Game car models for mobile game smoothing

Support Modeling
#1

Hello, first post here. I am an indie mobile game dev that I do in my spare time. I have spent more time learning Blender in the recent months. However, I am struggling with the output I am getting compared to other models from a smoothing standpoint. I feel it is my basic mesh structure that is causing it but not sure how to achieve the correct way. These need to maintain their lower poly counts to be efficient so subdivision surf mod is not an option. I have posted some pics and maybe someone can give me guidance on where I am going wrong.

In these pics there are two models. The car is one I purchased and looks really good in game. The truck is one I did. You can see the artifacts/shadowing on the truck and I don’t know what causes that. It also shows in Unity.

I have included the pics with and without the wireframe overlay to show the difference in mesh. Other than the mesh I am not sure the best approach.

Thanks for any guidance. I am also not sure how to get better at the mesh structure so any pointers helps there as well.

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image1003×691 109 KB

#2

It looks like you might have polygons inside the mesh. You can turn on wireframe mode and see them.

Make sure you delete all the extra polygons inside the model and merge your vertices.

#3

I did find some bad faces and vertices where I had done the wheel openings at some point. I also did some playing around with the Normals and Average by face and that seemed to help a lot. I still feel like the flow of the mesh isn’t very good considering the roundness of the target model in many places. Feels like my mesh has the faces too consistent in size if that makes sense. I am continuing to watch more videos, especially on car modeling. But still looking for guidance on things that jump out to the experienced eye.

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

#4

If you could upload share the mesh, or a portion of it that has issues, I can look it over and point out exactly what needs to be fixed

#5

Here is the blend file. Thanks for taking a look. My goal is basically to create vehicles for mobile game in Unity. In this blend file there are two meshes. The original one and then the one where I think I fixed the bad faces and vertices. Also playing around with texturing. However, will need to figure out how to separate items so I can tweak the body color through Unity without affecting all materials.

trophytruck.blend (901.9 KB)

#6

I made a lot of cars for Unity with Blender, so here’s my workflow.
-Clear Custom Split Normal Data so you can adjust your smoothing
-Adjust your auto smooth values. Personally, I use 180 so I can mark sharp and have complete control over what I need to be sharp.
-In the image, the last part of it shows how to detach mesh (Mesh > Separate > Selection)

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image2352×3984 992 KB

#7

Thanks a bunch for you help! It is really hard to get people to help show their workflow that reflects how their models look so good.