Texturing Fundamentals | Blender - UE4 / Unity

a what's up everyone and welcome to the second video in the low-polygon asset design course in this video I'm gonna go over two different methods for texturing your model the first method is the longer more standard method for texturing a model second method will be at the very end of the video and will be very short and that method will focus on the material only based method that is very useful for these low polygon single colored objects let's get started now typically you're always working in quads but in this scenario where we're working on this low polygon model we're gonna go ahead and cut into tribes now and the reason for that is whenever you work on a model when you're working in quads the entire time or even larger than quads and you bring that FBX into unity or Unreal Engine 4 it'll go ahead and it'll cut tries for you okay and that's not really a big deal when you have these flat planes that are set into quads or even larger than quads because it doesn't matter no matter how the engine cuts it there's still flat faces so they're still going to appear flat in our scenario we are working on this low polygon model that has these triangles all over the place and these triangles are at different angles and that's kind of a part of what makes it look organic so in this scenario we want to go ahead and cut in two tries now so that we're aware of what those tries will look like okay because they might not necessarily look the best based on the way that the Unreal Engine 4 or unity decides to cut them for us so we're gonna cut them now in advance and set them up exactly how we think they look the best so the way we do that is we make sure we're in edit mode and we are and we will go ahead and just press a to select everything and ctrl T we'll go ahead and cut those tries for us okay now we're gonna notice right off the bat that we probably have because of the way that we've merged things with Union that we're gonna have a couple of things that you know are just not necessary like right here we have 2 verts next to each other with this small triangle totally unnecessary runs all the way down that's going to cause issues with our light map and it just generally doesn't look good so we'll go ahead and we'll select these two and we're gonna hit alt em and we're just gonna merge them at the center because it really doesn't matter we're gonna be keeping everything in trys here and this is already how the tries are gonna look we'll go ahead and render this in a second so we can see another thing we see here is like this face here that's got this cut right through it now that just creates a bunch of additional tries we don't really need so one way we can flatten this try and go out and make this a whole single triangle is by pressing ctrl tab selecting edge and grabbing all the edges that connect here and that are you know you notice that they have a union here and that's actually slicing you know you have one two three four triangles so if we just remove this edge here then we have a problem because we have a vertices that's cutting into the center of another larger triangle and that just doesn't make sense to the engine or to really any renderer okay so we're going to remove both of them so we'll just hit delete after selecting them both and we'll do dissolve edges now that'll give us a flat face here and a flat face here okay we're gonna do the same thing here hit delete resolve edges also come over here do the same thing we dissolve edges and another thing we have going on is we have this face kind of hanging out over our branch here that doesn't necessarily look good so what we're gonna do here is we will just come up here we're gonna hit ctrl tab and go into vertex and we'll bring those two together so at last and we have brought those two together it's got a little bit of randomness to it and that's good we want that but what we don't want is you know things like this that are gonna cause problems for so if we come up here we see there's another issue here we can come back to edge and we'll grab these two we can't delete resolve edges technically we do need this one here okay to make that into a try but one thing we could do to take this vert here and here and bring that to the last and now we've gotten rid of that unnecessary cut we could do the same thing here all time at last and we probably want to keep this one here because that's kind of what brings that branch out and gives it that angle okay so we'll keep that one there keep that whole face but we can go ahead and get rid of that one by pressing alt them and doing at last because I selected this vertice last bringing it there and everything here looks pretty good I don't see anything that doesn't make sense and because we've cut it in two tries we now know what these triangles will look like when they're brought into the engine now what we're going to do is we will go ahead and render this real quick and we'll just do this simply by going to rendered mode coming up here to the world setting and we'll just come down and turn environmental lighting so we can get a good look at what we have going on here and I think this looks you know very organic he's got like a uniqueness to it we have some triangles in there for some lighting to bounce off of which is nice and we have some differences in the branches and we've also cleaned up all the stuff that we don't necessarily need now when you're creating a texture you can pretty much use any image editing software that you want you could use which is free or you could use Photoshop or in this case you see I'm using Adobe Illustrator again like I said it really doesn't matter what's really important to do is just stick to the power of two which is making sure that you always have a square or your texture and the reason for that most people don't know but is because older hardware and GPUs did not really render anything that wasn't you know to the power of two that was kind of essential back in the day really not super important now but it's just good to stick to that rule of thumb and just go to the power to with all your textures okay the other thing here is this image is going to be set up to be a 16 by 16 pixel and the reason it can be so small is because we're going to be exporting this as a PNG and these solid colors here PNG is a lossless image quality and so it's not going to lose any information here in the center it will along these edges here so we're going to make sure that we stick away from those when we do apply our UV mapping and we'll stay here nice in the center but here in the center where there's no colors colliding with each other we're gonna have a nice perfect color and so really it doesn't matter how big or how small we put our you bees in here doesn't matter that this is 16 by 16 pixels and because we're doing these solid colors like we are it allows us to really optimize our game and have these small images for our UV textures I will provide a link to this image so you can just grab it offline and use it in your own project especially for following this tutorial that way don't have to go ahead and create such a simple asset right now but I do recommend that you either practice doing so or figure out how to do so in a software that you will be comfortable with and so what we'll do is we'll just save it out as a PNG and I've already done so and back in blender we are now going to create our UV map so that we can apply that texture to it now first thing we want to do is right down here in blender you'll see that there's this little tab that lets you draw out a new window so we're going to drag out a new window and we are going to go to UV image editor okay now from UV image editor what we can do is we can just drag and drop our texture in here and as you can see we now have our texture in and we can start working with it technically there's two ways we could go about this because we're just using solid colors like we are it's not really imperative that we do a proper seam marking for our UV so what we could do is we we could just select everything hit you and do a smart UV project and apply that image to it we don't really want to do that because it's not the appropriate way to practice doing this most of the time pretty much every scenario you're going to want to learn or know how to do your own unwrap and the reason for that is if you were going to apply like some wood texture to this you know for a little bit of realist realism or like some leaves texture to this you would want to have a proper seam and the reason is is because the seam is where that texture collides with itself and if you didn't have a proper seam if you had some goofy stuff you would have all these weird images happening and in colliding with each other in different ways and so you need to have this proper seam where you can kind of mitigate you know as much as you can of where that's gonna happen and so what we'll do is we'll just practice doing that okay because this is a basics course and it's important to learn things the right way and do things the right way as much as possible so we're gonna start off by marking our scene and the best way to think of a seam is basically if you were making this tree out of paper and most of it was just one sheet technically you would have to be wrapping that tree up and seaming it somewhere putting it back together like this is where your tape would be essentially to hold your little paper mache tree trunk together all right so that's how we try to imagine it with marking seams it can be trial and error and it takes some practice to really get used to doing and the best way to do that is just to jump right in and start doing it okay and if you make a mistake to just see where the issue is over here and try and fix it so what we're going to do is we're gonna make sure that we have edges here and we're going to just start marking a seam and we'll move up along the trunk here and we'll move into the center and because you know good practice we would hide our seam as much as possible we're gonna hide them inside here like so all right and we'll come up here actually we'll get rid of that right there with a straight shot that one goes all the way up all right and now we need to separate these branches from the tree so we're going to mark this all the way around we're gonna do the same with each one of these and couple more here just make sure those are all good and they are and we have a cut that comes all the way down the trunk okay so this is how it would wrap around and we have this cut here and that's gonna let this piece here kind of peel out separate from it and then we have seams running up each branch on the inside and that lets them open up as well okay now we're also going to mark a seam on our canopy okay because it also needs to peel open as well so we're just do our seam just like that we'll leave this side intact and that will keep all this together this is like cutting open the paper and this you know these two pieces will essentially just kind of peel out away from each other okay and so what we do is we're just going to hit after we have the seams selected we're gonna hit ctrl E and then we'll go right here to mark seam okay and that gives you these red lines now the reason we have it marked around here is because the canopy is going to be green this is going to be brown obviously and so these are going to have to go in different parts of our UV map over here all right so they have to be separated and that marking of that seam there allows us to essentially cut this away from the canopy it lets them be two separate pieces so they need to have a perfect seam that goes all the way around everywhere that that's connected to cut it out from it and now that we've marked it we can hit a again select everything you and we're gonna say unwrap right and now what that does is it unwraps both of these and we can see here that we have everything nice and smooth it's always important to check there's no overlapping movies not really a big deal for this because we're gonna have a separate UV for a light map light Maps very important that you don't have overlapping UVs we're here it's not such a big deal all right and so these are nice-looking these are actually really good they work fine and what we're going to do is we're going to come down here we're gonna choose our tree texture if you didn't already drop your texture in then you could just drag and drop it in right now and it would drop these right on top of it we're just gonna choose that now what we're gonna do is we're gonna come down here and we're going to make sure if you don't already have this on it's not on by default we're gonna make sure that keep UV and edit mode mesh selection and sync okay and that's important because what that does is it lets us see everything at once okay and by having that we can just press B here and drag across make sure we have everything selected so we can just scale this down and move it around and we'll head a to deselect B to grab this and s to scale it down and G lets us move it around okay so we're gonna bring this over here and we're gonna select that with B and then G to move it up here we're just gonna put them right in the center we can do this with this low polygon model where we're not really making full use of our entire texture because we're 16 by 16 pixels it's really not a big deal okay if we were you know if we did have like a 256 by 256 image it would be essential that we had everything squeezed in here as tight as possible as you can see with this tree we really don't have much to it okay we just have these two separate pieces and we've set up these extra colors here so that if we wanted we could literally just make another version of this where all we did was select everything and bring it down here and now we have a totally different tree okay so we have that option all right now that we have this set there and we have our image behind our UV this doesn't actually set the UV to the model okay it's just for reference alright so now we know what it would where it would be on our UV texture but now we need to apply the texture in here so that we can actually see it in action and make sure there's no issues with it which there there shouldn't be based on what we see here so what we'll do is we'll go over here and we're going to create a new material and we're just going to say hit a plus here new and we'll just name it tree material alright and then we need to apply texture to that so we'll come over here to the texture and we're going to say new and we'll say tree texture and then right down here we have this new open this is actually where you select your image okay we're going to say open image we're going to travel to where our texture is and we have our tree texture PNG here and so now we see that we have this texture here if we come back to material we see the texture applied to the material and if we were to go to render we would actually see now that we have this texture on our tree it looks good now if all you see is something black here that's because over here in world settings you don't have environmental lighting on okay and that's when you get this alright so environmental lighting becomes very useful especially for these flat color low polygon objects because it lets you see you know the angles in here it gives you lighting from all around it's just a really nice tool to have turned on so that you can check it out after you've applied the texture and we've created our first low polygon asset and we've modeled it and textured it and the next thing we'll do in the next videos we'll move on to setting up the light map UV which is entirely different but very important especially in a low polygon scenario where you don't have moving branches and trees where you are going to want to used baked lighting now the method we just went over was texturing method that you use basically all the time what you can do also is material only okay and for the material only method we will just real quickly select this whole upper area and we'll come over here to our materials and we can just call this one tree canapé and we have that selected we'll just assign that there and we could just pick a color here we could say we want have to be it'll be that green right now I've already pre-selected these groups here so I'll just this will get it drunk drunk and we'll come back here and create a new one and we'll assign that will call this trunk and we will make this trunk a brownish color doesn't have to be perfect and so we could do it this way as well it is important to know that this is a method that is available to you and is very simple very quick you simply select the faces assign a material and color the material and then when you save this and export it as FBX and bring it in Unreal Engine 4 it'll have these materials associated to it if you appreciate the content you can help support this channel on patreon.com slash toxicity gamedev make sure you hit that like button subscribe if you want to see more there's a lot to come peace [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Toxicity Game Dev

Views: 10,805

Keywords: gaming, game development, game dev, ue4, unreal engine 4, unreal engine, blender, 3d, 3d modeling, modeling, low polygon, low poly 3d, design, game design, blender to ue4, game objects, game asset design, tree, texturing, 3d model texturing, blender texturing, blender tips, blender tricks, learn ue4, learn unreal engine 4, learn unreal engine, learn blender, blender modeling, low poly, blender basics, game, tutorial, texture, materials, material, model, level design, 3d texturing

Id: 2lbJ9pIWkiE

Length: 18min 27sec (1107 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 20 2017