Finally time to make my own sketchbook! I’m not sure how frequently I’ll be updating it, but recently I felt that I didn’t have enough time for ‘pure learning’, so I decided to change that.
This will be mostly Blender stuff, but I’ll probably throw in some Unreal/Unity/Godot related things too.
Starting with my progress on the Rendering University course by Blender Bros. Theoretical part done, and now time for practical part!
Today somehow inspired by it, but still on the ‘rendering university’ path I made this environment (also made separate post for it.
What I really wanted to do here is to check out hair particles on a plane… and then I put a texture on it… and then I added wind and turbulance fields (the grass is animated, but I will not bother animating the scene as it would take too much time). And then a rock, and a second one… and so on… after few hours I ended up with this:
OK, so jumping between topics :). Now I did quite a lot of research into trim sheets. The main goal for me was to figure out what people are doing and how I can do them in quite efficient way. Spent about 20h watching courses, tutorials (at 2x speed , I sometimes get deep into the weeds). Still not perfect but I think I have a workflow that works. From Blender → Marmoset for Baking → Substance Painter for extra detailing/texturing.
Basically the idea is to start with a plane that’s a little bit bigger then desired output plane. Here it’s good to think about texel density, Eg., if I want to have 1024px / meter TD I am setting up a plane like that:
The outside area helps me to keep everything nicely tillable.
I’ve tested baking in Blender (with GrabDoc addon), SP and Toolbag. Still toolbag gives the best results IMO.
Then the last step of texturing/detailing in SP is quite straight forward (like any other model). The difference is that it still needs to be tillable. For that instead of working on a plane I work on 3 planes that simulate tilling:
Overall I think I get the technical aspect, now I need to polish the design aspect by making quite a few trim sheets :). The first one I plan to use to texture a simple scifi storage room.
It’s tinny area and I had to remind myself that too much details on such area will not result in terribly crisp bake… While I was at it… I also recorded a ‘tutorial’ (or more like a discussion video about this very thing):
Also, I’ve improved my workflow with this simple script:
As I’m baking in Toolbag for quick iteration it’s quite important to have possibility to quickly swap the baked maps which this script does perfectly.
Ah, and I’ve also imported the trim to Unreal, just to make sure it looks OK (results of that are in the linked YT video).
One is continous, one have some little asymmetrical ‘breaks’ to make it more interesting. Those are quite useful to cover up seams and other ‘joints’ in the geo later on when applying the trim (aside from being useful on their own as eg. panel lines). I have a little strip there (4.5cm) that I will either leave as is or paint something. So far I made a single orange strip of paint there (it will probably be replaced by something else). Here’s how it looks after baking and back in cycles (this time I didn’t forget to hook AO node )
Edit: it took way longer than I thought it would… I was pulling my hairs while baking those lines… to finally realized that I am using wrong high poly fbx file for the bake…
Continuing… It is time consuming exercise. I’ve spent a bit of time on shuffling things around and cleaning the mesh. The ‘joys’ of boolean workflow. But the most time I spent on design. I’ve finally settled on pattern for panel lines. Here it’s repeated 3 times (12m):
The latches are not finished yet (they took also quite a while to design and making them/applying them to the panels takes a while too…). I like though how they turned out, here’s a close up (geo vs bake):
Today I was checking various ways to do meshes (not objects, but those mesh-type thingies, see below, the pattern on the can). Poking faces and built in honeycomb generators are quite cool for that. Probably such patters are very easy to create in geo nodes, got to learn them at some point. Totally too much triangles for game engines (though Unreal wouldn’t care), but OK for baking.
While teaching my son Godot (based of Brackey’s excellent tutorial)… we needed a door that would fit to existing tileset aesthetic. So we drew one (and I drew another one for practice). This is how they look in Godot:
, I sometimes get deep into the weeds). Still not perfect but I think I have a workflow that works. From Blender → Marmoset for Baking → Substance Painter for extra detailing/texturing.
and was posting as separate threads…
