delete those faces because if I delete it again just as a reminder if I delete this face the bevel goes away because it needs something to Bevel over okay so I think this is a decent enough result like there's 's not too much else we can do unless we added a bunch of seams everywhere uh so yeah I'm going to leave this as it is I'm happy with it and we can continue on so let's take a look at this again and now we're look Dev very clean unwrap uh the only thing I don't like is that these squares are a bit smaller interesting sometimes it has to do with the tool we use that UV squares let me try unwrapping everything again you and then unwrap um and let's just do these one by one because some of these we might not want to touch because for example here um if I go to UV squares and go to two grid by shape yeah what that ends up doing is kind of squishing those squares together so um in this situation I don't want to do that can also try it for this one if we press the L key for this inside let's make sure we don't have the same issue two grid by shape it kind of squished those interior ones which is not exactly what I wanted so we could you know we could technically leave that one alone you could also add more seams if you wanted to it might actually help it like you could add a seam right here but I don't want to do that it's just going to look strange so this one's this one's technically fine I don't like the fact that it's rotated so I'm just going to try to rotate that a bit so it's more or less kind of straight up there's a 20% rule with this type of stuff meaning you know if it's like 20% tilted or 20% smaller than the other squares generally the human eye can't really tell the difference and that's a rule I've kind of always followed because I've definitely noticed that to be true slightly tilted but especially the textures we use not something to really notice um but at the very least I should be able to straighten these guys out let me just see which one that is I think it's this guy in the top we won't see too much of that so that's fine and same for this one here on the top this one we should be able to straighten out without issues so let me go here to UV squares straighten that out and this one's actually consistent great so UV unwrapping can be a little bit tricky you just have to be careful and now again I'm just going to reuse UV packmaster to pack these islands here and before I do that it looks like I ALS o missed one more let me take this guy and straighten that one as well and we can go ahead and just uh make sure everything selected pack everything together and with UV packmaster this is the best it could possibly do in terms of the most efficient way to uh pack these items together even if we do it again it's basically going to be stuck at no that's a bad number let's try this again 668 that's better and just let that run and this is you know this is acceptable right generally I eyeball this and if the squares look small enough then you know I'm pretty happy and I'm happy with this result awesome so now at this point we have to do a few small optimizations and then we're ready to bring this guy over into substance painter texture it and uh everything is going to look great okay let's go ahead and close this panel we don't need it here and we're ready to basically do the export in first things first I do like to join everything together so especially like there's rules to that like this is all basically one piece so you might as well but if this is like separate pieces like there is like a wire cable attached to it or something by all means you don't have to join them together but since this is more or less like one uniform object you can press contrl J and just get that joined together and um yeah should be good to go now what we can do is we can rename it you can name this literally whatever you want however I'm just going to call it uh crate easy easy enough if you're doing like low poly and high poly which we're not doing here there's different solutions but uh nowadays it doesn't matter as much which is great and then what I like to do is I like to go here to the this right here and then drag this so it has the same name uh just to be safe sometimes it can cause problems but you should be fine and now I need to do is just go to the modifiers panel we're going to add in a triangulate modifier and if you want to see how that looks go here to view Port display and then go here to wireframe and that's just going to make sure everything's triangulated also take on the keep normals button this is very important because sometimes game engines or texturing software they will automatically triangulate for you and it's just it won't triangulate as good as blender will do so just make sure you add this modifier to avoid issues awesome and generally the very very last thing I do is I go to the bottom face and I move the origin point there so shift s cursor to selected and then right click set origin to the 3D cursor and now the origin is going to be right there at the bottom which is awesome can go ahead and turn the wireframe off here and we are ready to go we can go ahead and Export this so file export fbx and I'm going to just call this crate fbx and also make sure you turn on selected objects so that way it doesn't export anything else that might be in your scene in this case we only have one but just do this for good measure and uh export the fbx and now we're going to hop straight into substance painter now if you've never use substance Panner before don't worry I've got you covered it's very similar to photoshop this is going to be a fun process let's go here to file new and we're going to use 4K uh direct X is fine just leave leave it at that you can always flip that pretty easily if you need to uh we're going to go to select so right here we're going to choose the crate double click on that and we don't really need to do anything else uh Auto unwrap I'm going to turn that off CU we already we already did the the unwrapping right so we don't need to deal with that to click on okay and there we go you're going to see this thing is displaying just fine here in substance painter I am going to change this view here to I don't want to have this little UV area so believe it's this one we're going to go to 3D only just like that and now we're ready to start texturing now I'm going to delete this layer here I don't need that I don't care about it and I'm just going to start with something basic we don't have to go crazy with it but um just going to find some sort of cool material you could even use Smart materials which have like presets built in like scratches and grunge um but you can kind of you know go through here and search see what you like not sure if there's a way to make this panel a bit bigger just because uh I don't like how small these are I'm going to go here and I'm going to type in plastic and we have a few different ones this one is one of my favorites because it kind of gives you a base to go off of so we're going to do something like that can also try this one or this one just kind of see like what different types of plastics and what you like better um I don't want to add all these but you know you get the idea so I'm going to go with this one right here this plastic used and I don't want to have this tan color I'm going to go into the folder and for the base color here I'm going to make this more on the gray side kind of like that on the darker side there we go you can also hold shift and right Mouse button to move that hdri around and we have way too many scratches so you can kind of turn these off and on and see what's doing what so we have these white Speckles way too heavy in my opinion we're going to drop that opacity down just a bit just so it looks better and for the base I'm going to make this a little bit darker again and we're also going to make this metallic I think a metallic would look kind of cool and again a little bit too dark whenever you go metallic it tends to get darker so just be careful with that and we have these nice little bumps on the surface again a little bit too heavy I'm going to drop this down to about 25% and it is absolutely storming outside so if you hear that my apologies okay in this case we can't use that slider what we need to do here is actually go to the um this physical mask and just drop that flow a bit there we go so just a nice little basic texture we have going on here I might might even try like a green I think maybe a green could look kind of cool I don't know just move this see what we think let's see how it looks if it's not metallic maybe non- metallic would be even better you can kind of play with this and see you know what type of results you want I might need to pause this recording because the weather is terrible right now you can also play with the roughness I don't want to make this too reflective but I also don't want to make it too matte I think like you know in this bottom half would probably be the best in terms of reflectivity and we could also you know play with the value here a bit saturation and just see what you want something like that could be okay um I still don't know if I want like a more gray type of color maybe that'll be better honestly keep in mind you don't have to uh you know follow the design choices I'm making feel free to make up your own so what I want to do now is make some sort of pattern here towards the top I think that'll uh kind of give us the kind of the balance that we need I think so first thing I'm going to do is take this rubber I think this rubber is kind of the um effect that I want this one right here we could also try this one or maybe this one nah I like this default rubber here so now what I want to do is I want to rightclick to add a black mask this will remove everything now once I paint whites into this black area it will reveal it so what I need to do is I basically need to go in here and just paint on it and you're going to see it's going to reveal that but this isn't actually what I want I want to have a texture I want to have a texture that has the same properties of this rubber right here so what I can actually do is I can add in a uh a fill layer going to go here and to drag this to the top and B basically a fill layer just default layer you can change colors metallic roughness all that I don't want any of this I'm going to turn all these off I only want height information okay so we're going to go here and I'm just going to type in I already did it cuz I had to re-record this part but type in diagonal going to choose this fabric diagonal and what this is essentially going to do if I go back here and I start painting this in we're going to actually have this kind of diagonal texture now the first thing I need to do is make sure let me actually right click and clear this mask so I can remove the mask sorry so I can see this so I'm going to just rename this to diagonal texture so I know what it is and I'm just going to make this tile really really high you know kind of like that and what I also want to do here actually you know what this is fine so we're going to go back to this main folder and keep in mind this just has multiple different properties we have the texture we have you know this rubber effect the color it's just all kind of piled in into one folder so I'm going to right click and add a black mask which will affect everything in the folder and now what I can do is I can hold uh what is the command again to hop into the side view still used to blender it's a alt shift and left Mouse button you can kind of hop into these different views here so basically what I want to do is I want to have this strip of detail all the way across the top let me turn this back on for some reason that got turned off and there we go we're going to kind of have this cool effect kind of like that now we can also hop into orthographic mode in this case it's the F6 command if you want to have a much better kind of view of this and what we're also going to do is we're going to change the type of brush we're using here okay we're going to go here to the alpha and we're just going to search for a rectangle we're going to choose this one we're also going to make sure the hardness is fully set to one then I'm going to hold control right Mouse button going to make that as big as possible and then control left Mouse button can move up and down to make this can change the rotation so it's nice and even uh where's the rotation option it's up here somewhere there it is so you know I could change this to zero it's going to be perfectly flat and now what I'm going to do is click here hold shift and click across and then we're going to kind of get that effect there now if we go back into the 3D and 2D view we can basically see you know what's happening I would normally oops I would normally kind of go in here and just paint that in manually but I'm just going to do one side at a time just because remember that was a little bit rotated from what we have before so go back into 3D only going to hold shift going to try to you know make sure I get that as accurate as I can and we're going to go across and if you ever want to remove a portion that's very easy all you need to do is change this gray scale Back to Black and then just click and you can kind of line this up if you need to we're just going to do one more side and turn this back to White so it will reveal it black conceals white reveals that's the rule and then just get in here and you know you can kind of line this up if you want it's kind of nice to have a little bit of inaccuracy it's going to look a lot more natural so keep that in mind but this is more or less the uh you know the kind of result I want on this particular object also I don't believe substance painter unfortunately has a paint through option otherwise I would have done it that way but what I'm going to do is change this to Black and just kind of you can also hold control right Mouse button to make that smaller and I'm just going to try my best to kind of just line up up these areas a bit unless substance made an update recently that I'm not familiar with I don't believe there's like a paint through option CU that would have been a heck of a lot easier in my opinion but what can you do and that looks fine and then what we're going to do is go in here and just try to line that up and line this up as well right there from the top to the top and that just looks heck of a lot better in my opinion now if you want to get fancy you can always go in here you can go to the rubber base you can change things like the you know color if you want to kind of give it like a kind of a contrast to it you're more than welcome to do that that looks great now I also need to line up a little bit darker I also need to make sure I line up the top portion here so click let get that lined up to me being a little bit pedantic but you know if you want quality results this is uh what you should probably be doing and then just go in here finish up this one and uh I'm definitely fine with this this looks good we have this cool little texture and then we can go to this diagonal texture we can bend it right if you want it to be like straight you can pretty much get whatever result you want I'm going to go to 0. five and also we're going to increase the number here so that way it's a little bit cooler looking I guess you can play with the tiling if you want I think this is fine and if you don't want it to be bent you can always keep it straight but I think that you know 45 degree Bend is pretty cool try like eight on the number and uh that looks good to me now I also want to get the same effect right down here on this uh this little bottom piece right so same exact idea let me go back to the mask turn that up and this is basically the area I want to add it now this one should be very easy to line up because we actually have like a a guidance line just going to hold shift and click you might need to make this smaller otherwise substance might just not want to work with you even smaller than that click here hold shift click to here and again here hold shift click to there there there we go again it's annoying there's not like a paint through option but uh I just don't think they've implemented that into substance yet and then we just kind of have this effect which is uh which is decent kind of gives it a more mechanical look which is precisely what I wanted now here on the bottom I want to make some sort of floor I think that would be natural kind of like a crate would have some sort of rubber floor or something so let's add in another one first let's press alt shift and then drag up to the top view change this over to orthographic this is going to be very important and now what we're going to do is find a different we could use the same material the rubber maybe try a different one I think this one that we just used was pretty cool so what I'm going to actually do is straight up just duplicate it right click going to go to duplicate layers this time we're going to clear the mask okay cuz we're going to be painting in our own version here so let's go ahead and it's going to be tricky in the corner but let's see if there's a different Alpha we could use a more square one so let me type in square looks like we have a square one right here we can use going to make sure that hardness is turned up to uh one I think we're good and basically if we hold control and drag this up we can at least gets you know most of it filled in right so we're going to do that and then we have to be careful around those Corners which isn't really a problem uh so what I'm going to do is get over here get over here and just try to fill in the easy parts right and now all I really need to do is I need to go in here and type in let's remove the square and type in shape use this default one and we're just going to really get in make sure the hardness here is set to one it's completely it's not like faded at all okay and now all we really need to do is get in just kind of paint in there try our best right don't have to be perfect you just need to be good enough to uh get the result you want you're going to see we have the seam CU remember we marked a seam in there you know it's kind of the name of the game sometimes you're just going to have to see the seams but not really a big deal so going to get in can hold shift and just you know slowly paint around there again this doesn't have to be perfect because an item like this wouldn't be perfect in the first place a lot of this detail would kind of be like you know rusting away and things like that so it's a little bit on the bevel but that's okay I don't like the color on this one so what I am going to do so I'm going to go here in the folder go to that rubber base color we're going to make this really really dark here okay and we could also try metallic it's going to look weird I think though so maybe not the roughness definitely is not going to be reflective this is going to be higher and if you want to you can always go back to the mask and paint even higher I think painting right around the bounds of this bevel would be a good idea so let's change back to orthographic it's actually a little bit hard to see in orthographic so maybe we'll stick with perspective and just try to fill in you know this beveled area I think it'll look better so we're just going to get in right and I just think this looks a little bit better kind of on the bottom there which is awesome and on this particular one I'm going to select the diag Al texture I don't want this to bend at all I think maybe just like a straight one with more like a more of a number here it could be kind of cool kind of gives it like a much more natural look there on the bottom kind of rusting out and um yeah I just don't think the bend here looks good so I'm going to leave it straight and also this kind of mitigates the issue with the seam because now it kind of has this you know 90° thing where the seam is which is awesome now what I'd like to do is introduce some Edge wire now technically I should have done this before I even started texturing I just forgot not a big deal what we need to do is go to the texture set settings here we need to bake out our ambient occlusion for those nice shadows and also our curvature map for the edges now it's probably going to mess some things up but we can fix it so basically turn everything off except for ambient occlusion here and the curvature setting you can honestly you can just leave everything default should be fine and we're going to go to bake selected textures and then return to painting mode and it messed a little bit of the you know details up that's fine the reason it did this is because now we actually have ambient occlusion and curvature information so it looks like this weird kind of foggy effect on it came from this guy here so let's just go into the folder find the culprit looks like it was this guy the edges so if we just go to the map mask and then go to the generator here we can just drop that Global balance a bit or we can leave it up and simply drop the opacity of it so it's not so heavy and there we go now this looks a little bit better drop the balance a bit more there we go and let me also go in here and change the color just make a little bit less uh less dark right around there seems like a nice contrast between this texture and the actual base color we have going on which is great right so pretty simple asset it's looking good and you could add all sorts of stuff honestly you could add in Rust you could add in really whatever you want for example I could go in here and type in Rust and I could literally add the rust right click go to add black mask and then we're going to add a generator then what we could do is kind of generate that rust we could try like the dirt set in could try the curvature setting could try any of these really um I'm going to do this one and maybe drop the effect of it it looks a little bit weird but this is something you can do if you want to kind of get some you know kind of rusy in areas but on this particular thing I don't like it going to get rid of it now what I want to do is add some text to this thing kind of like engraved text basically so I'm going to add in a fill layer I'm going to right click to add a black mask so we have some control I'm also going to make sure we have all this turned on we can turn off normal for right now um metal as well and if I increase this height information and try to paint onto the mask you're going to see depending on the direction we're going if I go in negative it's going to kind of engrave that into that um object which is exactly what I want now what I need to do is I need to choose an alpha that gives me text control so we're going to go in here and you can take any of these really this one's kind of cool so literally I could go in scale that up check that out it's pretty cool isn't it I'd recommend finding you know a text font here that kind of fits what you want this one's pretty cool it's like a Sci-Fi look to it so I can go into the side I can do that as a matter of fact I can even turn off the color information here and then it's literally just going to be an engraved text which is awesome you can turn everything off basically except for the height information so that's cool and then what we need to do is just change the text you know I just put some like random garbage whatever you want and that should update I don't think it updates retroactively though which is no problem just type in the text you want and um I'm going to go ahead and add that in and we're just going to turn off everything except for the height information and now you kind of have that cool like engraved effect you can make that deeper if you want or you can make it you know go outwards I'm going to go in the negative like that it looks really cool and then finally what we could do is here we could add in some sort of like you know logo maybe this is like a recycling container on a different planet whatever it may be I'm going to go into orthographic and press the F key to zoom in and we're just going to add in another fill layer here and all I want on this one is color information that's it so I want color information and I want to make this kind of a green color and then I'm going to right click to add a black mask and we're just going to go here to the alpha and this time we're just going to find a cool Alpha in this panel maybe like a recycling logo could be cool or biohazard whatever you want this could be like a Sci-Fi kind of recycling logo I guess um let's go in and just find a good place to put it you know you don't want it to look out of place which it kind of does right now if I'm honest so maybe we could go to the back side and add that in over there or even try like a different logo maybe a different logo will feel more balanced on this thing so right there above it not really fitting what I want to go for but maybe if I just do like a really small one right there you know I just don't think that one fits what I'm going to try to find is a more rectangular one that kind of makes more sense in the context could do something cool like this just a random little detail doesn't really have to mean anything it just has to look cool right and then if you want to you can always go back in here and kind of change the color if you want it to kind of pop out a bit more there you go make that a little bit darker right around there should be fine so that is really it I think this is a good stopping point feel free to add in more detail if you want that's uh totally up to you I definitely like how this thing looks I decided to change this to a red color just because I don't know I think it looks better and also I think this is too big so what I'm going to do is just clear that mask and then just make another one here that's just a little bit smaller and just get it right there in the middle more or less there we go and I'm definitely happy with this so that is basically it for the process you model and blender you do a little bit of unwrapping you triangulate the model and then you bring it here into your texturing software of choice and you texture it and you're good to go so at this point this kind of depends on what you're doing afterwards you would go up here to export textures and um depending on where you're using this you would have you know different options here and for example if you're using like cry engine there's presets for that so this part's up to you you just choose the area you want to export it and then you choose the folder I would export in 4k you export the textures you bring them into your software of choice and you're good to go that's really it so I hope this video was valuable if it was uh definitely check out some of our stuff over on blunder bros.com like I said we have a really good free training I would highly recommend uh you give a watch it's going to help you a lot with your visual design and if you want something a little bit more Hands-On you can check out our hard surface accelerator program over on our website that one is really good as well so thanks for watching see you in the next one

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 7,806

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Id: 5dgMPL28TlE

Length: 60min 56sec (3656 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 01 2023