Turn your high-poly mesh into a GAME-READY asset!

what's up guys so this is a pretty in-demand type of video i'm going to show you how to take a high poly mesh modeled in blender and turn it into a game-ready asset so obviously much lower poly bake it do all that good stuff so this is actually a piece from our hard surface essentials pack if you haven't grabbed that this thing is an amazing kit bash and materials pack for you to grab i'll put in the description but this is one of the models from our pack which i'll be using for demonstration so uh first of all let's go ahead and discuss the poly count so if we go ahead and select everything and go into edit mode you can see we have about 11 776 vertices in here and for a model this simple it's a bit too much i just realized the banner of my videos was cutting out the poly count but just trust me it is eleven thousand seven hundred seventy six verts for everything bit too high for a game asset so the way i approach these things when i'm turning it into a low poly and ready to bake is i first of all um most in like the most ideal situation i would um have all the booleans here in the modifier stack so that way i can remove them and the reason for that is see this cut down here for example this cut right here waste of geo we could easily bake out this detail in a normal map so this detail we don't really need for a low poly but issue here is i don't actually have any boolean modifiers it's all locked in so if i still have the modifiers live in the stack i would probably just remove this piece but um i'll just show you the more complex but technical way of doing this before we get started i just want to shout out our patreon every single month you guys will get a ton of exclusive tutorials decal packs project files art critique videos the whole nine yards for as little as two bucks a month so if you want to support us on patreon link will be in the description i think you guys will really enjoy it anyways let's get started okay so first thing we need to do is just kind of assess our situation over here i kind of have a long name going on what i'm going to do is rename each of these i'm just going to name this base rename this handles and rename this to canisters okay and i'm actually you know what i'm going to rename all of these to underscore high afterwards because this is really good for management purposes because when we bake we're going to definitely want the high and low poly underscores there okay so now we need to do now that we have this high poly mesh which most of you probably have after modeling we need to turn it into a low poly game ready asset this is really easy to do so eventually we'll join all this together and do all that good stuff but first of all let's just go step by step i'm going to start with this piece just isolate the view with forward slash on the numpad and get to work all right so this is our high poly version as you can see if we go into our edit mode here we can't see it but about 3500 vertices on this piece a bit too much so first thing we're going to do is duplicate this piece with shift d and we're going to rename this new one to base underscore low so uh this is the one we want to kind of decimate and get a little bit lower poly so i'll show you how to approach this the high poly ones done can move that out of the way don't have to worry about it this low poly one or soon to be low poly is the one we're most concerned with so basically what you want to do is take the high poly mesh and start getting rid of just excess geo you don't really need in this case it's a pretty planar hard surface object so you know a lot of these pieces like this thing in the middle um we can we don't want to dissolve this one out here because it's like holding the curvature of this cylinder or cylinder cut rather so we're going to do instead is just deselected these two edges right here get rid of that these connection points are pretty awful but we'll deal with that later right here this bevel way too many segments for a game asset you're not going to be this close to see it so we're going to make it a little bit more low resolution so what i'm going to do and actually what we can actually um do is disable the bevel and weighted normal we don't need those because we're going to end up baking a um either the bevel or we can do it my personal favorite way one segment bevels to keep the poly count low but anyways we're going to do is come in here alt shift click and dissolve out every other edge here basically so ctrl x will do the same thing come in here alt shift click come all the way around dissolve that now you can see it's kind of lower poly and this is kind of the gist of things we're just reducing the poly count to something more reasonable there's no reason to have you know this many sets of edges in the bevel because it's going to be a more low poly game asset and something that we're not going to be zooming in on so dissolve that out we have a straight edge right here get rid of that get rid of this one we need these connection points for the boolean so no big deal we'll assess the n-gon situation later sometimes the n-gons can be problematic depending on how they're connected up if things triangulate well generally it's okay but we'll get to that path when it's you know come upon us so let's first of all just keep working here um we don't need to do this to each side this is a completely symmetrical object on both the y and x axis what i'm going to do is simply run asymmetry across the y and across the x to get the same exact result over here only thing is we'll have a symmetry line we can dissolve that one out we don't need it and dissolve that out as well so um yeah whenever you run a symmetry it's going to add these lines back in so just be wary not really a big deal though just kind of dissolve them out and for some reason this kind of moved let me pull that back a bit and pull this one back a bit because the curvature kind of got hurt right there okay perfect so top's basically done um actually no it's not we do need to do this inside area so what i'm gonna do uh easiest way to do this instead of having like go in and shift click around is to probably use machine tools you know what scratch that we don't need machine tools what we're going to do is select one of these edges here then press shift g select by length make sure the threshold is set to zero and then check or deselect and we should be good let's do one for the offset and then ctrl x to make that lower resolution and let's um deselect this one we'll just go ahead and symmetrize it so control x and then should be low enough i think for resolution and i'm just going to go ahead and run asymmetry get it over on that side get rid of that and we should be good to go so same idea i'm just going to go down to one of these quadrants here and make it lower res so get these guys right here dissolve that out get these guys right here dissolve that out let's go ahead and reconnect this guy up here somewhere we'll just will that be okay that should be fine we'll go ahead and turn on auto merge slide this up slide this one up take care of the top here and then take care of this set this one probably now we'll keep it we'll keep that one then we'll go ahead and symmetrize this way and this way and now it's on all these sides same for the middle one we need to go ahead and get rid of these ones ctrl x slide this one up slide that back up and as well as this one here dissolve all these and once again symmetrize to the left and to the right and really this thing is pretty low poly what do we have right now 2 806 verts still a bit too much this can definitely give some work here um like i said a detail like this can easily be baked we're not gonna really need this so what i'm gonna do is actually patch this up so the easiest way to patch this up here is probably to let me think probably to press the m key and merge at the center m key merge center and then we're going to do oh actually you know what that's going to literally merge at the center isn't it we'll do all these separately so murder sensor merge center and then simply dissolve out these um this loose geo here so what we'll do is symmetrize symmetrize and just dissolve out this extra geo here nothing crazy any non-manifold geo will delete out like that one more and then symmetrize one more time and now that's patched up because um literally if we turn the or view the high poly one right this detail right here will literally bake into a normal map just fine so we're saving some res that way so yeah it's more ideal if you have the boolean live in the stack because you then you can just delete the boolean right but if you've already applied it you might have to go a little bit more manual and not really a big deal let's see what else this way too many segments let's go ahead and do one of these and you already know the drill symmetrize is our friend especially when the object is perfectly symmetrical like this and already we're down to about 2600 verts which is really good for this model here at least not too many other normal map bakes i can really see here i mean we could pick these up technically in a normal map i just don't know how clean it'll be i'd probably leave bigger details like this though so for these guys way too many bevel segments we're going to come in here and simply i don't even need to repeat myself do i you should already kind of get the gist here making this a bit lower res for blender so get that we're gonna go ahead and go down here get these guys here we'll get that one and then just a few more on this guy ctrl x and we're looking good symmetrize again and let's go ahead and check polycount now down to 2300 and i know we can do better what are we missing ah these ones right here way too many so this should be the last set that we need to clean up and honestly when you're making game assets or plan to use it as a game asset you should really kind of um prep these in advance maybe make a backup before you do a lot of segments or something just to kind of speed up the workflow but this is literally how you can turn pretty much any sort of model that's higher res into a more game prepared asset so and don't worry i'm going to show you the whole process besides this because i know this is kind of boring but it is definitely necessary if you want to have something that will actually you know run pretty well so we'll get that and we'll go ahead and symmetrize one last time like that and we're down to about 2200 verts which honestly i can live with this is a somewhat more detailed mesh so 2200 on this guy is probably fine i don't know why this didn't mirror or symmetrize oh it was a i guess it switched back to mirror anyways we'll apply that mirror [Music] right here and actually we're at 2150 vertices which is even more reasonable and actually these little notches right here can definitely be baked into a normal map now um whenever you have a flat surface with these really small minute details you can usually bake them so what i'm going to do is make this even more low poly by simply getting rid of these because we'll bake these on the high poly version and what we're going to do is simply clean this up we'll merge this phase of the center and then merge all these edges right here at the center and just do a little bit of manual cleanup work get rid of this merge and then this edge right here symmetrize to the other sides like that and there we go that actually did a lot for us we went from like one note two thousand one hundred or something down to one thousand two hundred verts this is yeah we're not gonna get any better than this i don't think except maybe for these few little details right here so dissolve these ones out we'll get that maybe not we'll just get this one and yeah this piece is looking pretty clean so at this point if this was the model you were working with or maybe you have a model and you're applying the same strategy at this point what you want to do is once you have a relatively decent poly count given the model obviously a more complex mesh will be higher in poly count something like this will be pretty low but once you have that low poly count you're pretty much ready to bake so there's a few things we can do and there's two different strategies one is baking out a bevel so this one has no bevel on it right and we could technically bake this piece bake the bevel from the high poly like this one if i can find it we can bake the bevel from the high poly onto the low poly and that's a completely valid way to do things a lot of people in the industry do just bevel bakes and it's a normal thing i don't prefer it because one segment bevels are much cleaner downside one segment bevels let me show you right now we have what 1218 verts and the the cleaner way to do this would be to add a bevel with one segment with hardened normals turned on meaning if we add a bevel and do one segment looks pretty clean right we could go up to like three segments and it would be cleaner as you can see but the polycount is going to be way too high for that so it's not worth it we usually do one and you can do harder normals or you could just do a simple way to normal modifier and this is a more clean and accurate way to kind of approach bevels on a low poly mesh do a one segment bevel with face weighted normals and you'll be good to go you don't have to i just prefer it this way even though the poly count is a bit higher let me show you as you can see the poly count did go a bit up to about 2.8 k vertices which it's all about you know your budget right depending on what you're ordered to do i'd recommend going this route though but i guess for the sake of clarity and just people who really really like to conserve geo i won't i will just you know turn the bevel off or remove it remove the weight of normal but i would recommend going one segment bevels with face weighted normals if you want the most detail but we're gonna bake it in this video i think it'll be a bit more of a like more industry standard type of solution to it so let's do that so first things first is a normal map right we're going to need a normal map which means we're going to need a uv layout here which i don't think we have we can go ahead and check we'll go to the uv editor and we don't so we could just do a simple smart uv project and blender will do an okay job i don't prefer this because it's messy one of my preferred ways is to either do it manually or to go up here to select and select all the sharp edges like this and then we can kind of work backwards from here like this edge right here we don't really need selected remove that one remove this edge remove these edges right here and actually now we'll keep those i think remove these two and down here we'll do the same type of thing let's remove these two and these two basically i'm just trying to find a good seam layout so we can get a pretty clean unwrap so these seem to catch so let's go ahead and remove that sometimes if the angle is too steep or not within the threshold you might have to deselect manually so yeah this looks good i think i can get away with this let's go ahead and press ctrl actually no remove that one and remove those two yeah and i missed these as well so we'll remove those and then now we can do control e and mark the seam and as you can see some of these over here are not as we expected let me see does symmetry work with these seams um yes they do that's even better okay so now we have a pretty clean layout for our seams this isn't like the the most practical solution i could probably really get in here and make it better but it's going to be completely fine for what we need so let me go ahead and press a and then unwrap this and you can see we have a much cleaner layout here so in hard surface meshes unwrapping based off of sharp angles is a much easier solution to me and it handles ngons really well which is good so you don't really have to stress too much about that as long as you're not dealing with super curvy surfaces where you really need the the topology to be good like this if i triangulate it like it looks fine you see what i mean it's not going to be a big deal it gets triangulated on bake anyways or not on bake on on export i mean so yeah when you export it it'll get triangulated anyways so no big deal with that so yeah we have a pretty decent layout now the next thing we need to do is check the um how the uvs are you can check the textile density and things like that and the easiest way to do this is to go to the uv editor and add new we'll do a 4k texture so 4096 and just the names fine let's do a uv grid and click ok and i want to see the preview of this so to do that all we need to do is add a material here and connect that up so we'll simply add an image texture so shift a image texture connect that up to base color and then find that color grid or uv grid whatever connect that up and now if we go into material view we can kind of see the unwrap this is actually a really clean unwrap but it's also a pretty basic object so yeah it's a little bit wonky over here i'm not a fan of this we could kind of clean this up by joining things perhaps maybe let me see if we go into the back and maybe clean this up a bit i don't want to spend too long on uvs because that'll just kind of take away the point of this tutorial but i know some people appreciate it so i'll um i'll do it for you guys that like it i'm gonna try my best to kind of you know make this a bit better it's probably more so because in the uv editor itself these are kind of rotated see that so really instead of even adding these edges right here we could simply try to you know rotate it better but maybe those edges are a better idea so we'll do that and kind of rotate it yeah this is pretty sloppy type of uv situation but not the point of the video so you know what how about this i'll do a separate video on uvs and the best practices there because um this is going to take way too long for me to clean up for this video and we're just going to completely lose the topic this will be completely fine for what we need anyways so let's not stress this is a pretty good layout for what we're doing and at this point we're going to go ahead and bring this into substance and i'll show you exactly how i would bake this out so i'm not going to bother with the rest of the mesh here like the um the barrels and the handles because it's going to follow the same exact process so i want to keep this video pretty efficient so i'm going to delete those out just to be you know more transparent here so what we have is our high poly right here looks pretty clean and we also have our low poly right here the low poly once again is at 1220 verts right now on the high poly is at if we apply the bevel we can see what that is the high poly is at about 27 000 vertices so that's a big difference there for a pretty simple asset so that's exactly why we need to make a low poly which we already did so let's go ahead and get this guy baked so some people were yelling at me last time saying why you just a bacon substance so i'm going to do that this time i'll show you how to bacon substance what we're going to do is um first of all one thing i prefer to do not necessary i prefer to rename the object data properties to the same name as the actual object so what i do is i go to this object data panel and i click and drag like that and then click and drag like this and the reason i do this is because several years ago when i was i think back in high school i was doing something with i think it was before the substance days basically i had a bait going on and i i don't know what it was but i read on some obscure forum that this can like save your ass in some situations i don't remember where i heard it i don't know if it's true or a complete philosophy or not philosophy but a complete myth i have no idea but i've always been doing it that way so just relaying the info to you if it's if it's true then good if it's not then i mean no harm no foul so at this point we're ready to bake so yeah basically that should avoid data conflicts and exports so i mean there we go so we're going to do is first of all select our high poly base right here the high poly one make sure everything's joined together you know join everything apply all your booleans all that good stuff keep your bevel live in the stack just so that way you can tweak it if you need to but anyways at this point we're gonna go ahead and go to file and then export okay there we go i always forget an obs i have like two separate display sources so i always have to switch it if i go to a new tab so uh file export we're gonna export as an fbx we're gonna make sure first things first tick on selected objects because if we don't it's going to make every er export everything in the scene so tick that on and we're going to rename this to base underscore high and export that and then this one is going to be base underscore low i'm going to go in here and then same idea selected objects and then base underscore low and export that and make sure when you do this everything is in the same exact position in the 3d viewport because if it's not then there's going to be issues with origin points things like that so make sure they're overlaying each other same size and everything so at this point we're going to move into substance and bake this out all right so once we're here in substance all we have to do is go to file new do 4096 document resolution and then import the low poly and that's all you have to do click ok and now we're going to have is your low poly little mesh here so nothing crazy if you want to view it better you can shift and right click to kind of move the lighting around but what we need to do now is bake and i kind of want to show you exactly how the bake is going to look so i'm going to kind of zoom in on this so you can see so to bake we go over here to the texture set settings and we go down to the bake option so just click on bake mesh maps and from here 4096 i always bake in 4k it's cleaner that way and high definition meshes we're going to select our high poly export from right here click on that and there's only a few things left i would take on or off first of all i'd make the anti-aliasing set to the four times four and if you want to be more specific you can match by the name so it'll actually you know match the meshes based off of the underscore low and underscore high i would just turn that on by default and at this point we can kind of adjust these well we want a normal map we want an ao map curvature map id map maybe we probably don't need that for this example but position and thickness we don't really need i'm going to turn those off and once we've done that and make sure once again your output size set to 4k we're going to go ahead and click on bake selected textures and i really want you to pay attention here because you're going to see a big difference in the um in the quality of the low poly so check this out i'm going to click on the button and watch as it kind of starts to bake and everything you're going to kind of see some different results you're going to see the normal map come through on this one for example the bevels will be a bit cleaner you're going to see the bevel bacon just just going to look better in general right so nothing crazy it does take a bit of time so be patient let it do its thing and it won't take too long and now that it's done we're going to click on ok and as you can see pretty decent bake if you zoom in you can see some pretty visible baking issues they're gonna happen it's the name of the game so go to any game asset in any game you're gonna see problems but these aren't as bad as they could have been these bakes up here look at how perfect well not perfect but as close to perfect as we're probably going to get these bakes are super super clean up here we can really zoom in and see you don't see too much of a difference until you really zoom in on it what else the bevels are baked in see the bevels here looks pretty good and overall it just looks you know pretty clean all around so you can just come in here and start adding in your materials go to smart materials add in whatever you want any metal don't click out yet i have one more thing to show you please don't click out it's really important but i'll just show you like drop that on there and yeah you're pretty much good to go so remember earlier how i told you that one segment face away to normal bevels were the cleaner way to do things and i wasn't going to originally show you but it's probably a good idea that i do so what i want to show you let me pull blender back up right now our low poly version right on this piece has no bevel on it right completely flat surface no bevel now i would highly recommend if you want to have a more detailed mesh to run a simple bevel modifier one segment with face way to normal so you can do that via a weighted normal modifier or simply turn on hard to normal so i'm gonna do that i'm gonna go to one segment and i'm gonna show you the difference here when we actually bake with a one segment bevel versus no bevel so if you want to do it this way just remember the poly count is going to be a lot higher so it's um kind of a give and take situation if you're fine with that then good so i'm going to go ahead and show you so all you have to do make sure the bevel's on you have your one segment or whatever and once you're happy with that all you have to do is go to file and export this as a new one so i've already done that i exported it as a new name right here we're just going to bring this into substance and just real quick i want to show you although we have the bevel baked in the reason it's not very clean is because if we zoom in on the edge you can still see the visible sharp edge on here right the bevel bake basically simulates by adding in like a little shadow around it like the um bevel shader and blender but it's still very visibly a sharp edge and it's not very clean so just keep that in mind i'm gonna go ahead and show you now how it looks with the one segment bevel so same exact process file new 4k add in the new one right here i'm going to click ok and all we have to do is um bake out those maps again just to show you if we zoom in right now you can still see the bevel see that much much cleaner but i'll show you how it looks on the maps too and here we go all the maps are baked as you can see but the bevel now is much cleaner because it's actually a bevel so no sort of sharp edge across there with a fake bevel it literally looks like a bevel here because that is exactly what we did in blender so this is exactly why i recommend using one segment bevels with face weighted normals even though the poly count's a bit higher it's all up to you the budget of whoever you're making the game asset for personal preference whatever but if you have the option definitely go with one segment bevels they're a lot cleaner and i just prefer them overall so that's about it guys hope you enjoyed the video if it helped you out drop me a thumbs up i usually don't ask for those but it does help me in the youtube algorithm and brings more engagement to the videos so i'd appreciate it i'd also appreciate a subscribe and make tons of videos like this other than that patreon in the description if you want to support me there and that's about it thanks so much for watching and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 129,017

Keywords: blender game asset, blender hard surface game asset, hard surface game asset tutorial, blender high poly to low poly, turn your high poly mesh into a game ready asset, blender hard surface modeling, hard surface modeling blender, blender, blender tutorial, blender hard surface, blender boolean, box cutter blender, blender box cutter, josh gambrell, hard surface blender, hard ops, boxcutter, game asset tutorial, uv unwrapping, 3d modeling blender, game ready asset tutorial

Id: 9kq72GpvsT0

Length: 29min 39sec (1779 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 12 2021