How do I setup materials/textures,etc. for selling stuff?

Support Materials and Textures
#1

I’d like to sell models, but I am not sure how materials are supposed to be set up when exporting in FBX and/or OBJ. I know that materials can’t really be exported, since materials don’t even work in Cycles vs Blender render, let alone Cycles and 3ds Max or something, so what do I need to do with the model to make it a finished product? I don’t want to just sell a gray model without materials and textures.

My theory is that although materials don’t export entirely, their “position on polygons” does export, so if I have a ball that is half one material, say wood, and the other half is glass, if I export it in fbx or obj, it won’t show me the wood or glass materials in the exported model (except if I assign a wood texture on the wood part, but it will still be without the original reflections and other material properties), the glass won’t be transculent, however it will save the wood and glass material slots and if I adjusted those materials, the ball would have one half turned into whatever I set up, so the faces on the model would still have the materials assigned to them as intended, although the materials themselves would be in default settings. Is that about correct?

So, if I had a PBR model, I could export the locations of where each material is supposed to be on the faces, but I can’t export the textures and normals (just send them separately in a folder) and the client has to set up each material (from the slots that were exported) and he has to (re)assign all textures and normals, right?

#2

Bake the textures and save those in the folder of the file. If you have downloaded any 3d models outside of Blender you will see those as well will come with the texture maps. Most sites where you can sell your material have guidelines on how they recommend the 3d objects to be set up for other users to download. For instance you made a tree, you would have the textures for the bark of the tree, the textures for the leaves all in the folder of the 3d objects folder. UV maps help ensure that the 3d model gets told where and positions to apply the texture.

#3

The problem is, it depends on several factors, like the complexity of the model, the shading its going to have, if it is a model designed for videogames, animation or other purposes, etc. Usually you want to have the less number of textures as possible, and you usually dont include any material, because even if the material is a really generic one, readable for anything, you will find that most of the times you need to create the material yourself, either if it is for a game engine, for a visualization app or whatever. The important part are the textures.

The material does not have any importance if you are going to export the model and sell it. What you are talking about are the UVs i presume, obligatory if you want to sell your model (but uvs have nothing to do with the material). And those uvmaps need to be as close as perfect as you can.

Unless, if the asset is specifically for a game engine, you would need to include some specific workflows for that game engine. If you just want to sell it as a generic model, then the only thing you should include are the textures and make sure your uvs are decent at least.

But the fact that you are not sure means that you should not be selling anything in first place, until you learn how to refine your models and be sure they are up to at least minimum quality standards :stuck_out_tongue:

#4

@FlyingBanana, when you say bake, what exactly do you mean? I know how to make UV’s and that I should include the textures in the folder with he exported model, but is baking that or is it something else? I know that there is some thing called normal baking, but I haven’t researched that, I just made normal maps outside Blender and then imported them, so I don’t know if it’s related in any way.

@n3mes1s, I can understand uv’s and textures, but what if you have a bunch of materials and textures, how will the client know how many materials he should make? In the example with the half wood, half glass ball, there are 2 materials and 1 texture, it’s obvious that there should be 2 materials, but what if there are 20 materials and 10 textures, how will he know which faces should be made of what material and how many materials are there?

I imported a random free drone model (made in a different software) few days ago, it doesn’t even have textures, but it has material slots with names of different materials, for example wings are one material, front parts of the wings are another and there’s a bunch of other materials, how would I know all that if the person didn’t make any materials?