Making your models look good

Game Engine Game Engine Support and Discussion
1

Hello,

I was wondering why my models in blender game engine don’t look as good as in professional games. After some research I came to this result to have some nice looking game models:

  1. Make a high poly model
  2. Make a low poly model
  3. Bake normal maps
  4. Make a diffuse texture, a specular texture, ambient occlusion texture and the normal map

That’s it no?! Did I forget something?
To come to an end, the most important part is the texturing. One should be good at texturing to make things look good.

Do you have another procedure? Or is it just the blender game-engine that doesn’t allow the models to be that good-looking?
By the way, is there a good tutorial about how to make nice looking textures?
How do you make your low-polys? Do you model them again or is there a tool to decimate the poly-count?

Greetings André

2

You don’t have to make high poly. You just have to make good textures.
Try to avoid solid colors, and repetitive patterns.

3

Another question:

Is it possible to use the premade noise, clouds, marble etc texture types as a normal map for the game-engine, or is it just for render?

4

Those are just for rendering. GIMP can create some similar textures, though, and is free.

5
  1. Blender has same workflow as you said model,texture,bake… (you might also want to check bake panel under render tab)
  2. You dont need dedicated texturing tuts for bge, its same as texturing models for render purpose.
  3. For preparing low-poly models from high poly sculpts you can use retopology tool.
  4. You might also be willing to learn about material nodes & GLSL. They will help you get conving look for you models.

If there is anything specific you are stuck at feel free to ask, we are all here to help each other :slight_smile:
happy blending :slight_smile:

6

You can always use Blender to render a clouds texture to a plane with the camera directly above and the plane set to shadeless. You might also want to set the camera to orthogonal and the image scaling to a decent size… All said and done, it’s probably easier to use Gimp, but it is possible to set up a *.blend file with the plane and camera settings and then use this file to create your textures within Blender.

Incidentally, BlenderCookie has a preorder special on the upcoming low poly character training series that includes the sculpt/retopo/texture/rig/animate/export to unity pipeline if you have $32 you want to spend. I’m expecting good things, having done others of Jonathon Williamson’s tutorials. I’m not sure what level it’s pitched at though so if you’re a beginner it might be a bit much all at once because it seems to have quite ambitious teaching goals.

Using GLSL you can use diffuse, normal, specular, emit, ao and other maps in the game engine as well as having dynamic shadows from spotlights. Dead Cyborg runs on bge.

7

agree with sdfgsdfg

low mesh good texture

also the particular, for example place ever a bit of wind in the scene with those relative object in movement

8

Ok, just another quick question:

I baked an ambient occlusion map for a model. Everything is fine. Now the question is how do I apply it to the object? E.g. when you use normal maps, you turn off diffuse, or color, in image sampling click on normal map, then down in the influence you turn on the normal slider…
What do you have to do when using an ambient occlusion map?
The same about Specularity maps… how are they applied to the object?

Ok another question… How do you usually make specular-maps? Can you suggest a tutorial?

9

I believe that you set AO maps to color, and set the blend mode to multiply. I think there’s a spec option in the map to panel that you use for specularity maps. You may also want to enable hardness for spec maps.

To make a spec map, you just make the areas you want to be shinier a lighter color. Often the AO map is used in part to create a spec map, and so is the color map. A lot of it is just painting, though.

10

That’s what I use for making textures for my games. I usually bake AO and colors in blender and open those images in gimp where I add variations such as discoloration, scratches, rust, etc.

11

Ok, thanks for the replies! So also depending on the object you can change the blend mode for the spec-map according to the shininess of the object… Never played around with the blend, but this brings a lot of new options :slight_smile:

12

First of all… If you bake normals from one model to another (that is, don’t simply bake from multires), bump mapping becomes part of the normal map

Baking the procedural texture to an orginary image is a bit more versatile though, and very simple:

  1. Have the procedural texture applied to the model as color.
  2. create an empty image in the uv/image editor
  3. bake with the “textures” option from the dropdown