3D Modeling Workflow for Games - Explained

For games, you'll want to have small file sizes for your textures so you can maximize texture memory. For normal maps, that means reducing gradients as much as you sensibly can. You can do that by setting each UV Shell to its own smoothing group / hardening the edges. You've already split the shell along that edge, so it's something you could do for free of cost performance-wise. Bake a soft edge cube and a hard edge cube down from a high poly beveled cube, and then compare their normal map sizes. You'll be surprised how much larger the soft edge one is. This process will also help your art look better in engine, as the normal maps are typically scaled down and compressed. If you have a lot of gradients in your normal maps that are being compressed, you're going to get obvious stair-stepping / compression noise in those gradients over a large surface, and they will have a hard time compensating for the soft normals of your render mesh in engine, which could cause some shading artifacting.

Don't forget to mention: 1. Channel packing for textures. 2. Trim sheets. 3. Using overlapped UVs depending on situation like toon shader or having the ability to put overlaps on a negative number position/axis/atlas to bake light map information. This is to prevent light map artifacting. 4. Using Texture Atlases to save on drawcalls in game engines. 5. Using alpha maps/ opacity in materials. (Not to use too much because of performance). 6. Having seperate UVs sometimes for light baking in game engines. 7. Having multi-materials for one piece (multi-sub materials). 8. Having a baking version of models. 9. Industry file systems and naming conventions. Like m_SceneObjectNameMat 10. Difference of using more geometry which affects gpu performance and texture maps that use cpu performance. 11. Making a collision model or material for objects. 12. Breaking apart models for baking (depending on baking software). 13 different ways to model: spline modeling, boolean modeling, displacment modeling, and model upwards from texture/ texture planes...ect 14 pipelines: highpoly/sculpt to retop-low poly or low poly to highpoly...ect. 15 exporting assets to game engines. For example the difference between tangent space and binormal.

Man, I'm so happy flipped normals exist. Love these videos, relatively condensed and pretty informative.

I gotta say this honestly is a great video for people starting out in the 3D arts. You are covering so much info they anyone can really use out there and it's so helpful. A job well done with this video. I'll be looking forward to the next one!

crucial info on how all this works! I've been messing around with Blender for years and have never come across a video that explains how the workflow works like this!

I like the approach of Star Citizen for hard surface models more, where they dont use a high poly model for baking, but rather a relatively detailed low poly model that uses texture tiling, weighted normals and decals for the details (like bolts, dirt and text). Looks great even at very close distance, doesn't use a dedicated (baked) texture for every model and can change materials on the fly. This approach is really scalable to have high resolution scenes with many different objects, without using much texture memory.

I already kinda knew most of this, but its always good to refresh a little or check to see if you missed some basics. So thanks for making the video, always great to see people make informative videos even for absolute beginners. Also fun to see how many dutchies (sorry if i assumed incorrectly) are in this work field.

Great video! I'll be sharing this with people I know who want to get into 3d modeling, so they at least know what they are getting into.

Finally a guy that knows what he's talking about in terms of proper technique and industry. insanely rare on youtube

Just discover your channel and i'm very happy to leanr those is the way you present it ! Thaks for your great work

This video encapsulates the first 4 years of my payed education in modelling into 15 minutes, and is almost as in depth. Great video, guys! Wish I knew about flipped normals before I started, it would’ve saved me so much time!

I think in this particular instance it would make sense to bake maps without positioning out meshes, but rather explaining on how to split it to groups for Marmoset. Because in this case you will actually get a completely different AO.

This is very informative thank you!

Very infromative, thank you!

good explanation. thanks

One of the greates videos.

I needed this :D

Vry good info.. thanks u so much 👍

Excellent video, very good pace. When you talk about "I will talk about this further down the line", what's the course that follows?

Nice explanation of the basics. There are many tutorials on each of these subjects, but I always seem to miss tutorials about the process that brings everything together. I'm trying to create my own racing game, I know some modelling, graphics, programming, ... . But I miss the right workflow. I'm creating a track, but how much and what do I need to make in a 3D modelling software and how and what in the game-engine itself. How much in a level is considered an asset and how much is considered as part of the set piece? Currently I have a small part of the track of a rocky beachfront, also with some animated falling rocks, all made in Blender. Did I make too many rocks in Blender? I actually made around which I spread around with a particle modifier, applied it permanantly and now have meshes of 'grouped' rocks. But do I need to convert them to assets or let them be part of the set-piece? Especially since I'm creating with VR in mind, I really need to be mindful of the resources. Btw, you sound either Dutch or Flemish. Am I right?