Transcripts
1. Introduction Trailer: My name is Emil Sigas. I'm a lead Treaty
environment artist, and I will be your
instructor for this course. Now, this course is a little bit different than our
usual courses. I like to call it
a budget course. In this course, we will give you a brief overview on how treaty environments
are constructed. Now, this course will
cover various topics, including explanation
of the core elements of Treaty environment creation, how to create treaty
assets for environments, how to create modular
assets for environments, how to create
procedural textures, and doing some level art and
lighting and post effects. The general takeaway of this
course is that at the end, you will have the knowledge on how tree environments
are constructed, and you can apply this knowledge to almost any type
of environment. Now, having that set, to make this course
a budget course, it is quite a bit different
than our usual courses. Rather than showcasing you the entire process of creating an environment
from start to finish, we will showcase
you how to create each core element of
a treat environment, meaning that we
will showcase how to create a simple treaty asset, create a procedural texture, explain the concepts behind modular assets and
smart materials, and we will showcase how to do some level art and lighting
along with some post effect. Now we will be using three
Max for any of the modeling. However, this can of course be replicated in any Tree
D modeling software. We will be using
subsisPainter and designer for texturing
and for the rest, we will be using
Un L Agent five. With a total of six plus
hours of video content, I feel confident that at
the end of this course, you will have the
knowledge in how Trey environments
are constructed. Please note that this
course only comes with the project files of the Tweed assets and
textures that we create. The full Tree environment in UnrulgFV will not come
with these project files. This course also comes with out generated subtitles in
English, Chinese, and Spanish. So I hope that you will
enjoy this course and that this will have a positive
impact on your life.
2. 01 Introduction: Okay, welcome, everyone to this budget environment
tutorial course. So what makes this a budget
environment tutorial course? Because as you can see, we still have quite a
fancy environment here. Now, for the people that already know me or know fast
tract tutorials, is that we often specialize in very large scale long
form courses that show the entire process of creating environments
from start to finish. Of course, this
process is very long, and because of that, it's
also quite costly to create. And in turn, it means that those products are a
little bit higher priced. But we wanted to go
ahead and give you also some more cheaper
tutorial courses, and that's what we're
working on now. So what's the goal
of this course? This course basically
will showcase the main elements needed
to create an environment, but it will not showcase how to create the
entire environment. In this specific instance, what that will mean is that I will show you how to create
a simple asset. In this case, it is just going to be a
simple metal detector. I'm going to show you how to
create some modular asset. In this case, sorry, my
voice broke up a bit. In this case, that
is going to be, for example, over here
like the simple walls. After that, I'm going
to show you how to create a simple
procedural material. For example, these
floor tiles over here. And once that is all
done, I'm going to show you how we basically
put this stuff together inside of
unreal to create a small environment and then
how to do some lighting, post effects and
stuff like that. So the general goal is that I don't show
you how to create like every single asset or every type of asset or
something like that. I will give you a
general overview on how the assets are created, how the materials are created, the textures, and how everything
is set up into Unreal. Should essentially give you enough knowledge in order to
create a full environment. The only difference
between it is that you just have to spend
a lot more time to actually get to this type
of scale because you will need to create a
bunch of different assets. I do, of course,
highly recommend that if you have the budget, you also view one of our larger courses because
it will go much more in depth in the different types of assets and materials and
all that kind of stuff. So as you can see, this is what we'll be creating, although I don't
know why we have some floating screens over here. So the first thing that
we'll do is we will go over on how to
create a basic asset. And in that case, we
will go ahead and create a simple metal detector like you
can see over here, featuring the few specific
elements like using weighted normals in
order to quickly create an asset without
needing to do the full height, low poly type modeling, and also a few different
metals like you can see, we have some plastics in here. We have some metallic
stuff in here. We'll add some little dirt
in here and we'll also add some small logos and texts
like you can see over here, which will give you a pretty
solid overview on how to create most different
types of assets. So let's go ahead
and continue on. In the next chapter,
we will jump in and we will start by the
creation of this asset. We will be using threes Max. However, the mulling techniques that I will be
using is universal, so you can basically
replicate it in whatever tremlling software
that you like to use. So let's go ahead and continue
to the second chapter.
3. 02 Creating Our Metal Detector Part1: Okay, so let's get started
by creating a basic asset. Now, whenever I start with this, the first thing I
want to do is I want to create a
folder structure. In this case, what I
like to do is I create a new folder that
I'll call assets. And in here, I can create a folder that has my asset name. Now, if you want, you
can give it an ID. For example, what we often
do is we do an ID like this. And basically, as a studio, it allows us to keep better
track of our assets. But honestly, if
you're making this for a personal project or something like that, you don't
need to do this. So what we'll do is
we'll just go ahead and call this metal detector. I also recommend
to use underscores because some program sorry, some programs don't always read normal spaces as
well as underscores. So what they then will do is your links will look like this, which is always a bit M. I don't like that. So underscore. And in here, I like to
create a few folders, a exports folder,
which will contain all of our exports to
unreal and painter, a ref folder for our reference, a saves folder for all
of our save files, and a textures folder. That's often the basic setup. So first, we need some reference because else we don't
know what we're making. Now, for reference, it's
actually quite tricky to find the reference of metal
detectors on Google images. And the reason for this
is because, of course, it has to do with security, so there are less
images out there. But what I like to do
is often I like to go to my Google Images, and I'm just going
to go ahead and call this airport security
metal detector, and then you end
up on this page. For some reason,
it's already on, but what I then usually like
to do is I like to go to tools and then set
this to Large. First of all, over here, I just like to see if I can find some interesting
images like this one. Right click Open
Image in New Tab. This one, open image in New Tab, maybe this one, open image in
New tap. Tatas are another. Oh, yeah, this one
here. Open image NTAP. And once I have done pretty
much like the base images, this one, this looks
like three D. Yeah, this is So I don't I like
to use real life images. Once I've done that, you
can also go in here. And for example, they
give us some tips, and I will go, for example, walk through metal detector. Once again, that'll
set my size too large. And now I get a bit
more specific Examples. Let's open this one. Also, something cool
that you can do is once you are kind
of like running out of images and
you feel like you still don't have
enough, 1 second. Let me just first of all, actually check, quite
like those strips here. So I'm just going to
use this one also. Yeah, so let's say
that at this point, we kind of ran out of
the stuff that we want, although this is a
really good image to already give us some size. Then what we can do
is or you can go down here and you can go ahead and you can search similar images. However, with the
similar images, the annoying thing is also
that when you click on it, you have no longer control
over that resolution. So if I click on this one,
you can see that this one is only 800 by 1,500. Another thing that
you can often do is you can check the titles because sometimes these images
they come from products. So for example, over
here, you can see that this one is a product name and then you can see
the product name. Let's do this one, for
example, True scan security. You can even visit the website to double check what it's like. If it will load here through scan SX security walk
through metal detector. Now, if I, for
example, then copy this and throw that into Google, I might be able to
get the actual model. This works better if you have a very specific model that
you want to work with. But you can already see
that this already gives us some images of this
specific model. And you can just keep
refining based on this. Now, we have quite a
simple metal detector, so I feel like at this point, I'm pretty much good to go. So I'm just going to go to
those tabs that I opened, and I'm just going to drag
them all into my rev folder. I think one, this one
also looks quite good. Let's go probably for this
one as our main model, although I don't
like the console, but we can see I want to keep
it quite simple because, like I said, I want to
keep a budget tutoil and not just turn it into, again, a large tutorial. This one looks a bit weird. But we can see what
we will create. Okay. Maybe if it just go back, walk through metal detector, sometimes just
typing in close up, looks like my virus
can find something. There we go. If you
find it close up, you can often also find
some really nice images. And then based on that, we can also go in and see if there's anything that's improved because I just want to see the top
a little bit better ideal. I see something that
has to do with the top. Like, these are just
the same close up. Like I said, normally, you have quite a bit
of an easier time. So for now, let's just
leave it at this. This should be good
enough, at this point. And I can just go ahead
and move this over. Now, what I like to do is
I like to use a program, and this program
is called PureRef. It's a free program
that you can use to basically I'm just
going to skip for now. It's a free program that
you can use to view images altogether in
a very flexible way. You basically just select
all of your images from the ref folder and
you drag these. And give the second to load. Here we go. Now they are loaded. And now, if you hold
your Mal Mouse button, you can just kind of, like, zoom in and look around,
stuff like that. And here we can see some
pretty good reference styles. Okay. Awesome. So at this
point, let's have a look. What are we going to
create specifically? Let's go ahead and go for To
be honest, you know what? I feel like this actually
looks a little bit too basic. Let's go ahead and go for some
legs that look like this. And then a body
with a little top. This can also show you
how to do something like Billions over here
with some extrusions. Then for the center, do the width and
height. Let's see. For the center, is
there something specific that I want to do? I know that what
we did. Oh, it's not showing up for some
reason. Oh, there it is. I know that what we did
over here is we gave it like this little console,
which I quite liked. So I might just go
ahead and just, like, make up some type
of a console like this just to make it a
little bit more interesting. But I do quite like so I have some problems with my windows bar where it's
not properly loading up, but I hope you don't mind. I do quite like over here, having this roundness to it, although I don't see it
as being very popular. So it's something
we'll figure out. Okay, As Cool. We now know what
we want to create. So let's go ahead
and move this over. I'm just going to move it over
to my top screen. Come on. You can do it. I'll
just switch like this. I hope you guys
don't mind. And what we can do is we can
start with our model. Now, the first thing is
that we kind of need to define the scaling of this. What I have, and I will include it in the Exports
folder for you guys, is a handy scale reference. Let me just quickly go
ahead and import it. Here we go. And the scale
reference is basically just like a simple person
that you can see over here. Now, nice thing is
if you have images that actually have
people also on it, that gives you also a
better sense of the scale. But in our case, we just
have the dimensions here, and you can always go ahead and also Google the dimensions. Now, since I'm to tres Max, my grid is a bit too small, and this is because I'm probably set to like centimeters
or something. So if I just right click here
at the top, Ah, over here, I can switch this from
centimeters to 100 centimeters, which gives me a
slightly bigger grid. Okay, awesome. So
as I said before, the first thing
that we need is we kind of need to
define the scale. This is often called a blockout. I still like to
do it even when I will probably create
the model white after. So for now, I'm just going
to create a simple box. And let's make it
like this large, going to turn on my edges
and faces so I can see it. And then over here, I can set the width and the length
and stuff like that. We're going to start with 82 because I'm basically just
following this image, and a height of 220. There we go. Now, for the width, I would say that often, if we just go ahead
and go to the top, when I walk through these
things at the airport, it's not too white. So shall maybe also go for 82 or maybe a little
bit No bit less. Let's go for 70 or
maybe 65. Let's do 65. I feel like 65, if I
compare it to just like a person walking through
is quite a good option. Now, at this point, I
like to go ahead and center over here my box by just simply
setting, in my case, the transforms to
zero, zero, zero, and my scale reference can kind of go to the side over here. Okay, now what I want to do is I kind of want to
figure out the gap. Oh, I can see over here,
actually, that's 50. Let's do that. So I was
pretty close. There we go. 50. I like to do 55 better. Okay. You can always change the scale a little
bit if you want to. So we are going to define the actual thickness of the hole that you
need to walk through, so that's converted to an
added pole in my case. And once again, you
can just replicate the steps that I'm doing in
your own modeling software. As long as you know
the basics of it, you should be able
to follow along. I will make sure to only use
very universal techniques. I'm going to basically
place two edges. I'm going to use these to figure out roughly the thickness. And I feel like if I set
these to it is quite thin. Something like this.
And I'm basically just eyeballing
it at this point. But I feel something like
that looks quite good. And I also need to set
the top, and for the top, it might be good if I have my little person here
to make sure that there are still enough space for
also tell people for the top, I feel like I do need a
little bit more space. Something like that looks
quite good to me. Okay. And now at this
point, we can also decide what type do we want? Yeah, I do still
quite like this one. I feel like, yes, it's
a little bit more futuristic, but I
do quite like it. So at this point, what we can do is we can go ahead
and we can delete. Actually, we can just
delete all of these phases. And then you can also again select these phases
and just bridge them together. Like this. So the reason why a blockout is easy is because it is very, very simple shapes and
we can still kind of figure out what we want
to do with everything. For example, now I can
just select these sites. And once again, I'm going to use my connect tool to
create two etches, and each edge will become
one of these assets. So basically, I need
to keep in mind that these etches become a
little bit thicker. But what I want to
do is I want to evenly basically
space this all out, probably something in
the direction of 30. And then in my
case, I'm going to chem for it or you can bevel it. It's up to you whatever
program you're using. And when you bevel a flat edge, it will just split
into two edges. If it's on a corner,
it will give you an actual beveled corner. But this is a useful
trick to basically split edges into two
perfectly even spaces, and it works pretty much
the same in every software. Probably 4 centimeters.
How is that? Maybe a little bit less. 3.7 Yeah, I feel
3.7 is pretty good. Now at this point, what I can do is I'm just
going to go ahead and create one more
edge, just a single one. And I'm going to move
this one up because I don't want to hit it
all the way to the top. And for now, you can
literally just select these two and press
bridge again, or oh, that's Bevel. Where is bridge. There's
bridge. Like this. Like I said, with the blockout, you just want to get the
absolute base shapes just to get a feeling
for it if it works well. And I think this
works pretty good. Yeah, like, nice and cozy. Okay, awesome. So now that we have a general sense
of the base shape, now what we're going to do is we are going to further
define this shape. In this case, let's go
down here and let's use this basically as
our definition. So as you can see over here, we have these little feet, and it does kind
of like the feet do kind of, like, continue. But what we'll do is we'll
make a standalone feet and then extrude this out and then just mirror
it to the other side. So for this, it looks like a cube it ends up
straight here see. It ends up straight and
then it goes into a bend. With stuff like
that, what I like to do is I like to go to the top, and I'm just going to create a simple box to
get started with. And this box should be roughly
the width that we want. And most of this honestly
is just eyeballing it. That's literally what I tend
to do most of the time. So I'm just going to go ahead and work on this. I'm
going to make this. Actually, let's just
select all of it. Let's make it a little
bit thicker because we want to have this as like
a small ring around it. But the most important one
is figuring out the depth. I feel something like
that works quite well, because we still are going
to extrude this out. I'm mostly talking just about this little ring over here and saying that I actually want to make
it a little bit less. So to basically make
one side round it, we can just select these
two edges, chamor it. And in most cases
with ham of Bevel, you have control over how many of these segments you
want to place in between. Now I'm just going to go
ahead and isolate this. What you can see is we
have a little error. This mostly happens
only in actually, no, it happens in all
tree software where sometimes it's just not bending properly the
way that we want to. What you can do is you can often lock the transforms or reset. In trees Max it is called reset X forms by going up
here in the utilities, reset X forms, and
that will basically just reset the general shape. Inside of blender, I believe it's called log transform positions or
something like that, and inside of Maya, it's just removing the history. Now when we try again, it should be a little bit more round. Not perfect yet, but it does
work a little bit better. Now, another thing
that I can do. I could do this,
select these edges. And shape them a bit, and
that probably does the trick. Or what I can try to do is I can try to go in
and use a spline. Now, this one is a little bit
more specific to Tres max, which is why I wanted to show
you the first one first. What I can do is I can use a
rectangle spline over here. And usually when you have
a rectangle spine and then convert it to
an editable spine, you can select the ends
and you can fill it them. Wait, let me just move this
to the side so you can see. And when you fill it them, they become a little bit more
perfectly round, see? Because, see that it's
small difference. Here, but you can see that
the difference is there. So that's just something
to keep in mind that sometimes a spine
actually works better, but that's mostly a tus
max and a Maya thing. Yeah, yeah, Awesome Maya. So at this point,
we have a fillet. I'm going to set the interpolation
a little bit higher. That's basically the
segments in between. This shape until they
are nice and high. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to use a modifier, which is my extrude modifier. Now, I have a bunch
of modifiers here. You can find them
probably if you watch any basic Tres Max toil. But just make sure that over
here in this little button, you turn on show buttons. And then if you go to
configure modifier sets, you can drag in here, you can set the total buttons, and you can just drag in
whatever modifier you want. So you won't be seeing me go all the way down this list
because it's just too much. Let's go ahead and
add the next root. And now what you can
see is over here, we can nicely, like,
extrude this out. And then looking at it
over the entire shape, I feel 6 centimeters is
pretty much good enough. Okay. Awesome. So we now have this general
shape over here, and what we're going to
do is we're going to basically extrude
something out of it. For this, what we need to
do is it looks like that the extrusion is flush with
the rest of the shape, which means that we need to go, Oh, sorry, we also need
to set this to an angle. So let's do that first.
We have our extrude. Now, to keep things non
destructive inside of three Max, what I like to do is I like
to dd and added pool and that is different than
converting everything to an added pole because then
you lose your modifiers. Art and dipole is pretty
much the same thing, but now you can just go
ahead and you can change it. I'm going to turn
on Snap rotation, which every single software has, and I'm just going to
rotate this a little bit at an angle. Maybe a bit stronger. Yeah, that's a
pretty good angle. I'm just going to quickly
go to my side view and grab this one and just
make it straight. Like I said, often, you can just kind of
like eyeball things, and it is more than good enough. At this point, I'm just
going to add a Oh, let's just remove this edge. We don't need two of them. Oops. And of course, if I would not be doing
this as a tutorial, I would be a little bit more precise and make it a
little bit more nice. But for now, we can just go
ahead and add an edge here. We can delete the bottom because we don't
need the bottom. And then just select the rotations that we
have over here. And basically, at this point, let's just go into isolation
mode and extrude these out. Probably like this. I know it will look very bad. Don't worry about it, and
then move this all down. To probably around this point. I feel like I want to, which is a little bit
annoying to do after. I'm just going to
move this down. There we go. Give it a
little bit more space. And for this one, I think something like that
should be fine. Okay, cool. So we now have this shape. Now, what you can see is
you can see a bunch of really nice soft bevels
all the way around here, and we can also
create those bevels. That is no problem at
all. However, we might get a few issues
around this area. So for these bevels, there's a few ways
that we can do it. Or what we can do
is we can literally select these and move them down. And this is a little bit
more non destructive. And because we are
moving them down, they should automatically
create a bevel because they're
already on an angle. And Yeah, that's already creates
like a little bevel and then all we have
to do is bevel this. Technically, you could also do what I'm about to
do with this edge, which is that you
add a ChEMFO to it. Give it a few segments. But here, as you
can see, is that when edges come closer together, the HEM fv, they
break a little bit. A way that we can hopefully
fix this is by going here and switch to,
for example, triangle. Yeah, because
uniform is breaking, and Quad definitely breaks. So let's go for triangle. And let's add do I need an extra segment?
No, you know what? I don't even need
extra segments. Just T is enough. There we go. And now this all looks nice and soft, and you
can, of course, do the same thing over
here. Hem for this. Here, we do need to do a
little bit of cleanup, but you can see that we
have a nice and soft leg. So, what else do we need? We need to go ahead and
create a little hole in here for like a screw that
we'll place in the bottom. And for this, what
we can do is we can use a very
traditional boolean. So in the case of Trees Max for boleions
you first of all, create a shape that
you want to cut out. And what I like to do
is I like to not end it on an edge because
if I end it on an edge, it will just create
messy geometry. And then what I will do is I will go ahead and move
it all the way up. Trees Max often creates additional segments
you don't want. Make sure that you figure
out how many segments you want to have rounded.
18 is fine for me. I will convert it soon at a pol, go to my left u and figure
out how deep I wanted to go, and I'll have it
just below over here and make sure it's sticking out properly because else you
want a bolly and everything. Now at this point, we can
simply select our shape. What a Boolean in TSMx hates
is when your shape is open. So just select this and press cap. That's
all you need to do. We will remove this
um tree later on, but a boolean just
really doesn't like it when the shape is open. Sometimes it works, so
don't take my word for it, but often it's just
better to merge it. Now try is max with Booleans. You go down here
into your geometry, sets to compound objects
and pro Boolean. In Blender and Maya, you can just use a modifier. That is called Boolean. I
like to then go down here in the advanced options and
turn remove only invisible. This will keep the
Boolean a little bit cleaner when it's
removing edges. Press start picking and simply pick your shape. That's it. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to go
ahead and go to Adipol and we're going to
have a look at our shape. Now, there is a
quicker way in tres Max to select Wong vertices, which is that you
go to selection, and by numeric, you set your edges to two
and press Select. In this case, there
is nothing Wong, but just in case you wanted to know that if you have
a Wey messy Boolean, it will select some vertices
that you don't need, and then you can just
press Control Backspace. I'm just going to show
you the more logical way. I'm going to do a target welt, and I'm simply going to weld these eedges together
where they are logical. So over here, you can
see that it's just close enough that I'm not moving the edges too much because
if I move them too much, we no longer have a nice round
shape around these edges. And then what you can see
over here is that we have a few edges left that are oh, wait, sorry, that
are not connected. We, of course, do want
to connect these. However, remember, we are
on a slightly round shape, so you want to be very
careful with your geometry. If you make it too messy, you will get smoothing issues, which we cannot have with
our weighted normals. That means that, for
example, with these etges, I like to actually grab it and go all the way to the site. I know that it adds a little
bit of extra geometry, and I like to also give
it a bit more space. Instead of doing
this, I go over here. But that extra geometry will in the end
look a lot better. Nowadays, also in our case, we'll be using nanite
which means that we can also afford a bit
of extra geometry, but I don't like to t that way
because you should be able to create assets also for
engines that don't have nanite. And over here, we can
just go to the site. Now, every vertex
is now selected, which means that at this point, we can double click on the edge, and we're just going
to go ahead and we are going to jam for this. And I feel like we probably
don't have enough space, but it should not
be a big jam for so Let's actually sent
this one to uniform. In this case, uniform
works better, and I'm just going to
give it a single bevel. So nothing in between
because we are going to use weighted normals in order
to basically improve this. I'm going to extend this out a bit more probably
to this point. And then I'm going to make use with the fact that these etches are so close together
by simply merging them, which should fix most of our smoothing issues that
you are seeing right now. As you can see,
looking pretty good. Okay, cool. So at this point, this shape is pretty much done. Now, a nice trick is if you
go to face mode and select by angle and set the angle
to low like five, you can quickly
select full angles. Once again, this is something that every tree
moding software has. Now at this point, just to do some very, very quick cleanup. Actually, you know what? I
will wait with the cleanup because first what
I want to do is I'm going to insert this.
Yes, insert this. So let's do an inset. Make the inset roughly the thickness that
you want it to be. Let's say 0.2, and then I'm
just going to push this down. At this point, you will
no longer be able to see this phase because there will
be another shape around it, but I'm still going to
keep the phase just in case you can see in between
this tiny little edge. So we have this. If
I just go down here. Although over here, it
looks like it goes inwards. There is actually pretty
much nothing there, but it is going up a little bit. So I'm going to now
first create an edge, and just to make things clean, I'm going to create
a cut that goes from this side all the way to
the other side like this. Going to go ahead and select it, and then deselect oh, sorry, I still have ignored
back facing turn on. The select everything
on that round bend, and I'm just going to
flatten this using my scale. This ensures that this edge
is perfectly flat like this. The reason I'm doing that
is so that now I can just create a very
simple swift loop, which just place an
extra edge in here, probably halfway, and this one I can just properly flatten. So this shape over here, it will become nice round, which means that at this
point, looks like that. Oh, turn off slack bi angle. Looks like that at this point, we roughly just continue. How does this look? So it goes down
into a little bend, which means I probably
want to simply select this and extrude this out
to roughly the center. This is also a reason
why we center stuff. So if I extrude this out
into the center, these two, I can make nice and
smooth quite easily. I can do that by just
selecting this one and adding a simple chamfer
with some segments. So that's not an issue. What I want to make
sure is that this flows over nicely,
but I think it does. Like here, there is a
little edge around it. So if I just make this
quite a large roundness, let's give it one more
segment like this. That should do the trick. Sure, we have some
messy geometry, but that's something that
we're going to fix in a bit. I do also want to flatten out this last tiny
edge over here. I should probably flatten
out that's annoying. You can also add tiny extrusion like this to flatten
it out if you want to. Go ahead and let's
just select this one. The reason I like
to select this one is because then when
I extrude it out, it flows a little bit better. So let's just go in and, let's extrude this
out a little bit. And then just going to deselect
these vases and this one. Move this up a
little bit because AZA becomes very messy geometry. And now over here,
we have a bunch of random junk that we can just
kind of merge together. That just happens because I did an extrusion that I should
not really have done. I should have done it
in the first place. But modeling is a dynamic thing. It's something that you
sometimes just need to change your mind while doing stuff. Now, a nice thing that you also can do is you can select
all of the vertices, go down here to weld
and weld settings and just set it at a very low weld setting like 0.02 centimeters. What that will do is it will remove any overlapping vertices. Whenever you also
have smoothing issues that you cannot really
figure out why, I also recommend
doing that because then often it will
fix the smoothing. Now over here, this geometry, yes, it can work, but I
like to make it nicer. I'm going to select
these edges and press control backspace to remove them and do
the same over here. Although technically, you
could also do a mirror, but we're going to
do it this way. And the reason I do that is
that I can use my cut tool to place a vertex from
one side to the other. A cut tool is once again
something that you have in every single three
D modeling software. And over here, I simply
move over to these points, though I could even
do, let's see. Let's move this
one over. I'm just trying to keep my jom tree quite spaced out because it will help when we
our weighted normals. And we still need to add
some bevels to this stuff. The reason we need
to add bevels is because weighted normals
works on bevels, actually. Yeah, let's just merge
down some stuff here. I know it looks quite ugly now. But once it is connected, that you do a totally fine job. See, that's now pretty
well connected. We can do the same over here. After that, all we have to do is create some quick bevels, and at that point, the
feet up pretty much done. And I'm then going to end the chapter here and
I'm going to continue it next time where we
will just go ahead and continue with the model. There we go. So that was already probably the
most difficult shape of the entire model
funny enough. So we now have to feed over
here. That's looking fine. The last thing
that we need to do is we need to add some bevels, and we need to add some bevels because of the weighted normals. Weighted normals is a modifier. Also, at this point, it should
actually save your scene. That would be quite useful. So that saves, and
I'm just going to call this metal detector, there we go, because you never know when you're
going to crash. So for weighted normals, the reason why we
need it is if I apply the modifier, you can
see that over here. Weighted normals needs a
bevel as a buffer zone. It's not needed here because we already pretty
much have a bevel. Here you can see what it looks like when there
is a buffer zone. See, it almost feels high pol and that's the whole
goal of weighted normals. However, we still
have some issues now. Now, a few issues is that we don't have
bevels everywhere. Another issue is that there are some places where we don't
want to have weighted normals. For example, if we
go ahead and go into our added poly and we select everything in our phases and score
all the way down. This is more specific
to Tres max. In blender, what you
can do is you can simply separate the phases
that you don't want, and then you can
solve it that way. But inside of Tres max, you can set your
smoothing groups. If we set everything to a
smoothing group of one, it will be 100% smooth. And then what we can do is we
can use smoothing groups to define where we want to have our weighted
normals and where not. If I turn off the
one on these pass, they will not receive
weighted normals. And that's the important
thing about this. So at this point, I
can see like, Okay, where do I not want to
have weighted normals? For the end, I'm literally
going to delete it. And I'm actually also going to merge this together because we are going to mirror the end
so we don't need anything. For the sites over here, what we want to do is
we definitely want to add some weight
normals or sorry, some bevels, and we want these bevels to actually
be a little bit bigger. So that's why I'm not selecting the entire tops over here. So I'm just going to go
ahead and chamfer it. And this can again, be like a single chamfer. But make it nice and large, something like
0.13, for example. And I can even merge this to make it a
little bit cleaner. There you go. Now, we
also have these corners. So basically on every corner, you would need to
add a bevel in order to have weighted normals
work unless you, of course, turn
off the smoothing. So over here, we have these
ends and we have these ends. Yeah, you know what? Let's
also select the end. I'm just going to give
this a willy small chavre. Yes, we are adding a
lot more geometry. But in return, what we're
also doing is we are saving a lot of time by not needing
high to low poly baking. Again, the geometry over a model like this
is quite minimal. If you have a super,
super complicated model, then you want to
think a little bit more about where you
place your geometry. But for something
as simple as this, what we can do is we can
just leave it like this, turn on weighted normals, and in the hard edge detection, press U smoothing groups. My apologies, I need
to redo my smoothings because I added edges and
then it gets confused. So let's go ahead and redo
that. And there we go. If I now turn off Edge faces, you can see that we have a model that feels like a hipoly model, even though we've
done no type of baking and our geometry
is still quite minimal. You can check your geometry
by pressing seven ints Max. If you go to the plus and
configure view pots in here, you can go to statistics, and you can turn
on triangle count also and then select
total plus selection. This allows me to also show
the selected model over here. But this was by far the
most difficult model. So at this point, all
that we need to do is temporarily delete
the weight normals, add a symmetry modifier
on the x axis. And let's move this.
And in my case, I should be able to literally
move this to the center. Sorry, not this one. So if we just reset this
transform to the center, this way, it will end up
perfectly on both sides. R add our weight normals
with smoothing groups. Double check, and
that's looking good. Awesome. So that is now done. I will go ahead and enter the chapter here,
save your scene. In the next chapter,
we will simply add this entire thing over here and like a top and
probably also the center. So this was by far the
most difficult part. So let's go ahead and continue
on to the next chapter.
4. 03 Creating Our Metal Detector Part2: Okay, so let's go ahead and
continue with our model. So as you can see over
here, pretty much. Well, it looks like there's
a tiny edge over here, but fluoresce is pretty
much like a flat model. So that should not be
too difficult if we just go ahead and go in here. It's too bad that I
did not save the Edge. Spine. Sorry, save the spine.
But that should be fine. Let's go. Place a new spine
roughly in the same position, convert the edible spine, and once again, do a
nice fillet over here. And you know what? I
can already just do a quick extrusion.
And let's see. I feel like I do want to add some additional interpolations
that somewhat matches up. But I think something
like this is enough. The reason why we don't need as many segments over here is because on such a large scale, sorry, long scale, I should
say, on a large scale, you can see segments,
but on a long scale, it will be harder to see them. So this is pretty much fine. Add a poly, get rid
of the center one. And then what I can do with
this one is First of all, let me just I'm
just going to go up here to my hierarchy
and center my pivot, which makes it easier for me
to do a tiny bit of scaling. There we go, just so that
we can see in between. And now at this point, we should be able to
pretty much push this out. And yes, we can use some
clipping in this case. I don't often like to do it, but this is one of the
few cases that I'm fine with it. So let's see. So we clip this out, and
then technically over here, there is an entire trim
that goes around it. We could do that, but I feel like for our design, it will just be a lot of wasted effort, I
would almost say. What I do want to maybe do is I might want to make a
little gap over here. So if I add a swift loop, so I'm basically
just diverting from the original design just to make something that I like myself that still fits our design
a little bit better. And it's just because
to be honest, I just oversaw that the trim was supposed to continue on all the
way to the top. We can still make it, but
it's honestly just not even worth spending so much effort on it when I can just grab
these two etches over here. Now, let's just
select both of these, isolate, and then still
having those edges selected. We can just make
a little corner. Let's go maybe to like the side. Push all of this stuff out. There we go. And once we add a little bevel to this,
that should look nice. So that should already be good
enough. We have this trim. I'm also going to
go ahead and create a little shape later on
for this stuff over here. But for now, this
should be fine. I'm going to keep this quite simple just because like I said, we're just going
to go over on how to do some basic modeling now, not how to create an hero asset. So having this asset
over here, let's see. All I have to do is
pretty much move it up to the top and then
create a top piece, which means that we can
already prepare this side, and then later on, we
can just symmetry it. So for preparing the side, it looks like all
I need to do is to delete these faces and probably also the top
because we don't need that. So that should already
be it, which means that we do not need Let's see. No, those faces we can see. So I do actually want
to place those back. I'm just thinking if I even
need weighted normals for this because yes the
faces go around it. I guess it would be
best to add a very, very thin weighted normal
strip around these sides. Something like that should already be enough just to
give it some smoothening. At this point, I'm just
going to also move my block out out of
the way a little bit, move this over here, just so I can see it a
little bit better. And let's go ahead and do a symmetry on the x
axis and once again, set it to zero. And I need to Okay,
that's not correct. Sorry I need to click on my
symmetry so that I go into the actual mirror modifier
and then set it to zero. There we go. And with that done, that should pretty much be it. At this point, I'm
also going to go ahead and just
convert to Adipol. I'm going to merge some of these together because
it's waste geometry. Let's actually merged over here. And the center edge we can
also get rid of Contrabgspace. Then if we just select the top, we can move it all the way
up to the Not all the way, but super, super
close to the top. Somewhere over
here. Okay, so now all we have is we have
this piece over here left, which seems to be pretty much I'm going
to keep it simple. I'm going to keep
it as an extrusion. It has a little trim around it, and I'll probably
just stick to that. Now, cool thing that
we can do for that is we have over
here this edge if we just right click and
then we can create shape. And what it will do
is it will create a shape based on our selection. And I believe most tree
molding software also have it. I know Blender Define has it, which probably the one that
many people are using. And if I just center the pivot, we now have this seam over here. So what I'm going
to do with this is I'm going to go ahead and let's move this
up to our top. And then let's probably do I think just an
extrude should be fine. Oh, that's a lot of segments. Check Y. Interesting. Let's set the interpolation
down and see if that okay. So, for some reason,
interpolation created some invisible segments, which is definitely
not what we want. I'm just going to
go ahead and push this Shall I push this up? Yeah, let's push it up. Move it down a little bit like this. And at that point,
what the mouse is going to do is just
add an added poli. I'm just going to go ahead
and select the entire ring, and I'm going to do
extrude and then extrude settings and set
it to local normals. And this basically allows us to extrude based on
our local normals. At this point, we
can go ahead and we can extrude this down. And I need to give it a
little bit more space. Sorry, guys, let me just extrude out a
little bit further. So local normal. I'm going to set it to 0.6. And then what I'm going
to do is I'm going to add a quick segment
probably around here. And doing that at this point, if I just go ahead and
select the center face, hold Shift and click on Edge to convert it to edges,
Control Backspace. So that now has become the
new edge and at this point, if I extrude this down, see, we have a little trim still. I can now push this I'm going to push it
down a bit further, and then I want to
just taper it off. So if I push this
down a bit further, I'm going to then
add two connections. Probably, let's say, let's
taper it off from here. Probably here. So you can just select this edge
and then push this up. I'm actually going to
push this entire thing down a little bit so that
it fits a bit better. And next, I just want
to go in and say, I know that I could
have done symmetry, but for some reason, I decided, oh yeah, wait. The reason I didn't
do that is because we converted it from an edge. That's why. I'm just going to place a center segment in here. Select the center segment. Push it out a bit and then select the edges and
then just champ for it. See? And that kind that
already does enough. You can even give the bit
more segments over here. Then we have over here, just
a corner and here a corner. Let's go ahead and also
champ for that one. Just a single champ is enough. And then finally over here, over here and over here, let's also make
this extra smooth. We do also have the one
over here on the end. And then after that, I need to just clean
some geometry up. I just select this
edge hold control and double click to
basically loop the edge. Then I can go ahead and hold shift and convert
this to an edge or two edges and give it just
like a nice trim like that. Okay. Let's have a look
at it from distance. Maybe turn off edge and faces. Yeah, I think that
reads quite well. I have the urge to
select the entire thing and scale it up a little bit more so that it's
a little bit more visible. Just because when
it's a long shape, it's sometimes a bit
difficult to see. There we go. See?
That looks nice. We have a top,
bottom, great stuff. Okay. Now, at this point, I'm just going to go ahead
and clean up the geometry, and then what we
can do is throw on a weighted normals, and
that's pretty much it. I'm going to go ahead and select the top over here, hold shift. Contra backspace to get
rid of those segments. Next, I'm just going
to go ahead and I'm going to merge this one, this one, this one, and then merge these and you'll see where I'm
going at with this. Same over here. Just merge
all this stuff together. If it was a very
complicated asset, I would, of course,
just resymmetize it. But right now, it's not really worth doing because
all I need to do is just merge this stuff together here. There we go. And now what we can do
is we can basically just double click on
all of these edges, except for the main ones that continues straight and press
contraband space. See? Yeah, there we go. Same over here, this
one, this one, this one, and that we'll just
instantly get rid of a bunch a bunch of edges. Not sure why. That
selection wasn't working. Contrabgspace. Double check. Looking good. Weighted normals. And what you can do when
you have long shape. Now, you need to
be a bit careful. You can turn on snap
to largest face. This often does make
long shapes look better. However, it might sometimes
also make the corners look a little bit jacket.
You'll see the corners. But in this case, it
looks about fine. So I'm just going to do
that, and it will give me slightly better weighted
normals. Okay. Awesome. So at this point,
what do we need? We just need to go
ahead and create some extent details on
the bottom and the top, and then I am quite
happy to already just, like, call this piece done. I guess if we want, we can also, like, a little model
on the center. And after that, we
can focus on the top. So for these accent
pieces, pretty much, let's just go ahead
and height selection, our blockout stuff, and
let's go to our site view. And we're just going
to use lines for this, so I'm checking my reference. And it looks like
with the reference, it's going up here,
going to the top, and then I like to
click and drag, which allows me to
basically smooth my curve. It's called the Bezier curve. You will probably find it in every tree
modeling software. I'm going to turn off my
rotation snapping. There we go. That looks pretty
nice and round. And I'm just going to hold
insert because I just want to create a quick insert here. Let me make it a
little bit nicer just because want to be able to look myself into the mirror
and not be one of those people that makes
really messy jomry Although My jomr is
still pretty messy. After a while, you just kind
of get desensitized to it. I've been doing modeling for
more than ten years now, and it just yeah, sometimes you just
get a bit bored, especially because nowadays, I'm technically not a
tree artist anymore. I'm more of an art director. So this kind of stuff, it's fun to do once in a while, but it's not something
I do quite often. I just to push this back in, but not over the bevel, so that we just have
a thin strip which we can later on, make it look nice. In our textures. I'm going
to go ahead and delete that. I'm then going to
connect some of these, give it a very quick tiny bevel because I think in this case, the bevel will look nice. Yeah, you can just
connect this to the end because it
doesn't have a backface. So Sorry, if you can hear a lot of
clicking, there we go. Select this side, shift. And do we need to
give it an end bevel? No, because we don't
see that stuff. So just give it like a very small let's do
0.15. There we go. We can widely check if
the weight and normals like this is enough
that looks fine. However, you can see that
there is a tiny bit of, like, a messy edge. So in that case, just
go to our added pool, and in our smoothing groups,
set everything to one. But then select this entire
corn edge over here and set this to not one and then
turn on smoothing groups. And that should
already be enough. A, that's too bad.
Here it's fine. Here it's a bit too messy. Okay, fair enough. If it's wy too messy and the
smoothing groups don't work, then you just want to
go ahead and select these and add a
small bevo there. And at this point, yeah, let's just re smooth, so let's smooth everything, but then turn off everything
except for the top. There we go. I'm just going to go ahead and
I'm going to center this pivot. And, you know what? I will just do a very
simple symmetry. It's probably easiest on the Xaxis There we go. Let's see. Do we have enough
space? It does over here. Let's just go all the way
back to our added ply and we can turn this button on to basically still
see our symmetry. I'm just going to push
this in a little bit more. So that over here, it also
gets pushed in a bit more. There we go, and move the weight normals
above the symmetrize. Okay, that works quite well. Can I just use this one for
the top? That's my question. No, because it's
a little bit more inserted, which is too bad. In that case, we're
just going to go ahead and do the top manually. And yes, at this point, I am trying to go quite
fast because I don't want to waste too much
time on this kind of random small stuff. But here, if we just
give it a small bend up until this and square it off. Let's see. Let's
push this down here. Let's go to push this
in a bit further, but that should be good
enough, as far as I can see. Let's hope that we have enough space here
for the thickness. So let's go ahead and
extrude this. There we go. Minus or let's 0.1. Just like a very thin
extra, we need a bit more. 0.5 is too much. Three. Yeah, there we go. Okay. Going to go ahead and once again convert that. Delete this. See, I can also delete
this edge and even this. Now that you think of it, we
could have also done that on the other side because you
don't see anything else. So that's my bad.
Sorry about that. Like I said, I might miss stuff sometimes because I no
longer model every day. And when I do modeling, it's not so much like, Well, sometimes or it's
really highly detailed props, or it's more like stuff
like modular assets, like for big structural
elements that I need to create in order to properly know what a level is
going to look like. So it's almost a bit
sad to think about that my mulling days
are sort of over, although I choose
for them to be over, but still, that's just
how things go sometimes. But I still get to do
some mudding here. Okay, cool. Nice. For this one, I'm just going
to go at ter weight normals, snap the largest face also. Double check that snap to largest phase
does not here, see. Here you can see that actually, it did more bad than good, which is why I'm not
going to do snap to largest phase because it
looked a bit too messy. But that should be it for the
side of the metal detector. We do have some screws
over here and we have Wi small details, but what we can do is we
can add those later on. The screws I probably
do want to have as actual geometry just because
they are quite obvious. And also, what I want to do
is I probably want to get something like this in here because we are going
to go for this design. And speaking of that design, at this point, just unhide. Let's move this in
the center or back to roughly the center. Over here. And I'm going to just
duplicate this over. Later on, of course,
what we'll do is we will UV unwrap one and then
duplicate it over again. You can even re use one in the UV so that
you can save some UV space. But for me, I feel like that's too limiting for
the textures I want. But anyway, for now, we're
just going to have this. And we are basically
going to create this with a little
trim around it, and this little normal
edge what we can do is we can probably just have it inside of substance painter. We don't really need to
create that as geometry. So you probably know how we
are going to create this. Let's go to our side view. Create a rectangle spine in the location of
our spine over here. And then essentially, we're just going to go ahead and convert
this to an edible spine, select all segments and fill it them all
the way to the top. In this case, what I'm
going to do is I'm going to select the
top and press Fuse, which will turn it
into one point. This can save you needing
to select an edge again and then remove that edge on the
top and the bottom. Now at this point, I'm going to just height
selection temporary, temporarily, I should say. Turn on action faces.
And let's see. I want to push this.
Let's move it out. And because it's now round, I feel like we need a
little bit more space. I'm going to extrude this We Alexei, I don't need to
exclude that much because I'm just
going to mirror it. But the general goal is
that when I look at it, it feels like a logical spacing, which it does to me. Maybe give it even a
tiny bit more space. You can turn on once again
the show end results. Yeah, you know what?
That works quite well. At this point, we
have our extrude. I'm just going to create a very quick swift loop
probably over here. Now, as you can see,
what we can do is yes, we can do a very
simple extrusion, or what you can do
is you can actually extrude this in and
create a little gap. This creates a little bit or this requires a little
bit more geometry, but I find it that sometimes it does actually add quite
a bit more visual interest. Basically, what I will do is I will create another extrusion. Let's see here, let's
do something here. Then I select this.
I'm going to go ahead and extrude this
out quite thin like this. And then I'm going to
go ahead and press Plus to add another extrusion, and this extrusion will
be the final thickness, something in this range. I can see over here that we
have some messy geometry, so let me just quickly fix that by collapsing these points. And collapse is basically
just a merged butt or like a target
weld but in center. You should have a collapse
or something similar to that in any three
molding software. Not sure why these are there. Actually, I don't trust
that these are there, so I'm going to select
all of my vertices, and I'm going to weld
on a very low level. See, here we removed
eight vertices. So there were probably
some overlapping vertices which cause the issue. I'm going to select the center. And yes, you can select by
angle, or in this case, I can just press grow selection
twice and then delete. Whatever you need to do to
basically get the selection. And at this point,
I'm going to go to my top view and extrude
this out again. See, so now we have this
little edge over here. What we can do is
we can give it like the tiniest chamfer just to be able to not get any errors. This edge over here, we can get rid of because we don't need it. And then we have this end edge, which we can give
slightly larger Bevel, 0.07, something like this. And now we're out by
weighted normals, that should look quite nice. Just turn off my edge
and faces to check. See? So just going inside there, it just feels sometimes a
little bit more grounded. And I'm going to actually
push this back a tiny bit. So let's go to added
pool. There we go. I'm going to make it
a little bit less. Once that is done, actually, let's remove the
weighted normals for now because we are just
going to symmetrize it. Let's first center the pivot. Centering a pivot
because it will always start the symmetry
from the center just makes it easier for me
to see. And there we go. It's already actually
at the right position, I would say, white? Yeah, something
like that. And now we can once again
arteright normals. And you can also try
to do by largest edge. But once again, here
see, it just messes with the top a bit too
much for me to like it. So we have done this one. Now, yes, you can have an
extra trim around there, but I'm going to keep
this a little bit more simplified in this case, just because it is a tutorial. However, I do
recommend making it a bit more interesting with
a trim, stuff like that. What I'm going to do is I'm
going to save my scene and probably going to start first
by creating these screws, which should be quite simple. If we just go to our side view, we only will need to
create one of them. So if we go ahead and
create a cylinder, make it roughly the
size that you want. And once again, I'm just
kind of like eyeballing it and then putting
it on the side. And then look at it from a
distance to get a feel for it, and I feel it can
go a bit smaller. Now, as you can see over here, there are quite a few ridges. Now, this is quite a
bit of extra geometry. It's up to you if you want
to create these ridges, you can also create
them inside of, for example, um
substance painter or you can have them in here. What I will do is I
will go ahead and I will create them in
substance painter. And the reason for this is
just that I can show you a little bit more
norm map creation for more optimized measures. However, if you want to
go full on nanite, yeah, you can just go ahead
and then create it in here as geometry. But what I'm going to do is
I'm going to have it here. What I actually what to
do is I want to move this to the very
end because I want to see the bevel on
the end go in inwards. I'll show you in a
bit what I mean. Yeah, that feels right. So now, if we just select the top and bottom and
convert this to edges, we can add a nice bevel or chef, whatever
you want to call it. See? And then over here, it feels like it
goes inwards a bit. And I feel like that is
also the case in real life. Although this is, of
course, not real life. This is a random, but I just in general, like the idea of that. Now, over here for
this little hole, we can go ahead and we can
probably just use that. That should be no
problem because we already saved a
lot of jom trees. I'm going to just push this in. And what do I want to do? Do I want to give it a bevel? Yeah, you know what? Let's
just give that inner circle, also, a bevel instead of
changing our smoothing groups. There we go. And wait enormous. Quite nice and simple, and it would have one,
for example, over here. They don't feel
fully in the center. Like this, they feel correct. And I can now also unhide all and just temporarily
because once again, this is something that
will UV unwrap later on, I can move it over here. There we go. See, even assets
that seem simple, you're still in the end spending quite a bit of time to just
make them nice and perfect. Now, at this point,
what I'm going to do is I'm going to be a little bit lazy if
you guys don't mind, and I'm going to just
take a screenshot of this because normally, I can of course, think of a nice consol
or something like that. Or what I can do
is I can just take a screenshot of what I already have and use that as reference. So I apologize for my laziness. But now that I have the
screenshot over here, that just gives me
a nice inspiration. I'm going to go ahead
and go to my front view. So I'm going to go ahead
and create a simple box, probably starting from the top to this end panel over here. Oh, looks like I'm on the
wrong side. That's no problem. Just going to push
this here and just see where it fits nicely. Let's keep it a little
bit from the end. I feel this is a
pretty good size, something like this, yeah. And what I also want to do is I also kind of want to go ahead and continue with the general
shape flow that we have. Of course, this one
is quite sharp, but you can often see like everything kind of follows
the same flow where here. A lot of stuff is around, so everything else is also around. So I'm still going to
take some inspiration from other elements. Give me 1 second.
I'm just organizing my reference for a moment here. Okay. So that's pretty good. Let me just go in and you know what I'm going to do is I'm
going to push this out, and I'm going to give this
quite a large jam for ab, I think. Mmm. I do like large chamfer, but it definitely needs
a lot of round edges. Yeah, so let's do
quite a large chamfer. Let's start by making
these ones, very, very round, and then I'm just going to
soften everything out. Add a bunch of
segments over here. Maybe triangle will work a
bit better in this case. Here. So some really
soft segments. I kind of also want to give
it a little bit of an angle. Now, I look at it.
Yeah, you know what? I'm going to before I do those round segments
because they just making an angle annoying. How is this or if I
pushes out a bit further. Maybe let's go to my side
views that I can see. I want to know quick trick about scaling is
just use a line. And if you then, for example,
place the line here, you can just move it
down. And here, see. Now I can very quickly see
that this one needs to be pushed out more
in order to kind fit the same scaling. See? And now it all fits the same. So just random trick. But it's really specific to
Tres Max because in blender, using splines really sucks. So that's where I often
avoid using them at cost. I'm going to give it probably
six segments just to give it a little bit
more geometry like this. Okay. That looks quite good. And what I will
do is, let's see. Let's insert this.
So at this point, I'm basically just
making stuff up. That's why I'm also going a little bit slower to
really think about it. I'm going to insert this. I'm going to place a
single connect and move it probably over here and I'm going to chem for it to give it
almost like a little strip. Now I'm going to
extrude by local normal, these two edges. But of course, I didn't need to make this round because
else it doesn't fit in. So let's make this round a triangle It's a bit hard to get to the same roundness without greatly messing
up the geometry. But I do want to sort of
like match the roundness. So I am actually going to mess up the geometry quite a bit. Then what I can do is
I can select my angle, and hopefully I can just select this and delete all of it, and then hopefully I can
clean it up in a bit. So am I happy with that? Yes, I'm going to move this
edge here, this edge here, and I'm doing that so that
I can bridge everything a little bit more
cleaner here see? Because now I can bridge
sorry from over here, simple bridge to here and also from oh, it's hard to select
edges from here. Come on to here. Okay. Now you can do the
same over here. And the reason why we want
to do this is because if we just try to bridge
the entire chunk, the edges will go
all over the place. But if you do it
carefully by first selecting this and now
you go to press three, which is a border sect, you
can select this border. These selected two ends, see, instantly create
a clean bridge. Because when the
bridge is small, the system is better to
understand what we need. Example over here, it's again, quite tricky where I'm probably
going to go ahead and I'm actually going to only
bridge these points. And then this one,
I can just bridge or cap whatever you want. Again, these points
and And again, bridge. And that will make it
easier when we start adding some extra
bevels and stuff also. This one, yes, it's a
little bit quite tight, so I'm actually going to remove it because it's not even needed. Now I look at it because we already have it
connected at the top. Okay, so that's a pretty clean looking
console at this point. I'm going to go ahead and do I maybe want to like art
something interesting? Maybe like art like some type
of extrusion going down. Nah, you know what? I
feel like that kind of breaks the general flow of the smoothness
that we're going for. So at this point, let's just
go ahead and start by adding a nice extra smooth bevel. Here. There we go. Let's add a small bevel. Wait, let's first of all,
select these inner etches, shift and convert them to edges, and then select
the outer etches, and now we can add it
like a small chever. There we go. I believe there was a backface
that we don't need, do I need that I also
don't need this corner. So what I'm going to do
is select this backface and grow it to also select
the bevel and just delete. And wait normals. There we go. Now, as you can
see over here on the inside, I kind of forgot to actually
make some connections. I do like to do this by hand. Yes, technically,
your engine will probably like, merge it for you. But the reason I like to do
it by hand is because else the smoothing might be
slightly different between, for example, subsisPainter,
marmoset real engine. When this smoothing
is different, you will often get problems where you are texturing using
a very specific norm map, for example, and then all of a sudden the
smoothing doesn't work. So, trust me on it, often doing it
manually is better. If you really want to save time, what you can do is you can connect just
these ends over here. And over here. And then basically to force
the smoothening to go in a very small area because the problem is when the
edges become too long, you can cut it like this. Now, when you do this,
what you will do is you will force the system to only
triangulate these areas. But honestly, at this
point, you can also do this to do it yourself,
and it's a lot cleaner. But if you are will in a rush, you can just leave it like this and the system
will kind of clean it by itself without
going crazy. If you wouldn't do that,
it would, for example, place an edge from here all
the way to here and just like criss cross it all
through each other, which doesn't look nice. But here, as you can
see, this literally just takes an extra second or two, which over the grand scheme
of things, is not a lot. And this one actually
has an extra bevel. There we go. See? Okay. Awesome. So we got
those panels over here. At this point, you can choose if you want to have some type of buttons in your actual panel or if you want to have some
actual physical buttons. I feel that in this case, would I want physical buttons. It does feel a bit
nicer if we have some physical buttons
just because in Tri D, it's a bit easier to
see physical buttons, while having buttons
just in the texture, it always feels a bit off, especially when the texture is not high enough resolution. So I'm just going to
go ahead and create some very simple
buttons like this. Get a bit thicker. Yeah, that should look good. Awesome. Okay. I'm going to have a
button over here. And what I'm going to do is you don't really need to
do you need to rotate? Yeah, let's rotate these
buttons a little bit. And then we don't need
any type of backface. We can just go ahead
and select all of these edges and just instantly make it a little bit
smooth using a jumper. There we go. Weighted normals,
nice and simple. Now at this point, as you can see over here, if
I would move this, it would move based
on world space, which means that it will
push in a bit more. However, what you can do is
after rotating is you can set it from view to
local movement space, which once again is something that every three
moling software has. And this way, we
can push it out. Funny enough, I messed
up the rotation, so I still need to push
it in a little bit, but it also works on other side. So if I go, for
example, over here, that gives me enough space to add some additional graphic
details and stuff like that, I'm going to just snap to
larger face for these ones. And that's it. I would say that at this point, I pretty much have
everything done, I think. Let's art these
details over here. However, what we can do
is we can mostly just add them into as just a sphere. And after that, yes, I guess you have some connection points
and this and that, over here for the cables. But I'm going to just ignore that just because at this point, I feel like I've shown
you more than enough. I just like to have those
round details just because they add some visual interest
to the entire model. Let's move this over here. And for those round details, we can make it super simple. I'm going to probably do
it at the 1 meter mark. I'm just going to create a
simple cyna bit smaller. I'm going to set
this to 23 segments, sorry, 23, 24 segments. Try to always go
for even segments. I don't know why I did 23. I'm just going to
delete the backface, select the front, add
a quick env to it. There we go and await normals.
That's all that you need. And this point, you
can also go ahead and like convert this
to the other side. Okay. Awesome. So what I would be doing at this
point is in the next chapter, we are just going to go over
on how to do the UVNwpping. Now for the UVNmpping, normally what I like to
use is to use Rhythm UV, but since that would
be an introduction to entire new modeling software, that might be a bit overkill. So instead, what I will do
is I will go ahead and I will use just TS Max. However, I'm going to use a
plugin called Text tools, which is quite
popular for TS Max. For now for these
versions over here, you can go ahead
and if you click up here to your toggle
layer explorer, you can add the blockout
into another layer. Call it blockout, and then
you can easily turn it off. So now you can see that now
we have over here our model. If we just have a look, it looks like a pretty solid model. Of course, we need to copy some stuff over here and there, but that's something that we'll
do after our UVN mapping. So let's go ahead and continue with this
in our next chapter.
5. 04 Uv Unwrapping Our Metal Detector: Okay, so let's get started with the UV
unwrapping of our asset. Now, for this, I like to
use quite a famous tool, which is called Text tools. So if we just go
ahead and go in here, Text tools threes Max. And you can simply just go
in and type it into Google, and then it will bring
you to the first page. And if you scroll down, you can get it here,
but I recommend getting it over here in case
there's, like, a new update, I download URL, and just go over on how to install
a typical script, which literally just
means dragging it into Tres Max to install it. At that point, you can add it
to your toolbar over here. If you don't know how
to do that, just go to customize and go to
customize user interface. And if you go to
toolbars in here, you are able to find
text tools over here and just grab the one with icon and just drag it over
here into your toolbar. But I assume that
you already know a little bit of
basic URN wrapping, but in case you don't know
that tool, it is super useful. So our goal right now is to go in and UVnwap
just pieces that we want. So I'm going to first of all, go in and select this piece
and probably this piece, and also these three I
think that's about it. And just right click and
I'm just going to freeze the selection because I only want to unwrap
the stuff that I need, everything else, we
will just replace. And let's go ahead
and get started. You know what? I will do
an easy one for you guys. Just get start with. So let's go ahead and start
with this one. What we can do at this
point is usually Well, it's more about I don't
really do it anymore, but you guys should do it, which is, oh, sorry, I forgot to freeze this one. Which is by selecting it, Ctravi copy, and then do a new layer, which
we'll call backup. Make sure that after you've
done the backup layer, you click back on the default because if you
keep it on backup, whenever you create new assets, they will end up in
the backup layer. And this is just to get a
quick backup because I'm quite lazy and I usually just grab this thing and then
convert to added pool. So that's just like a clean mesh like this without any modifiers. But you get, of course, keep
your modifiers if you want. I just like to do it this way. And then I turn on text tools, press Edit UVs on
it. Nice and simple. And now we have
our UV editor over here. Do I get out with. So for this asset,
what do we need? We pretty much only
need one seam and we want to place it in a location where it
will be hard to see. If I just select everything, pressing Contra A
and press iron, you can see over here that's
not looking very good. However, if I then go to Edge, select this edge over here and go to Explode
and press break. This way, we can
now break the edge. And now, if we would go in and I often just like to
do like a quick peel, you can see that now it is
all nicely peeled together. Of course, I do expect that you already know the basics of UV unwrapping because this is a very quick tutorial course. Why is there a double oh, because backup is still on. That's not very smart.
I did the wrong one. Give me 1 second. This one
needs to go to backup. And this one needs
to go to default. My apologies. There we go. Okay. Awesome. And at
this point, if you want, you can turn on the checker box, which will ensure you that you have a pretty
decent checker. Over here, you can see that
it's a little bit angled, which actually is a
little bit surprising. What you can do is
you can press relax. And often here we go. That seems to fix that. Normally, quick peel
doesn't make any errors, so that was actually
quite surprising, but it can sometimes happen. And what I like to do at
that point is I just like the height selection
and then continue on. Now, these ones are very easy. We can just go ahead
and select them, and I think it's already
good enough to just iron it. Yes, if you want, you can place like a tiny
seam here, here, here, and here, and then break it to stretch it out if
you don't relax here, see, to stretch it
out a bit more. But often for such
small buttons, it might even be overkill.
Gonna add my checker. And now another cool
thing that is quite well, it's not unique to Tris Max, but it just works much better in Tres Max is that
you can just right click and copy your UVNrap
and literally just paste. On your other models. And as long as the models
are exactly the same, as you can see, they will
just copy over the UVs, at which point we
can hide selection. This one is also looking
nice and cleaned up. So let's just go
ahead and already going to Arthur checker box. And for this one,
you can see that this one is quite
a bit more messy. Let's start one by one. We're going to, first of
all, iron these ends. That's a nice and simple one. Now, for these pieces over here, you know
what I'm going to do? I'm going to actually grow
my selection over here. And iron these pieces. That will make it a little bit easier for me to handle
the rest of the edges. And as you can see, they
still work quite well. Now if I just press contra I and just to get
rid of this mess, I'm just going to do an
iron. And let's see. I'm going to for this one, probably only grab the front and then add a seam to the side, which means that I
want to go in here. Oh, sorry, it's because I
have my how you say it, planar angle turned on.
Let's go to the side. There we go. That front
is not so extremely bend, which means that we can
just iron it like this. And then we have
the side. And for the side, I'm just
going to go in, and I'm just going to
add a simple cut here. At which point, if
I would go ahead and straighten selection
and then relax, it will place it into
a straight line. Straighten selection
doesn't always work. It depends if your
jom tree is messy, it will just
completely break it. In those cases, just
use your quick peel. But that's another one,
the, ight selection. And like that, we can continue. Now for this one, what I actually can do is
let's convert at the ply. I don't need this phase, so that's just wasted UV space. And for cylinders, cylinders are still quite easy to unwrap. Let's iron them, and
another trick is just going here and
I'm going to oh, I need to because over here, I didn't merge it together, which is a little
bit bad on my side, but I can always
do that later on. I'm going to go in and I'm going to break this one
A to break here. In this case, I'm
actually going to place the seam over here
on the bottom. And the reason I want to
do that is because it's the least visible area because you often look at
the asset from the top. And at that point, I'm
also going to break it. But at this one, because
you look at it from top, I'm going to place it
over here at the top, because once again, it's just about how you look at the asset. At this point, you can see that we placed a bunch of seams, and now if we just
would do a quick peel, this one's Oh, that's
why it's not working. I forgot a tiny seam.
That's quick peel. There we go. And now
you can see that our wedding nicely organizes all of these additional assets. And if you want,
you can always add a checker, just to double check. I feel like I forgot to say something about that
one, but I don't know. Anyway, let's go ahead and go into something that's a
little bit more complicated, which is this one over here. Although, honestly,
it looks quite easy. I'm going to convert the Adipol and let's just see what we have.
Quite an easy one. Let's start by just
grabbing the base, and let's maybe grow it once to also grab that bevel around it. And that's quite a simple Plane. Let's go ahead and
grab this top base. Once again, let's go ahead and probably no, you know what? I'm not going to grow this one because I don't want
to seem to be too visible in case we are doing some type of
texturing on that. And all that is left is
this piece around here. And this piece, if
you look at it, it's pretty much like a cylinder because it just goes around. So if I would grab this piece, and let's say that I
place a Seam over here, and you always want to
make sure that the seams are somewhat in the location,
it will be hard to see. And literally while saying that, why would I not grab this one? Of course, because this one is a shorter edge, so
it works a bit better. And because it's quite a long asset to go
all the way around, I'm also placing a
seam on the other side because else it becomes
a really long strip and really long
strips take on a lot of resolution inside of
UVs, which we don't want. So now let's go ahead
and do a quick peel, and I'm just going to go
ahead and do a quick relax. As you can see over here,
the relax and Quick peel, they get a little bit confused. This sometimes happens
when we did not reset our X forms on assets. Doesn't always happen, but if you notice something is wrong, just quickly convert
this to added poly. Don't worry. The UvN
wrapping will stay on there. Go to your utilities
and reset the X form. And often after doing that, when we go ahead
and edit UVs again, for example, grab these
and now try to relax. Huh, try Quick Peel. And else that's
quite surprising if it that is quite surprising. I guess then this is
the actual look of it, but I don't like that look. Let's do a check box
and just temporarily, I'm going to make it
quite large so that I can see what it's doing.
I don't like that. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to give the
bit more space. I'm going to go in here and grab this seam and
also break that. And I can do the same over here, grab this one, break that. Let's try that. So if
we select this side, here, now it's just
like a nice thin strip. And often when you
break it like that, it gives a little bit more space to the other pieces over here, where I go ahead
and now here see. So now you can see
that these pieces, they no longer deform. If I would relax them, you
can see that nothing happens. So now the jom tree is
looking nice and clean. Of course, we are later on
going to fix the orientation, but this is good enough for now. So let's go ahead
and close this off, and this one is now also done. These pieces, they are very easy because they're just
like some ardon pieces. So what I can do is I can
select both of them iron relax. See? Because there's
only two phases to it. So it's almost like
Uvnwrapping a plane. I can do the same
over here, I believe. Yeah, this is a like this
bend is not too strong. So once again, I can
go over here. Iron. There we go. It's already good enough. Alright, selection. Let's go ahead and
go to this one, and I'm just going to convert to addi pool and get rid
of this seam over here. Yeah, this over here, like, it's a little bit dense,
but I'm okay with it. But if you want, you
can always just go in and lower this by just
selecting every other edge. It's up to you, see? And it does kind of like yeah. I feel like that is
a nice optimization. So that's nice thing
about modeling. Often, you can just go back
in and you can kind of, like, work on it to
further improve it. As long as you keep your
jom tree nice and clean, this should not be an
issue. There you go. See? A little bit of
extra optimization. Anyway, save our scene, and let's go ahead
and UVnwap this one. You will get quite
fast UVNwrapping, especially if you
don't like it like me. Like, I'm not the biggest
fan of UVnwapping. Some people find
it very relaxing. For me, I just want to get to like all the other fun stuff. Um, I will actually go in. Oh, for this, I cannot use
my plane selection tool. 1 second. Let me just
go for some reason, it's not able, there we
go to select that line. But when I hold Shift and then select the
face next to it, it looks like this
time it did work here. So I'm just going to go
ahead and iron this one. There we go. And
what I will do is, let's iron this and then place a little
seam probably here. Cut, straighten, relax. Don't worry about the scaling. That's also something
that we are going to fix. Later on, iron this, place little break here or seam or cut or whatever
you want to call it. Straighten, relax. Okay, so that takes
care of those. We can actually do the
same on the inside. And the inside, it will actually be really
hard to even see. I'm just going to place
a quick seam here. And this time because it's such a large model, I'm
just going to fold it. Wait, straighten
it and relax it. Okay, seems like that default, because it has the bend in it, it just needs that extra bit of shape to it, which
is totally fine. But there's no problem
at all. Nothing has to be perfectly straight. Sure, you can force it to
be perfectly straight. But often you're spending
a lot of time while not actually improving
the UV that much, maybe saving a
tiny bit of space, but it's often so
little that yeah, it's not really worth spending an additional 20 minutes on it unless it's like an absolute super optimized hero asset or
something like that, but I'm also going to select this and what I will do
is I wanted to grow it, but I don't want to accidentally give this any weird faces. That looks fine. Re iron it. That's what just take care
of that little extra bit. And now let's have a look. What do we have left? If you just select everything
in this box, it's easier for you to see. I want to probably place a cut. Let's place a cut here. Here and then here, and then I want to try
to loop it around. We need to be a bit careful
because these cuts are, of course, a little
bit more visible. So I want to go in
and loop this around. The only thing
that I'm not super happy about is the
top over here, which might cause issues. So what I might want
to do is I'll just select those by hand. You know what? Let's just do
an angular select over here. And let's then go ahead and
grow my selection and then deselect these few faces
over here because, of course, we already
UV Nwrapp those, so we don't want to
redo those again. They can probably be
included in this one. That's also fine if
you want to do that. I'm just going to go ahead
and keep it like this, which gives me a U shape. Grow this one. A bit annoying angle. There we go. U shape. I just realize I can
literally just go in here and just deselect it
but for some reason. I didn't think of that. And
now we have this shape left. If I go ahead and iron it and ironing it does
lose my connection. And what I also want to do is I want to actually
probably double click, except for the top, like I basically I want to
get rid of this shape. Let's actually do face. Let's do phase. There
we go and grow. Here we go. So
that's the bottom. And now, I should be able to just place
a single seam here, here, here and here. At which point I can select
this side, iron, this side. And then all that is left
is this little piece which I can try to just unpeel
and see how it works. Let's relax it a bit.
Yeah, you know what? That's fine. I'm okay with that. This is going to
be plain plastic. So unless you need to have very specific directional
patterns on it, this is totally fine
for what we need. So I'm just going to go ahead
and do art and tile relax, and this one is now done. Awesome. Selection, and this
is probably the last one. If I just go ahead
and oh Oh, no, wait. Over here. I forgot
about this one. What I'm going to
do with this one is just because this
is a giant end gun, I'm just going to scale this in, and I'm going to collapse
it. There we go. Same over here. Scale
this in, collapse it. Quickly grab this
one, scale scale, go down, copy, move
it to the other side. I know it goes fast,
but at this point, it's just about getting
this done nice and quick. And then the last one over here, what we can do is
we can go ahead and probably make
it one long unwrap. I do want to make
sure that I have enough resolution when I
make the one long unwrap. But the worst case is that I just split it
down in the middle. Of course, I want to
avoid that because it's a very visible seam, but that is we can
do that if needed. Let's go ahead and
grow, iron, relax. Select crow iron, relax. And then all that is left is
this entire piece. Iron it. And for this seam, there is not really
a good location. So I'm just going to so I
need to, like, unisolate it. I'm going to place
it on the inner side over here. Cut that. And then let's just go
ahead and actually, let's do a straightened
selection. Here you can see that straightened
selection didn't work. What we can also do is just
an unpeel and then relax. And then if we relax
a bunch of times, now it seems to give us a
proper unwrap like that. And that should do the trick. Awesome. Okay, so we have
these pieces now done. We can go ahead
and we can unhide. And now with these pieces done, I believe that's about it. What we can do is we can go ahead and move these
over to the other sides. I'm not going to pack them
yet because I want to keep these as unique UVNwps. If there are some pieces that
you want to reuse the UVs. So, for example,
with these ones, if you just want the textures
to be exactly the same on all four in order to
save some UV space, then just don't
copy them over now, but do it a little bit later. In my case, that might actually be beneficial
for this one. The reason might beneficial is because it needs to have
normal map details, so I want to make it
a little bit larger, and it might be better for
me to make one piece larger than to make all four
of them larger in UVs. So I'll show you what
I mean with that. I'm going to go ahead and let's see, this
point to this one. Something I'm also
thinking about. Yeah, that's good enough. Is to copy over this one. That's a little bit more
of a difficult one where I'm like, arts a lot of shape, but because it's so large, it will be a shame if we
lose so much space to this. But if we go ahead
and first of all, centra pivot so that we
can do a proper rotation. Oh, sorry, I'm
still set to local. That's why it's
messing things up. If we go ahead and select this and then do a
simple rotation. Hopefully that doing that
rotation will give us enough difference in
the texture because we will never see the
exact same texture once that we can just copy
over this entire thing. Wait, I'm saying
that, but that means that I don't need
to copy it over. So we are going to copy
this over later on. For some reason, my mind
is not completely here because copying it over later on means that I don't
want to copy it over now. So I think that's already it. If I look at it.
Yeah, you know what? That's already it pretty much. Okay, that went
faster than expected. I'm going to go ahead and
just select everything. It's isolated. So this
is going to be the model that will give our
final UVN maps. Let's go ahead and save. We also need to keep in mind occlusion mapping when
we copy things over. So what would happen is
when I grab this one, it will give me an embit
occlusion map on these sites. Then if I would
copy, for example, this over here
without rotating it, what will happen is that
you would literally see occlusion on the
flat angles over here. That's another good reason
why you want to rotate it and keep in mind where occlusion
mapping will happen. In any case, I'm going
to select everything. I'd like to always
at this point, do a reset X form and convert
everything to added poly. The reason I like to
do that is to make sure that all of the scaling is logical because we
are going to use automatic packing in order
to pack most of this stuff, and then we make some
small adjustments. So right now, the
reason why we need that automatic scaling
is because, for example, this shape is way smaller
than a tiny shape down here. If we select everything, scroll down and press this button, the rescale elements,
it will rescale everything based on the
actual three D model scale. At that point, what
we're going to do is we are going to
turn on rescale and rotate and set the padding to 0.001 and press pack, normalize. This will give us
a very quick pack. Now at this point, I'm
going to go in and I'm going to check if there
is, first of all, here, turn on elements select, any type of rotations
that I want to change. I'm just going to turn
off snap rotation. And see if there's anything that I want to rotate a little
bit more straight. In this case, there
isn't really much, so it's pretty much this.
That's totally fine. The next thing that I need to
do is I need to figure out where we need to have some
additional resolution. So I know we have
this one over here. Now, I know that I want to, I have a lot of free space, so I still have the
space to do this. I know I want to
have quite a bit of extra resolution on these pieces because they will
have text on them. So what I can do at this point is I can
just grab this piece, hold control, and
scale it up a bunch. I'm then also going to grab these pieces scale them up even more because
I know that most of the text will be
on these pieces, but I might add some bar codes on the
side and stuff like that. This way, it will give us a
little bit more resolution, which in turn means that the
text on it is a bit sharper. Next, we have this
little piece over here, and I'm going to also
make that quite large. And what I probably want to
do is I want to make sure that it's rotated
somewhat straight. Maybe I can
straighten selection. That would make my life a
bit easier, but yeah, here. If we relax it, yeah,
it should be fine. So we now have those
additional pieces that are scaled up. Sadly, this one we cannot scale
up and because it's long, it creates a lot of empty space. It's up to you if you want to add an additional seam here, which might save on space. I can show you that in a bit, but let's first of all,
select everything. Make sure to turn off rescale and then pack again. And
now you can see that here. We don't have as
much space anymore, and we now have quite a bit of space on this piece over here. I actually argue
that for that piece, this one, and this one is
a little bit too large. Reason it's too large
is because you want to tie and still keep a general even resolution space.
Across your model. The reason you want to do that
is because else what will happen is that this
model over here looks super high resolution
while the one behind it looks lower resolution because it is not taking up as much
space in our UV. Basically, the bigger
it is in your UV, the more resolution it uses. However, the only
time when we break that is if we need specific
elements like text to show up better because you
don't want to have one of those three models
where the text is just blurry. Now, I'm fine with this. I'm fine with the
additional space that we have over here. But if you feel like you
want to split up even more, you can always convert to AdiplPlace a quick connect here. And then go ahead and select
everything again, like this. And you can try to basically double click,
break this seam, and do, again, a repack. Sadly, over here,
you can see that it literally doesn't
make any difference. But that is a way that you can split it up into multiple
pieces or maybe split it up down half and on the side to reduce the amount
of space you need. However, again, it will
add very visible seams, and these seams
might be visible in your actual texture,
which is not nice. So I'm just going to go
ahead and not do that. Cool. So we now
have these pieces. I am now going to go ahead and select all of this over here. Once again, center my
pivot just in case. An important thing is that it is exactly rotated in the center. Turn on my snap rotation. And the reason for
that is because I want to reuse my AO map. So as you can see over here, we will have AO or
embitoclusion on this side. As long as this is
exactly aligned, as you can see here,
the emboclusion will also show up on the
other side when we bake it. Like that. Next,
we have this one. I'm just going to go
ahead and move this down. What I like to do
just to change up the texture a bit is
just rotate it a bit. I know that means that our seam might be a little
bit more visible, but just by doing it this way, see, it will be
rotated a bit more. And at this point, once again, we want to select these center and then do shift and rotate 180 and move these ones over here. I'm just going to go
ahead at this point, height selection,
unfreeze Al, the lead lt, unhide l. So now you can see
that we have everything, and then I need to do that
because I want to make sure that over here it is you see, I want to push it
out a bit more. Okay. Awesome. I
think at this point, we have a properly UV Nmap
model that is ready to go. See how nice it is when you don't need
to do a full height, the low poly and
you can just very quickly create this model. So just to prepare this model, we want to go ahead and turn
on our material editor, which is always a bit
slow in trees Max. And we just want to assign
a simple material to this. If you get a much larger editor, just click and hold and make
sure you grab this button. The name that you give
to this material will also be the name that
is in your textures. So metal detector and apply. So now everything
has one material, which means that when we export this to
substance painter, it will have one material set. At this point,
that's looking good. We can save. Is my
weight normals, correct? Yes. And I think we are ready to go to
start with the texturing. So what I will end this chapter
on is by exporting this. So that's file export selection. I call this metal detector, and because it pretty much will also be like this
in unreal engine, I don't think we need to call it underscore painter or
something like that. That's only if you
have something that's specific for only painter. But seeing as we
are going to bake this and leave it
exactly how it is, this should already be fine. So that is now exported. And in our next chapter, what we can do is we can jump into Substance Painter
and we can start already with the
texturing of our model.
6. 05 Texturing Our Metal Detector Part1: Okay, so in this chapter, what we're going to
do is we are going to texture our metal detector. Now for this, I have a
substance painter scene, and I also have a
marmoset scene because I like to often render
my assets in MomsetS. The lighting is a little
bit more accurate and everything just looks
a little bit nicer. I will go over my Mm
set scene in a bit. First of all, oh, my TAs
bar isn't working again. Let's go to Substance Painter, file and create a new scene. Now, I personally always have a template scene
that I'm already using. I'm going to use it
now because when I use this and give this
project to you guys, you guys automatically
also get it. But I will go ahead
and I will show you what is different
in this template. I can then go ahead
and go to my file, and I want to grab the FBX for the metal
detector over here. And document resolution
can be four K, and that's pretty much
all that we need to do. We can just go ahead
and press Okay, and then it will load in our
scene. Sorry for that noise. So in this scene, what is different compared to the very default
substance painter? That is mostly that
if we go in here, I have a different
environment map, which is just called
unreal scene, and you guys should
also have it. And for the rest, I turned
on some post effects. In this case, some color
correction, where I just like, very slightly change
the brightness to make it a little
bit more accurate compared to unreal engine and Mm set and also with the tone
mapping because without this, substance paint the
default scene is quite far away in terms of similarity
to Unreal engine and Mmset. I turned on some
antalsing and I added a color profile once again to match it a little bit
more to Unreal Engine. So you guys can
just, use the scene. You can even open this scene and then save your own
template if you want. You can simply do that
by going to File. And I believe over
here, you can have more safe options and
save as template. But for the rest, like
I just have Man grit, and as you can see, it's just
a slightly nicer render. Okay, at this point,
what we're going to do is go to your
texture set list. If you don't have
any of these panels, you can always just go
to your window views, and here you can
find all of them. But I assume that you already
know the basics of painter. I'm going to go ahead and just want to double check
that looks correct. Yes, everything seems
to be looking good. I'm going to double check that the text
set list is called metal underscore detector so that when we export
our textures, this is what the name will be. Next that I'm going to go
to my texture settings, scroll down, and I'm
just going to bake all of my maps. For this,
it's super easy. You just want to make sure
that the output size four K, turn on use low pol measures high pol so that
it will just use the base, and we do not need a
an ID map over here. The rest we can
kind of just bake. We don't need all of
them, but let's just go ahead and just press
bake selected textures. And now, what you can
see is that it will just go through and bake
all of these texture maps. We mostly need these
texture maps in order to use generators in
order to use mask, generators, and
that kind of stuff, which we can use to allow us to add bunches of dirt and
all that kind of stuff. So once that's
done, we can press to return to painting mode. And now, what you can
see is we have our AO. That's the main one
that we want to just double check our
Ambit occlusion map. If you go ahead and press
C, you can cycle, sorry, not C. E, you can cycle
through your baked maps. And here, Oh, as you can see
with your embitlusion now, because we perfectly align it, it feels like everything is just exactly how
we want it to be, even though we are
re using textures. So that's a nice
thing about this. We also get some nice
seams around here and everything like that
or some nice darkness. So that's looking great. You can press M to go back
to your material. Now, usually, I have a bunch of, like, preset materials that I already use to speed
things up quite a bit. However, right now, sadly, I cannot use those because
I want to show you guys, how to properly make this stuff. What I'm going to do is I'm
going to go ahead and figure out what I want
my texture to be. I'm going to probably get
started with norm map details. So just checking about, like, what would be a nice thing to art I do like that there's some type of
detail here on the center. So yeah, even here
we ordered it. Let's start with
some no map details. I'm going to get started
by which one was it? Oh, yeah, this one,
this one was it. Over here, let's add some
details to this one. I like to create a new folder. So in your layers, just
create a new folder. Call it normal details. And in here, we are going to get started probably with a simple, probably simple fill layer. And call this down. The reason I call
it down, and if you hold alt and click
on your height, it will only apply the height
and move the height down. That's basically why I
called down because it will create normal
details going inwards. Now, at this point, we can go ahead and we can add a black master disc and
there's various ways that we can add
the normal details to this specific
piece over here. We can drag stuff on.
We can paint stuff in. One that I do like to sometimes try is I like to go into
my symmetry settings. And here if I set the
symmetry to radial symmetry, and set the amount a
little bit more like this. I don't are you? There you are. And then if I go in and set this radiosymmetry to
be exactly on our line, we are able to just drag in. You can also just drag
in a bunch of masks. This is not the best
technique, I would say, but I wanted to show you because it is a bit useful technique. The only thing is that
it's annoying to line up, which is why I don't
use it too often. What I said this to 0.135. No, sorry, one, two, five. 123. And then this 10.95. 0.96. And basically, where you
said it roughly to, like, the centers be a little
bit more perfect. What you can see is that now, it allows us to basically
drag in a bunch of lines. The only thing is that I want there we go to set
the angle back. And at this point, if we go in and we go to our
brushes and grab, let's start with the
basic hard brush. But then if you scroll down, set the hardness down a little bit. Now, what you can see is if I
go ahead and go in here and click and hold and
click in here, you can see that now it will instantly
create these shapes. And what I would
say is I want to make my hardness
a tiny bit less, and I'm going to make the
count a little bit more. Go in here, click. Click. There you go. And you can now also
play around with your height over here to make
it a little bit stronger. And what you can also
do is on your down, you can go in and add a
filter and add a blur filter. And if we just lower that in, see if we can control
a little bit more like how soft we
want this to be. However, because we
are the blur filter, I don't want to use this
same layer for other stuff, so I will call this knobs. There we go. And that's
why he does the trick. I can turn off my symmetry, and that arts those ones. Now the next one was going to be maybe to add some lines in here, and I kind of need to
play around with it, see how I want to
create this because I don't want to go
too over the top, since that might not look
very nice. Let's see. If I go in, let's
create another layer. Um Tin lines, height
down black mask. Let's add a fill
layer in this case, because adding a
fill layer to this allows us to basically
insert a texture. In this case, we want to insert something that has
a bunch of lines. Let's just check
over here my Alphas. So normally, you have the
anastropic Oh, wait, sorry, it's in textures.
Here, the nistrophic. That's why I couldn't
get it right, which is often like a
bunch of thin lines. However, they don't
always work perfect. I need to go into
my noise and set the X amount all the way down, and then I can set the Y amount. And another nice thing
that you can do is instead of projecting
based on the UV, you can project based on
the triplanar projection, which allows us to do here see an overall rotation
and view like this. There seem to be
some small issues with these lines which actually is not something
I'm used to seeing. Let's go ahead and check. Like, oh, I guess it's
just like a small error. That's weird. I've not
seen that one before. Okay, in that case, there's
another one that we can use, there are many things
that we can use. Another one that we can
use is we can go in and we can use some
type of a generator. If we go ahead and go turn this off to our
Alphas and let's see, probably use a tile generator. Sorry, I think I need
to be in There we go. I need to be in this textis one. Tile generator, I always get mistaken about where it
is and stuff like that. And in our tile generator, if we now go ahead and just
alt click on the mask, we are able to see our tiles. And what you can do is in here, that's at the wire mount
on a way that's a scale. Let's set the X amount down. Let's set the specific shape a little bit lower so that we get like these
thinner shapes. Let's at the Y amount to, like, let's start
with one to eight. So that only creates
like a few thin lines. But now what we want to do
is we want to just go in. I'm going to set
my scale to two, and setting it to two basically just pushes it all the way out. And now I can set my Y scale to basically make it here to give the lines a little
bit thickness. I wonder if this will
look nice to have a few lines like
that, to be honest. But we have to see set
the Y amount still bit higher because that might
also not line up as well. I'm I'm going to set them
to 512. There we go. What I'm a bit worried
about is that it is giving me this
gradient over here, but it should not
have that gradient because I already pushed it out. I guess it's my resolution. I set my resolution
to four K by four k. Or just leave the Y resolution that seems to fix it
also. Fair enough. I don't care as
long as it's fixed. So that probably
works quite well. If we go for
something like this, now let's go in and
back into these lines. I think what I also want to do is I want to go in and I want to add a levels, and I'm just going to
invert the levels. Because the issue
right now is that it feels like it's Oh,
yeah, there we go. So sometimes it's
a bit hard to see, but you can see that now the
lines are going inwards, and I'm going to now go
into my tile generator and maybe play around a little
bit more with my skill. Don't know what I want exactly. Maybe something like this. I think that looks quite
nice from a distance. Awesome. At this point, we just need to define where do we actually want to
have these lines, and we can do that by
adding a very quick folder. Card them lines, twag
it in here and go ahead and add a black master dis and I can go up here to
my polygon fill, and I can select this. Here we go. I can
select these phases, and it will fill
in those polygons. Often, I can also go to make
it a little bit quicker. What I tend to do
is I tend to just basically and it will
just copy it over, scale or select all of these, and then just deselect the ones that I don't want to have. And it will just be copied over to the other
side, which is nice. There we go. So is
that everything? On this side, let's not forget. Wait,
there's another one. I feel like this one. Wait, that's like this weird. Oh, it's because I
forgot the entire mask. Sorry about that.
I didn't really realize that it went that far. Okay, so we got that one. Now I do want to kind of go in and but I will do it a little bit more careful
just by clicking dragging. There we go. I like that one. And I think that works
quite well. Awesome. Yeah, I like that. Like,
it's not too overpowering, because if you add
too many lines, what will happen is you will be able to see the antialising, which will not look nice. But I think at this point,
that's pretty good. I would say, if you
want, we can also add something like
screws inside of here. For that, what we would do
is just add another one. Scarlet screws. And I'm just trying to show you a bunch of
different techniques. So for this technique, what
you can do is, for example, if we grab a screw Alpha, and you can often find a bunch
of screw Alphas in here. Let's see if I have, like, a nicer looking one, or like a bolt
alpha or something. I should have more. Yeah,
but those are non maps. I don't want to do it height. Well, I can show
you with a bolt. Of course, I can go out and find an Alpha
and all that stuff, but those Alphas have copyrights and because
I'm making a course, I technically cannot
really use that. So let me just see if I can
use something like this one, but then slightly change it. Anyway, what you
can do is you can literally click and
drag it on here. You can drag it on as a
believe it was a mask. And then you can drag it, but I don't know if the scaling
is Huh. Let me just see. Oh, wait, probably because
we cannot see anything. So let's go to
height. There we go. So if we set the height,
it will create a new mask, but as you can see over here, it allows us to simply
drag the shape on here. And in our case, we need
to kind of move it down. So it's another way. Of course, for screws, it would be a
bit overkill to use this. But for more complicated shapes, you can definitely use this. So we could do this, and then we could add like a
quick filter with a blur to blur it. And also, what I forgot
is I forgot to give it some additional resolution in this area because as
you might remember, it just doesn't have
a lot of resolution. So at this point, we could also use a technique like this. The only annoying
thing with a technique like this is that you
would then need to keep duplicating fill layers, which might be a little bit more performance
heavy versus just like manually selecting stuff. I don't know why it
moved all the way there. I guess it's in, like, a local
position mode. Here we go. So that is a way for, like, larger details.
However, for screws. Oh, and set this to be, um, where are you? Art. Linear Dodge Art. So yeah, you can see, it's
good for one detail, but if you want to do it for
multiple details, often, just simply using a brush and applying this Alpha to that
brush might be a bit easier. Anyway, so that's pretty
much our normal details. Let's just leave it here for now. I think that will be good. I'm going to just drag
this one in like this. And let's go ahead and
start by saving sen. It would always be
a good thing to do. Save metal detector
painter. There we go. Now what we want to
do is we want to go ahead and start focusing
on our textures. So we have a few textures
that we need to define. We have metal and let's say aluminum because
it's not pure metal, like you can see over here, it's more like just
aluminium type metal. We have some plastics. We have some graphics. And I would say that
that's already about it. Yeah. So let's go for that. Let's start by
creating new folder. Color base colors. I'm now going to go ahead and
go into my smart materials, and substance painter already has a lot of smart materials. Sadly, I have a few really, really good smart materials in here that we
created ourselves, but I don't want to use
that because that's a little bit cheating
for a tutorial course. Instead, let's start by
defining our plastic. Now, plastics are
often quite easy. All we need to do is we
need to go down here. And let's see plastic
made scratched. You see where they have a
couple plastics in here. And what I'm going to do
is I'm going to go for probably Ah, plastic soft dirt. You want to go for
quite a hard plastic, so let's start
with plastic used. Over here, just
because it adds, like, a little bit of additional
like wear and tear to it. I'm then going to go
ahead and I'm going to decite on the darkness, and I'm probably
going for a very, very slightly blue darker metal. You don't want to go too
dark because nothing in real life is pure
black or pure white. The closest to black
you can get is coal. So if you keep that in mind, often plastics are
often not that dark. And you will notice it,
especially when we are inside of Mum's toolba. In that sense. So
I have that one. I then define roughly my shine
on it using my roughness. And I can see over here like
it has a grinded finish. The guinded finish is fine, but I'm going to set
as a bit higher. So it just gives me like
tiny nor map details, and I'm going to give it the intensity a little bit lower. So it just adds, like the
tiniest bit of nor map details as if that it still
has some surface area. However, we don't have
the resolution to really go into super, super
micro details. We then have our ware over here. The first thing I need
to do is I need to go in and I need to add some
tie planer mapping to it. You know, let's do triplanar, and I want I'll set
my scale a bit down over here so that
it actually becomes a little bit smaller
because else, yeah, it would look very good. Now what I like to do, in
this case is I'm going to add another fill layer on top because I want to break
this up with something. It's too much right now. So I'm going to add
the fill layer on top, probably set it one to multiply. And then if we just
grab a random crunch, we can use that to break
things up a little bit. So I personally
like the cop web. Yeah, let's try that one, the cobweb crunch
over here, see? And now already doing this, if we just Alt click, you can see here, I already just breaks
things up quite nicely. At this point, I'm just going
to tone down my base color. And give it just like
some very slight damage. And in my roughness, oh, yeah, my roughness
is already good. That's a little bit less. Let's do the cob webs, and let's set the projection also to triplanar over here for cobwebs and play out a little bit more with our
contrast and our balance. Here, see now you can
start seeing it go away. It's quite subtle, but
it needs to be subtle. I think that looks
quite, quite good. So we have now, for
example, a plastic. That's called plastic dark. At this point, just to
apply it to your model, we can simply go in here
and add a black mask, go back to our polygon
fill and set this to lemon or to mash fill, sorry, and we can simply select
the pieces that we want to apply our black plastic to, which is going to be only
these ones, I believe. Yeah, that works quite well. Then we also have
a whiter plastic, which, as you might imagine, is going to be quite easy
because all we need to do is just duplicate our plastic dark. Plastic white. Let's make it again,
a black mask. And for now, I'm
just going to only apply it to these elements. Although, of course, we
don't want to apply it to the stripes over here, but bear with me. And I'm going to make it not so much white,
but, like, a very, very slight yellowish to
make it feel like a little bit more like older,
dirtier type plastic. Maybe something like
that might do the trick. It doesn't definitely need some additional dirt and everything, but this might do the trick. So what becomes white? All of these pieces
become white. I don't know why my PC is
so slow all of a sudden. Oh, and in my dark plastic, I'm going to make these dark just to really make
them stand out. Or not, they might
actually not look as nice. Yeah, you know what? I'm
not going to do that. Instead, what I will do is I will make them a bit more gray, and I will show you a
cool trick for that. But first of all, let's
keep focusing on the white. I'm also going to make these
knobs over here white. I think that will
look quite nice. Then if we go to our UV select and set the
colour to black, I'm just going to click to take the UVs away from
those points over here. No, and let's go to
our plastic dark and apply it also to
this model over here. And I feel like
it's also this one. Another thing is,
what if we make this ring over here, dark? I don't know if that would
look nice or if that would feel a bit cliche. For this, what you can try to
do is you can try to go to TD and then over here,
we can, for example, set this to Face select And we can select this entire ring, and then we need to
go to plastic White, and we need to actually
deselect it over here except for this. And let's just
quickly check. Hmm. Yeah, you know what? I like that. I like that. So
let's go ahead and do that. It's a bit annoying
because we are trying to switch between modes, so let me just quickly
turn it off here, click and drag here. And here, set this
one back to white and set Let's see. So this one to dark. These the dark. I know I'm doing this
way too difficult, but at this point,
I'm committed to it. So let's go ahead and just end up with whatever you
want. There we go. Okay, arson. So we've
done those pieces also. That's looking pretty
good. We definitely need some little bits of
dirt and stuff like that. Okay, just a random fun
trick that you can use. If you want to make these
just slightly darker, let's say we have over
here our white plastic. You can grab your white plastic instead of duplicating
the entire thing, if you want to keep
your seen more organized or more
optimized, I should say, simply add an anchor point to the plastic white and
create a new fill layer. And then in new fill layer, what you can do is you can
just in the base color. We don't need a height. We don't need the metallic,
normal or pastoreo. And in our roughness, you
can just go ahead and set this plastic and call this
plastic underscore gray. Go in, make it black, and then just select those
two models over here. You can hold Shift and use that to rotate your sky around. And then what you can
do is you can just add a very simple levels and
set it to luminosity. And then what we can
do is over here, see, we can make it just a
bit darker like that. And I noticed that
I forgot a line. So let me just There we go.
Yeah, that should be it. Okay, ask them, see. And now they're just a little bit darker without us needing to do a lot of extra duplicating
and all that kind of stuff. So the next one
would be our metal. And for our metal, we
can go ahead and we can grab a new metal, and it's going to be
more aluminum metal, or shall we go for more shiny? Going for shiny, of course, it looks a little bit
more interesting. So let's go for a shiny aluminum just because in
game environments, having stuff that looks
shiny is always a bit nicer. So if we can add some of those elements to
it, that would be good. Now, where is the metal? So over here we have actually
a pretty good one, I think. It's literally called aluminum. Aluminum brushed warn. Let's start with this
one and just edit it. Go to call it aluminum. And let's see. So we have some scratches over
here, which quite nice. The brushed, I'm not
going to go for actually, no, you know what?
I like brushed. Let's go and set the
length only a lot longer because the reason I like it
over here is because there is quite a bit of directionality
to this actual shape. So set the intensity
quite a bit lower. So that will give us some very slight brushed
aluminum look, which is quite nice. And then let's go ahead and
just for the scratches, I'm going to go in and
be a little bit lazy, and I'm just going to because I believe it's only
in the roughness, I'm just going to go to my
roughness over here and just lower it until
it's very subtle. I think that already
does a really good job. So at this point, we can go ahead and we can
add a black mask. And what we can do is we can
Oh, wait, we cannot do that. I wanted to add an anchor
point for our lines. But anchor points only work from down to up, not
from up to down. In that case, just
copy your mask. And then because we probably don't need to change
this later on anyway, so we don't need to
keep it super flexible. Where's copy mask?
There's copy mask, aluminium, paste in
the mask. There we go. That does the trick. If
you happen to see any type of annoying information
for example, your plastic white because
technically below, this is the plastic white. You can always grab plastic
white. Add a fill layer. And in here, you can Oh, wait, we cannot do that. That's
a little bit annoying. Well, let's just
say that by hand, you can kind of go
and just remove it. I wanted to say that
we can copy the mask, but technically, it
doesn't work like this. Another way is that you
could art a folder, add a mask to this folder, all that stuff, but we
just don't need it. So we now have these
base shapes over here. I like to keep the
graphics until last. So I will finish this
chapter off by probably just doing some very subtle
dirt and stuff like that. So let's go ahead and create
a new folder, call it dirt. And what we can do is we
can go in and in here, let's add a fill layer. OCC dirt is a classic. Basically some occlusion dirt. You just want to have a
color and a roughness. Set the roughness quite dull. And the color, it
kind of depends. For interior assets
don't go for brown dirt. That's actually
not how it works. In interior assets,
it's more like a very slight brownish, but more grayish
dirt, like this. Seed more as like dust
and stuff like that. We can then go ahead
and add a black mask, and this is where all of those baked maps that we
were working on comes in. Well, we have a dust occlusion, but there should be a better
one for very small etches, which is called Uh, OCC dirt, I believe
it is called. But now I cannot find
it all of a sudden. OCC dust. Occlusion. Huh. Or I might be just, like, thinking about it won because I always call it OCC myself. I don't see it here. So I guess what I will do is I will just use the
dust occlusion. That's weird. I'm probably just having
a brain freeze here. I believe it is actually dust
oclusion, but we can see. Let's go Alt click. And as you can see
over here, yes, we have some AO issues
where it is way too strong, but that's something
that we can work on. In a bit. First of all, we're going to go
ahead and let's see. Set the duct level a bit lower. I can press M here, just ask a little
bit of dirt set our grunge scale a little bit higher to make it a
little bit smaller. I'll click again. Yeah, so it just adds
some additional dirt, especially in these areas, which is where I
want them to be. I am going to actually make let's set my grunge amount down, but I'm going to increase
the level a little bit so that I get, like, a little bit more
dirt in these areas. But then, of course,
what we have is we have to issue
that over here, it's way too much dirt. So that's what we'll
be working on next. I would say at this point, yeah, it should be about fine. Let's go in and just
add a simple paint. And often it's just
easier to just very quickly grab some type of a soft paint and set it in
the flow not to be too high. No, press X. I don't
like this one. There we go. My brush
size is quite large. Set the flow, not too high, and I'm just going to even
do this just by hand. I'm in the areas where
I don't want the dirt, I'm going to simply click
and paint out the dirt. Don't forget that these things are definitely not
cleaned a lot, so we can keep a little bit
more dirt around the top, and later on we'll also add like some dust and
stuff like that. But for now, that's
just very quickly. There we go. And maybe
also not too strong there. There we go. Press M. Now it is just like
some subtle dirt that you can see in
some areas over here, and I can now go in and
I can just work with my base color to
maybe make it here a little bit darker over n. I'm probably going to keep it as a balance here so that
we can see both on the black but also
on the dark areas. And at this point, let's
go ahead and duplicate this layer and call
this dust, for example. We can just add a new
black master disc Sorry, to say dust. And we can see if we can have something that has
like just dust. So we have dust soft, but dust soft often doesn't
work very well. We need to kind of,
like, check here, see. For some reason, dust doesn't actually is not actually
the dust that I want. So what I like to do is
I just like to often add a paint layer and do it
myself where I go in here. I go to my brushes and
grab something super soft. And the one that I
like that you guys also have is the fur soft white. And then I just go in. Oh, and art. So dust to the tops.
Makes it a bit smaller. If it's too much, just paint it out again and paint it back in. Normally, I do use
a drawing tablet, but in this case,
I'm not using it. And let's see if
I just art click. What I'm going to do with this is just because it gives me, those lines, which actually
I don't like too much. I'm going to add a filter. And I'm just going to
blur this a little bit. And I'm going to go in and
I'm going to make this dust. A little bit more like white
brownish dust like this. And I will probably also add additional levels on my
mask just to be able to, like, just I'll click, play around with it a bit more. There we go. Like I said, it's gonna
be a clean model, so we want to work with, like, quite a lot of subtlety. Now, another one that I like to often add is my
roughness variation. If we go ahead and
go to our roughness, what you can see over here? Oh, wow, where does
that come from? I guess My plastic
white has a bit. Okay. I guess it's just a grinder
look. Okay, that's okay. So basically, with my roughness, I want to add some additional
roughness variation to this just because right now it doesn't feel
too interesting. And this can be more a bit of like an overall
roughness variation. So if you just go ahead and
call this Roughness, there. But you can also
set this more on an individual type level, for example, on just plastics or just metals and
stuff like that. If I only set to roughness, add a black mask with
a fill layer and then grab just like a nice
grunge that is quite soft. Often these wipes
work quite well. I don't know whether
it's a filter. It's supposed to be fill. Here, see, we get these
really large crunches, and now we should
be able here to add that to our
roughness to give it a little bit more
additional shine. And it's something
that will be subtle, but once we go into marmoset, it should show up
quite a bit better. So we have stuff like that
that we can add on top. We can also add like these, like little scratches
and stuff like that, especially in some
of these areas. Oh, what is that? That looks like a norm map, but I'm not sure where
it is coming from. Yeah, here, something
in my no map details is causing some very
strange issues. It's the knobs for some reason. Let's go into my knobs. At a Let's add to paint. I'm just going to
go to selection, and I'm going to paint
out whatever that was. Let's double check. Okay,
still looks cract. Weird. I don't know what that
was, but oh, well. As I was saying, yes,
we can also add maybe, like, some sketches
and stuff like that. That's something
that I feel because these are being used a lot, like people bump against
it, scratch against it. So let's add one more fill. Scratches. Let's make this a little bit
darker than our plastic and set the roughness also to be
I'll do I want to set it. Now, I'm going to
set the roughness a bit duller, but not too dull. Add a black mask,
add a fill to this, and let's grab some like here, let's see, this one, it looks quite good. See, it has a little bit
of scratches in there. We can go ahead and we
can set the scratch tiling to be Ooh, actually, yeah, quite like that. I also like the color a lot. Something like
that, for example. Now what I'm going to do, I'm just going to
create a folder. Coloured scratch mask and just throw your
scratches in here. And I'm going to add
a black mask disc, and then if we just grab, for example, some
type of a brush. Don't know why I keep
grabbing the one that I don't like. You'll see. We can just paint in areas where we want to
have these sketches. They would be, for example,
mostly in the center, and then maybe on the outside. Oh, set is a bit careful. They would be more
like at the bottom, for example, scratch out. And there would not
be a lot at the top, but maybe someone just accidentally scratched some of these ends because they often walk past it,
something like that. If you also want
scratches at the bottom, as you can see, they
are too strong, you can play around
with that, of course, also by just adding
a different type of sketch for the bottom. And I can see over here
that my dirt is too strong, so I'm going to go and set the sketch dirtiness, I believe. No, that's not the
scratch spots. No, that's also not the one, although the spots
can use some tiling. That's good. I guess it's dust. Let's set the dust tiling
quite a bit lower. Yeah, there we go. That looks
quite a bit better. Okay. And I wanted to quickly, like, fade them out. Yeah, that's actually another
thing that you can do. You can over here,
add some scratches. Especially here, and then
set your flow, press X, and set your flow very low, and then very carefully
paint them out. Theoretically, you are
just working with opacity. So this will also make the
scratches feel less intense. So I guess that's a nice one. We would want to probably have
smaller scratches on that, but I don't want to make
the sketches smaller in these areas. Okay. Awesome. So let's start with
something like this because this chapter has been
going on for quite long. I'm going to save my scene, and I'm going to showcase
this in marmoset. And once that is done,
we can finish off the next chapter by creating
some simple graphics and maybe adding some
additional polish and then importing it into Unreal engine to see
what it will look like. So for this, quite easy,
let's just export it. And it's in our metal detector. And I'm not going to use my export presets just to
make it simple for you guys. So I'm just going to use the traditional PBR metallic
roughness export, Targa file, eight bit, four K press export. Nice and easy. Now, if we
go to our marmoset scene, first thing that we want
to do is we want to go to our export and import
our metal detector. In my case, I make
sure that you are in the image cam because
that's the one that has, like, all of the settings. And what I'm going to do is
I'm going to Make a bit of, like, a nicer
presentation for this. Here, maybe something
like this. And the floor is super, super shiny, so I'm going to go
in my shadow caster and lower that over here. And what I also have is Oh, no, wait, sorry, I don't
have that in this scene. So this already gives me a pretty interesting
looking scene. I'm going to move this
one. My shadow caster is a little bit floating,
so let's push it up. Here, you can see, these
nice little gaps down here, so it's still good
that we added that. And this is often how I
quickly render out an asset. Now, at this point,
I can save my scene. It's in your safe folder. And in the metal
detector, super simple. Because often you
have standardized naming like base color
height and all that stuff. You can simply select all of these textures and
just drag them onto your material to instantly
apply them everywhere. The only thing that we are
missing is the ambient eclusion one, which
I do like to have. I'm also going to
rotate my sky around. Oh, and it looks like I have
exactly the wrong angle. There we go. That's the angle
we want, so that we can at least see
our You know what? Let's do this one over here, and then this one
also at the angle. There we go. Why not? I don't know. You know, let's add this one to
the font and maybe do this one No, this one. I am a bit picky always
when it comes to rendering. There we go. Okay,
so as you can see, now we have a quick render. What was I saying?
I was saying that I might have wanted to have the
embitclusion also in here.
7. 06 Texturing Our Metal Detector Part2: Okay, so let's go ahead and finalize our model that
we have over here. Look. You know what
happened there. So let's go ahead and quickly switch back to
substance painter. And a few things that
I'm going to do so. We're going to definitely
focus on the screen over here. And let's start by just making the buttons a different color. So for the screen, yes, that one is a little bit
more tricky because you kind of need to figure out based on, like, very limited reference,
what you can find. What you can do is
you can, of course, look up different reference
that doesn't have to do anything with a metal
detector to get an idea. Over here, what you can see
is we did like very typical, like warning and then
below that, caution. So we do quite basic stuff, and we just give it some
random name stuff like that. Now, I don't know what we'll be doing for this one. We'll
just figure it out. The first thing I want to
do is I want to go ahead and probably add
some little buttons. And that can be a
simple fill layer. Scarlet blue and only
have it in the color, and that's also the roughness and make it like a blue collar. I'm going to set my roughness a little bit lower, actually. And just black mask.
Select your buttons. There we go. Just something
visible from a distance. I actually want to
make it a little bit less bluish,
something like that. That works quite
well. Okay, awesome. Now the next thing that we
need to do is we need to go ahead and probably use
Photoshop for this text. However, you could also do it inside of substance painter. If you want to do it inside
of substance Painter, what you would usually do
is because you have over here text where we have a
bunch of different texts. So yeah, you know what? We might be able to do
this in substance painter, just to keep things easy and not introduce another software. I am going to go ahead. And I'm going to start probably
by let's do some text. So I'm just trying to
figure out a good text. You can just add it over here and just add it as like a mask. And now, what you
can see is that we have a text over here. If we just set
this only to color and just make the
color black for now. Here's a text? Oh, once again, it's like some
little box in there. That's a bit weird. Everything seems fine
in my bake Maps. Sometimes it has to do
with the Bake maps, but this should not be
the case right now. For my font size, I'm going to go ahead
and let's first of all, lower this down, and let's
make this very simple warning. I don't know why I didn't type. Why are you not typing? Come
on. Warning. There we go. Okay, so we have just
some simple warning sign, and I'm going to make this
quite small over here. You know what? I'm going
to move this over here and I'm going to probably
have the logo here. But I just want to
show you basically how that we generally
can go about this. Let's make a new
folder, call it text. And then over here, yes,
we have our warning. And then what we can do is
if we duplicate this layer, call this one warning and text. And now we're going to
use something like JatTP to basically generate a
very generic piece of text. So that's one of the nice
things of using chat GTP, if I just drag it
over here is that we can very quickly
generate some text. So I can just say here,
generate a piece of warning text that can
go on a metal detector. Saves a bit of time. Here we go. That's already good enough,
blah, blah, medical advices. Yeah, sure, why not? Then we can go to this text, and in our fill, we can
simply paste it in here. Then when we press Enter,
it should show up. I'm not sure why it's not
showing up. We have the text. And that's all looking good. Oh, wait, I see something here. So it might just be that No. That is very strange,
to be honest. Let me just quickly check why. It seems there is an issue with not being able
to show enough text, but I'm also unable to scale it. I'm going to use a different technique
because I sadly I am not able to find the
reason for this. What I will do is I will
use a more classic one, which is our projection mapping. Sometimes it's easier to just go in and just quickly use
a different technique. Then in the Alpha, we can
select our text, enter it. Oh, sorry. I'm I'm not in
the correct projection. I need to be in
this one over here. Strike it in here. There we go. And then go ahead and do this. And what we'll do,
which is a bit strange, so we want to start spacing it. Individual base. So you
can now just hold S, and then you can
change the text scale. So what we want to do is we want to give it like a write scaling, an alignment,
something like this. But of course, we need to make
sure that we have it like a right or medical devices. Let's do an end or
there. Should avoid close proximity to devices. And what you also want to do is you want to make sure
that the text is not perfectly aligned
on every line. As you can see, even
here in the reference, it looks a bit
interesting when there is just a little bit of spacing. And even when you're writing anything like an
article 0R book, this is also similar how you say it,
similar rules to this. Alarms. Here, let's do
something like this. I think something like
that will work well. And we basically just align it. And at that point, if we just make our
brush a bit smaller, we should be able to
simply paint it in. See? So that's another way
that we can work on that. So we have warning and
what else do I want to do I want to probably do something like
how about instructions? Just give it some
instructions. Okay. And why let this
whiting? I can go in and the warning
one still works. So I'm going to hopefully at least hopefully
it still works. I'm going to duplicate it.
Call this. Instructions. I need to scale up
a bit because it needs to kind of like fall
in line with the original. Yeah, so stuff like
this, that's why I prefer to use
Photoshop myself, just because it's a little
bit faster and for me, easier to use. So
here we have warning. How about instructions? And then instructions, and this one is text. And I can now go in
and copy my text. However, this one will
probably be a little bit more difficult to properly paste. So let's see. There is this weird thing where
it just doesn't properly remove text. So let's see. What do we have?
Remove metal items, please remove all metal items. Including, let's do this, including belts, jewelry from the metal detector, and
then we'll have another. And, I think what
is wrong is that it doesn't detect my
enters, always. Yeah. I wonder if I can use HML code. No, sadly that. That
would have been nice. Well, you can kind
of use them, but, uh not the way I wanted to, but that should be fine. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead
and I'm going to place it in smaller sections. So we have this one, which
I just want to go in, give it roughly similar text. So we have this. Then
the second one is going to be so I'm
just copying it over. Follow instructions
at all times. I feel like it's
a bit too large. Let's make it a bit smaller. Yeah, I kind of
wish I use hotshop. I'm someone that,
like, in the moment, just decides random stuff. But in this case, it might not have been
the best decision. But we're gonna stick to it. You can just speed along. You already know how to
do it at this point. Mm. Let's do for security clearance. And once again, I'm going to keep this quite
simple because we're not even going to use this
metal detector in the actual environment later
on because I already have one that has had a lot more
time and care behind it just because it was made in a slower pace than
in tutorial pace. So there we go. And the last one In case of an alarm, you may be subject to
further there we go. That needs to be bit
up. There we go. I feel like that already
looks good enough. As you can see, the
text looks a little bit different in
terms of opacity. This can sometimes happen
just because of how we paint, so we can add levels on this, and then we can
kind of like make sure that the text is roughly the same, something like that. Okay. Awesome. So we have that
one. That's now also good. We definitely in the
end now need to have some type of plastic, and I want to make the
plastic probably a little bit more
reflective behind it. So what I'm going to do
is I'm going to go ahead and for my text, let's make another one that
we will call colored bars. Have it only in the color and make the color to
be a little bit more like a dark bluish color. And then we have a black mask. And then what we're going
to do is we're going to go in and grab a normal
basic hard brush. Actually, know what,
no, even better. We're just going to use a
simple projection mapping. And I'm going to find
a simple square alpha, which is always down
here somewhere. So it's a bit slow to load. Here, square of. Set the hardness all the way up. You can set the squeeze amount. You probably guess what
we're going to do with this. We're just going to go ahead
and move this all around. And I'm actually
going to give it like a little trim around it. So just give me a second
while I scale things up. I think that works
quite well. This one. Oh, I need to make my brush Mal. This one. Hm,
that's interesting. How are we going
to fix that one? Because we already
moved it around. Yeah, that is a
little bit annoying. The reason that's
annoying is because this text, we moved it around. So actually just
casually moving it up, it's a little bit
tricky to do sometimes. Now, there should be a way if
you just give me a second. Yeah, I forgot. Sorry, I'm
thinking too difficult. We can just use a transform. So we have our text over here. If we just go ahead
and add a filter to that mask and then add a
simple transform, here we go. We can just shift it over. For some reason, I was thinking
of a projection mapping, but it doesn't make any sense. That's just me forgetting stuff, which as a tutor, I probably should not forget, but I'm only human.
So, fair enough. Let's go back in and do this one. Also this one. There we go. Now, of course, what you want to do is you just want to go ahead and go into a polygon fill and just deselect the buttons.
There we go. Okay. Awesome. So
from a distance, that's already starting
to look pretty good. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to probably get
started first of all, I want to add a fill layer. Glossy, sorry, plastic
and see if I can get something nice
looking out of this where I make the
plastic quite glossy, and I'm going to make
the text probably like maybe a little bit more
like greenish, actually. I'm not sure if green will be
the right one. We can see. I'm going to add a black
mask dis and I'm going to only have this here and here. No, green is not
the right color. Maybe just some blue Yeah, maybe just like a
slightly bluish. Yeah, that taxi works
quite well. Okay, cool. So what we need is we just need a little bit of additional text, and that is going to be
if we just go to text and instructions
that's duplicated. Move this up. Scale up a bit. And this one will go or
will become white or yeah, let's make it a
little bit white, not pure white, but just,
like, a little bit. And I'm going to call
this one, sensitivity. Duplicate it. Uh sensor I'm just adding some
spaces to make it kind of like the same
just because I'm lazy. Let's duplicate this one. Menu. You can, of course, also to
set the font if you want, but in my case, I'm
just doing it this way. And we have, if we
duplicate this again, not menu, but I don't know. Um, revert, for example. Yeah, I think that
revert works quite well. Revert. This one is sensor. I'm keeping it a
bit more organized. Menu and sensitivity. There we go. That
should do the trick. And having that done, let's just add a logo to this. And for the rest I think I'm just going to
leave it at that. I'm just going to leave
the left one empty. But you can do, like, a fill on screen or some type of graphics
or something like that. In my case, just
for a simple logo. If we just go back to text, I guess having a different
font would be nice. Here, let's just
make it as a mask. And I'm going to call this one FD M 600 plus. So FDM is just a fast track, and M is metal
detector, 600 plus. It's just something like
that. Like you don't have to go too overboard with it
unless you want to, of course. Et's do something like this, and let's make the text. Uh, shall we go black
or No, you know what? White is probably nicer. So let's go for
something like this. And then let's go
for duplicate this. And call this one.
Metal. No, wait. It's a bit fancier words. Security scanner instead
of metal detector. And let's go in. And you can also just play around with
the fontie if you want. You can set it to lower and
let's leave it in center. There we go. Super
quick and simple. And I think for now,
that should be fine. Like, I'm not going to go
too overboard with it. I think this will give
you a really good idea, and we already spent 20
minutes on just this. So I'm going to leave
it here for now, and let's just see if
there's anything else. Let's go back to our mom set because I can't
remember there was something else that
I wanted to do. Oh, yeah, maybe like a tiny bit of, like, leaks or something. That was it unlike
the little knobs. But we need to be a bit careful that we don't overpower it. Just go to our dirt and
we can grab, for example, the OCC dirt again and
duplicate it. Call leaks. I already now showed you roughly the technique
that you would need. But what you can do is you
can go in and find online on text.com or R
Station marketplace, whatever you want, you can often find a bunch of leak textures. And if you just use your
projection mapping, and then if it's
willing to load, projection mapping and then grab some type of leaks that you got. There are many tutorials. I even have free tutorials on my faster tutorials
YouTube channel that shows you how to
create some of these. And then also in the
Alpha of my brush, I want to make that
a bit more soft. 1 second, let me just grab a brush that's a little bit more softer,
something like this. So double click on this one. And set the flow quite actually, now the flow can stay high, but I need to set the
size quite small. You can see that I can add a
few very, very small leaks. And don't worry, like, work on this a bit more. But just to give you a
sense of what I mean, Yeah, let's make it just
like very subtle like this. And then I'm going to first
of all, exclude the buttons. And at that point, we
can make this one like a shinier roughness,
and we can just, like, set this back to base color
and just play out with your past to make it
very, very subtle. Something like this.
If you just want some type of leaks or
something, of course, you have to argue the logics in why there would be leaks
here because technically, there's nothing here of wetness to increase those
leaks but in general. Just in case you want to do it, that's often how you do it. Now, for my base
color in my aluminum, I was also going to go in and lower the
roughness for that. And I believe after that, I can call this one
pretty much done. Another thing that you could
technically do is also have the aluminum, um in here. So if we just go for a
simple basic hard brush, you can do that. And then you would probably
also want to go into black plastic and press X
to flip your color around, although I don't know why it's
not working for this one. Might just be because
it's too dark. Yeah, it might be because
the AO is too dark, which would be a little
bit unfortunate. Yeah, see, here, the ambient
occlusion is just too dark. So in my case, I'm just
going to leave it. It's not really an issue. But yeah, you could
technically just also add some aluminum in here if you want to simply
by clicking on it. But in this case, it
just makes it more dark, so I'm going to
leave it like this. I'm going to save my scene.
Gonna export my textures. Make sure to set this back to just the normal PBR metallic
roughness export and save. And it should Oh, I export it to the Wong folder. That's unfortunate. Make
sure the set is back, not to the Bags folder. I will clean it up in
a bit. There we go. Export. And now, it should
just automatically reload. Come on, guys. What's going
on? Give me a second. Then just checking
what is wrong. Export. Metal detector,
textures, select folder. Export. It should work. I'm just going to
redirect them on because for some reason, they just do not seem to load, which is very strange because
everything is correct. Okay, so for some reason, I had to physically drag them
on here for that to work. So I feel like that's
just some kind of buck or something like that. But okay, so this is a general
overview on how I would go about creating a pretty basic
looking asset like this. And at this point,
what we can do is we could save
our scene and we can go ahead and set this
up inside of Unreal Engine. Now, in my case, for doing that, what I want to do
is I'm just going to go to my export textures, and then in my output templates, I have over here a new template. I can actually make it for
you, but I can also show you. And the reason I want
to use this if I just go over here as
Unreal Object export, this one is because in
unreal for my shaders, I use a ORME map. This means that my material reads from one texture
map the occlusion, roughness, metallic,
and emissive. So this is in the
RGB and Alpha map, as you can see over here. The reason we do this is because it is much more optimized. Instead of needing to load in four textures, we load in one, and because all of these
textures do not need color, they only need a gray scale, we can combine all of them. So for this, you can do this in Photoshop or what you can do is if you create a new layer, just press the RGBA, and call this one, for example, if you press dollar
sign texture set, which means metal
tectorUnderscore, ORME and then you
would literally just drag in the, let's say, the emboclusion in
the roughness OR, so the roughness
into the G channel, the metallic into the B channel. And then if you have it, the emissive into the gray channel. If you don't have an emissive, it will just not export. And this way, it is
able to basically export that specific map. So what I'm going to do is I'm
just going to go ahead and export once more using
that specific map, which in my case is called
SM unreal Object Export. And I will show you how
we set this up later on. So in the next chapter, let's go ahead and jump inside
of Unreal Engine, set up this model,
and after that, I will also go over on how
to create modular assets. So let's go ahead and continue with that in the next chapter.
8. 07 Importing Models And Modular Design: Okay, so we are
back in nel engine. Now, as you guys know at this
point is we have a model, so an FBX file, and we
have our textures ready. And that's pretty much all
we need for Inu engine. So all we want to do now is, I'm just going to go
ahead and you want to also create a nice folder
structure in here. In my case, like, whatever
you want to call. Let's say we call it airport. And then in here, you would make a folder that's called Assets. And in here, you would
make a folder that, in this case, is called metal. Detector. And in here, I like to make another
folder called texts. That's often the
structure I like to do. Then for my metal detector, I just simply drag
in my FBX file. But this is super basics
in terms of unreal engine. Just make sure that
built Nanite is turned on and combine
mesh is turned on. This one is very important. If you don't do this,
it will try to export every individual mesh that's in your FVx file as a new model. Scaling can be one because we made everything
properly to scale. So at this point, we can
just go ahead and press Import R, and then
we have a model. Now in our texts, we
can go ahead and just import R. In my case, it is going to be my base color, normal ORME map, and I will show you
what I mean with this. So we already well, I already showed
you how to do it, but here we have a base color, very simple base color.
Here we have a norm map. Now the norm map when you export a norm map from
substance painter, you don't have to flip
the green channel. However, if you make a norm
map in OpenGL, for example, in it can be, for example, in
substance design. Like you make it open GL. What you then want to do is
you want to go down here to texture advanced and flip
the green channel around. What you can see
over here is you can almost see like
it's indented. It seems like some people have a little bit more problems
with seeing this, but to me, it's quite obvious, like this, it looks like there's
an indent indent, but like this, it looks like
that it's extending out. And you want stuff that is
supposed to be an indent, in your norm map
to extend out for it to look good
in unreal engine. So it's like the opposite. I probably don't
explain that correctly, but that's just how it is. Now, if we go over here and we just turn
off these channels, you can see that
in our roughness, we have our ambient clusion. In our green channel,
we have our roughness. In our blue channel, we have our metallic and
our Alpha channel has nothing just because
we don't have an emissive. The only thing that
I want to do for my specific material
is I want to turn off the SRGB because SRGB
is more for colors. Okay, so we now have
these textures. Now, I have this
wily fancy material, which I won't be
using for this one, but I will be showing it
to you just so you know, because it just adds
a lot of flexibility. But this is like a
complicated master material that we use for
every single asset. As you can see over
here, basically, all that it does is it gives
us control over our UVs, and then it gives us
different sections. We have a base color section where we can change the color. We can add a mask
to basically change the color only in
specific sections, all that kind of stuff. Metallic doesn't do much. We have over here a roughness where it inputs the
roughness and you can see over here the ORM E
with the different channels, but it allows us to add roughness variation
using grunges and a bunch of other stuff. Our nor maps, it
allows us to add two different types of
norm maps if we want to. It gives us even
options for, like, dust, although, oh, no, this one doesn't
have dust anymore, but it even gives us we even
have a version that gives us the option to add normal dust and everything
on top of everything. But it's all too overcomplicated for
this simple tutorial. So what I'm going to do
is, I'm just going to show you super simple how
to create a material. In my case in airport, I'm just going to add it
to our metal detector. But of course, if you
want to do this properly, you make a new folder called
materials, and in there, you make another folder
that you call master, and you place your master
materials in there. In my case, well, I can literally
just use this metal detector material
just to show you. Let me just rename this. Oh. Um, here we go. Let's just open this
and delete this. So this is just a
basic empty material. All I'm going to do is I'm going to drag in my textures into it. And the absolute
most basic way of setting up a model is you're
dragging your textures, drag the RGB into base color, drag the RGB into normal. And then for this one,
it's just a matter of roughness is ambit oclusion. Green channel is roughness, blue channel is metallic. And if you would have it, Alpha channel is
a missive color, but we don't have an Alpha. That's all. Super simple.
You can just save it. If you would want to
add additional inputs, you can do that, but
we won't go over that now because
we don't need it. And now our metal detector automatically already has
this material assigned. So at this point, how do
we prepare this model? There's a few things
that we want to do, and I also have a video on my FASutorials
YouTube channel that goes over it in more detail on how to prepare assets
for production. But let's say we
drag this in here. We drag it in, and surprisingly, it's actually a little
bit too small, huh? That is quite surprising. Maybe something went
wrong with our scaling. I should have a scale
reference in here. Or maybe just my environment. Okay, I guess it's
just like this one. We just went for
a larger design. And I guess the
reason we did that is because it fits better with
our general environment. So it is up to you. This one is, of course, like a smaller design,
like a more compact. But if you want,
you can scale it up or if you want to
scale it up in general, you can click on the model, scroll down to import
settings and set the uniform scale a little bit higher here and
just press reimport. And now you can see
that now it's a bit bigger too big, to be honest. Yeah, let's say
1.2, for example. It will just automatically
have the scale at 1.2. So, we have our model. Now, to keep it
super, super simple, a few basic things that we need to know about
this model is one, we need to have proper
collision and two, we need to have proper
mesh distance field. If you go to show, and then, oh, God, where is it? I have it as a shortcut, so it's actually quite
difficult for me. I believe it is in advanced, and then it should
be Where are you? Because it's here,
if I press contro F, this is what I mean,
mesh distance field, but I honestly need to check
where I actually got it from because it's been so long
since I even used this. Ah, that's annoying.
It should be in show. Mesh. No lumen, no really, I actually have to pass
the video to find this. Well, that's a quart visualized. That's it. Visualized
distant field. Not that distant field. Mash distant field. There we go. Okay, sorry. I wasn't advanced. Here we go. What is a
mesh distance field? This is specific to
Unal Agent five. It basically means how
lumen sees your model. A lumen, of course, doesn't need as much resolution in
order to see your model, but you want to try and get a general shape to follow your model, which
it does right now. In the event, you
don't have this, the shape is like
over here where it's just completely empty. What you can try to do, and when I say ty, I mean it because it
doesn't always work. Sometimes you just have
to accept that your model doesn't work that well
with lumen in that sense. But if you open up your model, can go to the LOD zero
section, build settings, and set the distant mesh, sorry, distant field resolution scale higher, and you press Apply. And what it will then try to do, as you can see over here, it will increase the resolution giving you a more
accurate model. If I set it really high, here, see, now it is super
super accurate. However, try not to go too high because it's
more expensive to render. So one is more than
enough for this model, so I'm just going to
leave it nicely at one. The second thing is
simply that we want to go ahead and make sure that we
have a player collision. Right now, what you
will see is that this player collision
is just a simple box. Now, there's two ways
that we can edit this. We can remove the collision and add an auto
convex collision, which basically tries to
automatically add a collision. It's good enough for this
kind of stuff if you want to, but, of course,
it's not very nice. You can go in and you
can play around with the Hulcunt and the precision
to get more higher quality. Collision, as you
can see over here, or what you can do if you want to have something
super super clean, is you can remove
this collision, add a simple box collision, and then press R to
go into scale mode. And we are going to simply
move this over here. Then we can go ahead to press Contra C Contrave to
duplicate this box collision, move it over here, and
ContraZ Contrave again. And this time, we are going
to scale it out and lower it. And it depends how accurate
your collision needs to be. This one often
doesn't need to be as accurate because it's
just for the player. Of course, if you say, like, Oh, but my player is
like it needs to be able to stand only
on these 2 bars, then what you can do
is you can always just move it ControvraV again. Here we go. And now
as you can see, we have a fairly accurate
looking collision. Like this one is able to
basically move a bit more and maybe move it in like
this, there we go. So now we have a really
nice clean collision. We can save it. Look at that, which means that when
we would play the game, which I believe I
should be able to do in this scene, play from here. Or not. I guess my character
is all the way over here. So I'm not able to play it
as easily, but trust me, when you will play it, your
character will be able to just walk through here without getting stuck
or anything like that. And that's pretty much a model. See, we have our
nice little details. Everything is
working quite well. I would say that
even in this scene, it fits really, really well. And here you can also
see a little bit like the difference
between something we made very quick versus something that has
got a lot of polish, a lot of extra
attention to detail. And yes, of course, this
one is a little bit better. But that's something
that you would go over. You would go back and forth, often as feedback from someone
to get to the right model. And that's pretty much
it for our meshes. That is literally the
technique that we use to create all of these
individual assets. Doesn't matter which one,
we all use this technique. However, except for one mesh, and that is modular meshes. Modular measures you
can see over here, and I will show you a little
bit what they are about. You know, if we just go
ahead and save Mcin. So for modular meshes, we use modular meshes
in order to basically repeat models and quickly
build entire environments. As you can see over here,
if I would remove this, see how it is just
one modular piece. The way that this works is
that you make them repeatable. If I drag in, for example, my wall over here
and sets to zero, here we have a simple wow. The goal, if you look
on the grid is that this wall has a very
exact dimension, and this dimension is in meters. This can be one,
two, three, four, 5 meters, as long as it
is exactly 4 meters. This means that when
I turn on my snapping at 100 centimeters, so 1 meter, and I copy this, I snap one, two, three, four, and you can see that the snapping
is perfectly aligned. That's basically the general
idea of modular assets. As you can see over here,
when it is generally aligned, we have a longer wall
that will perfectly fit. At this point, if you are smart and you make all of your
meshes the same dimensions, you can quickly drag in a door opening,
switch it for a door. And like that, you
can just very quickly switch stuff in and out. In this case, I
only have a door. I also have this one
where if I delete this one and this one
is twice as long, here we go. We have a
door with a window. So like that, you
can very quickly alter all of these measures. If you were to go on a corner, I believe we also have
corner measures here or not. They should be here somewhere. I Oh, oh, yeah, there it is. Here we go. I just didn't notice it. So if we would copy this over, we also have a corner mesh over here to instantly
art a nice corner. And because this corner is also 1 meter by 1 meter, technically, although I cannot be
sure for this one because I didn't Oh,
yeah, so for this one, we made a slight alteration, which means that it
is no longer fitting, but if we would set to, like, a lower snapping value,
normally it would fit. Just trust me, this is
just because I did this very quick that it
doesn't perfectly fit. But normally, you want to
make this one by 1 meter, and then it will perfectly fit. So my apologies that it
doesn't fit right now, but trust me on that. So, okay, that's the general
idea of modular design. We also have that modular
design, for example, over here. If we have these measures, you can see that this one is
a bit more complicated, where on each end, you can see that
has a proper end, which means that
when I copy it over, you don't notice that
there is a seam here, see? This is where the seam
is, but you just don't notice it because it
is perfectly aligned. And a nice thing about
this one is that it is also modular via the top. So I can literally
also move it up, although moving up
because I needed, once again, specific scale. It's a bit smaller like this, but you can see that it
also moves up properly. Now, you want to spend
a bit more time. The reason I did this is
because I made this scene very, very fast, since for me, the scene was not
about gameplay, but it was just about visuals, because it was for, like,
a cinematic type thing. So I didn't need
to go as precise. But just to give you a
very simple overview, if we go ahead and
go to our three Max, for example, I can just make
this really, really simple. 1 second. I'm just
going to close this because I sometimes have a bug where trees max is super slow when I have unreal
open and stuff. Let's say that I
just reset the seed. Give the second. Here we go. So here we have a simple scene. Now, how I would go about
creating these modular assets, first of all, an important rule. So if you just drag out a
simple box, as I said before, make the box exactly
at zero, zero, zero, you need to make sure that it's a perfect dimension. You can often just
enter this dimension. In our case, our home
grid needs to be 100 centimeters because we are working in meters
here, not in centimeters. And we want to have
our width to be, for example, 4 meters. Then we want to
have our height to, for example, be also 4 meters. Square is always easier because when you need to
UV unwrap your meshes, you need to once
again, make sure that they are in a perfect square, and if it is already
a box, that's easy. Length, or in this case, like a thickness is going to
be at least 25 centimeters. One, do this for
interior scenes. The reason for that is
because if it is thinner, lumen might bleed in
some lighting where you can see the lighting
from the outside, come to the inside. So just stick with 25 centimeters. That's
the general rule. Now at this point, you can
see that if I would go ahead and copy this and move it
exactly 400 centimeters, it's already perfectly aligned, and it works exactly
the same inside of unreal as I've
already shown you. For your UV unwrapping, you want to make sure that UV unwrapping is a perfect box. In t is MAX, the
absolute best way to do this is to just add a UVW map, box, and make it even on
all axes 400 by 400 by 400. This is once again
just to get a pattern. So if I, for
example, would apply a simple checker
pattern to this, just give me a second to load. The general goal if I just do where's the
checker? There we go. Checker pattern. Let's set
the tiling to five by five. My general goal for this is
that when I move this over, so I don't have snapping
turn on right now, it perfectly flows over, see? You don't note scenting. However, if I would go
ahead and not have it perfectly on the square,
this is what happens. See? It is the same general
concept for brick walls, for plaster, whatever you want. It always needs to
be perfectly square so that when you open
up your UVW map, your UVs, at least
the ends of your UVs, perfectly hit the corner. Okay, fair enough. In this case, I need to set this spec to
one else I cannot show you. But here, if I show you now. Okay, that's awkward.
Striking. Come on. There we go. As you
can see over here, they perfectly hit the
corners on all sides, which means that it's
properly tilable. It's a same general concept
behind tilable textures, for example, which we will
go over a little bit later. And just like that, you can
make it whatever you want. Like, you start with
the simple wall often, but then you can always go in, and you can also turn this into something like
this. There we go. Now it's, of course, not properly mentioned
or measured, but now it is a doorway.
That's pretty much it. That is how we would go over on how to create
these module images. And on a larger scale, as you can see, Oh,
closed reel engine. Then we'll do it this
way. On a larger scale, as you can see, for example, this is the environment
that is based on that. You can see that all these
walls that you see over here, everything is just
modular assets. So we can very quickly with it only like three or four assets. We can literally create so much. Like this is like
one window piece that we just duplicate over. So we are able to create massive environments
with just a few meshes. You can see that the
walls in the corners, here they do work are
correct everywhere. Here, this is another
version of the um, of the security room, of course, this one is a bit more
of a dramatic version, but everything, as you can see with the valves is modular. And that's basically
the general concept. So I'm going to
leave it off here. We have now finished
our model and we have gone over our
modular assets. What we're going to do next is I'm going to show you how to create some procedure materials. And once that is done, we can start putting
everything together because then we have covered
all of the base elements. So let's go ahead and go over
that in our next chapter.
9. 08 Creating Procedural Textures Part1: Okay, so in the
previous chapters, I showcased how to create
a simple tridy asset. In this case, it was
like a metal detector, and I also showed you
the general concept behind modular assets. Now, in an environment, of course, there
are many aspects, but some of the main ones
are creating three assets, creating modular assets, and the one that we're
going to cover now, which is creating
tlable textures. In our case, we will create a procedural tilable
texture. So what is that? As you can see over here, we have all these module assets, but they still need
to be populated with some type of texture. Over here, you can see,
for example on the floor, we have some tiles on the wall. It's just some simple
plaster as you can see, it's subtle, but
it is all there. Now, these textures,
they need to be repeatable on all angles, and I will go over that
a little bit later. But the reason for that
is because we need to be able to repeat them
over and over again. You cannot give
such large assets like this unique textures
because if you do that, you will just end up with
low resolution textures. So that's where
tilable texts come in because we can repeat them
over and over and over. Just to give you a general
idea of what I mean, is that if I go ahead and go into this
material over here, and I will change the tiling. If I set this one, here, see? If I set it higher, you
can see that over here. Wait let me set it to like 100. You can see that now the
tiles are very small, but they still
work totally fine. Like it all just fits
together really nice. And I can also go the opposte
way that if I go for 600, now these tiles are very large. Of course, you cannot go too large because then it will
become low resolution again. But like this, you get
very flexible textures. And that's what we will
basically go over. We will go over on how to create a very simple tile texture just to give you a general
idea of the concept behind it. And we will be using
substance zig. So why do I like
procedural textures? I actually do do a lot of
photogramtry textures. So I would say that,
um, over here, this plaster, for example, I believe that this plaster
is a photogram try texture. So photogram try
texture is the art of turning images that you took in real life into a Tri model, and you do this by basically taking a lot of images
of one surface, and then you use a program
like Reality Capture, which is also owned by
Unreal to process that. Have a look on our
website if you are more interested in that because
we have two tutorials, one that shows you everything
you need to know about photogramr and another
one that shows you everything you need to
know about material creation. But to give you a general
idea of the concept, we are going to create
a procedural tiles. Having a procedural gives us a lot more flexibility
compared to photogrametry. Not just in flexibility in how many tiles we
want, but for example, here you can see that I added this little extra
detail on here. These details are also sorry, with procedurality,
that's a difficult word. It gives us the
ability to basically add more or less
of these details, make them bigger, smaller, rotate them, do whatever
we want with them. And that's why procedurality
is so nice and flexible. In turn, of course, it also takes often
quite a bit longer to create procedural textures and to get them like
a higher quality. So that's basically
the general overview. Now, what I did is I went
ahead and in our source files, I already made a
textures folder, floor tiles, and reference, and I played some
reference in here, which I also have
already in pure rev. Now, this is, of course, not
the exact same reference because the tiles that I have over here, I
kind of made them up. So I am going to show
you how to create this. But over here, I just get a general sense of the reference. You don't always need
the exact reference, but if you are a beginner, I highly recommend that you just try to recreate something. For example, something simple like over here with these tiles. So yes, we could, of course,
recreate these ones, but I want to show you
just like a simplified, more interesting version of it. So why would I still need this reference
when I have this? It's mostly for you guys. It's just so that I can refer back here and
see like, Okay, so see how the Grout
has a tiny bit of, like, like a rough
stone in there, and that is something that
we might want to capture. It's stuff like that. And also, for general the shapes to
see if we want to maybe get some interesting
shapes or how that the edge damages work on here. That's all little stuff that
I want to show you and it's easier to do that when I have reference compared to
doing it out of my head. So this is, however, the tiles that we will create. So since I literally
made this stuff up, I'm sure that there's very
similar stuff in real life, but not exactly like this. I am going to take
a quick screenshot. And throw this screenshot
also in my reference. There we go, so that
I have something to refer to when I want to
create those little specs. So let's go ahead and go
to my program of choice, which is substance designer, which is pretty much the
king of procedural textures, and let's go ahead and
create a new substance file. I, of course, already
expect that you know the basics of
substance designer, but I'm just going to
start from the beginning. Floor tiles, I will just
not cover the basics. That's the general idea. So floor tiles over here. The general concept behind
this is that first of all, we would want to
create a height map. From that, we would want
to create a norm map, and then based on those two, we can create a base color, roughness, metallic,
whatever we want. Now, in our case, we don't need the actual
height output over here because we're
just going to create a height map in order to
turn it into a normal map. And I also don't
need the metallic. So only these four maps are the ones that
we need to create. Okay. Awesome. So first, what we need is we need a tile pattern. Now our height map
is very simple. If you know anything
about textures, it's basically white data
is up, Black data is down. That allows us to, for example, go over here into our patterns and grab a simple
tile sampler node. And as you can see here,
we have white and black. Now we can, of course, add a lot of variation
to this now. So let's say that over here, we have a lot of settings, and we can set over here the
X and the Y amount down. So you can instantly see already how flexible procedurality is because we can just
change all the stuff. Now next to that, what
I'm going to do is I'm going to set my size
over here quite a bit larger because I want my tiles to be really,
really close together. Something like that
will work quite well. And there we go. We already have
some basic tiles. Now, how do we know if this
is repeatable? Very simple. Substance signer almost
always keeps things repeatable unless you manually
change your transforms. To in your tile sampler
to the view over here, press space, and then
you can see that now it infinitely tiles. And you can also zoom out
to see what it looks like, but because these
are very thin lines, it's a bit difficult for
the program to show you. Okay. Awesome. So what's the next
thing that we would need? We would need maybe something interesting going on in here. Over here, you can
see that what I did is I went with
something that goes a bit, up in like a bump. That is a little
bit more complex. So what we are going
to do is let's say that we are
actually going to go down a little bit because
it's a little bit easier. Now for that, what I want to do is I want to create a note, and if you press
space, you can just create a bunch of notes. But honestly, this is not
a program you should go in with this tutorial
to learn it. I highly recommend sorry, following some
beginner tutorials because it is just quite
a complicated program. Anyway, I'm going to add
a slope blur gray scale, and what it will do is it
will blur whatever I input into my gray scale with a
mask, in this case, my slope. Now, what I want to
do is I want to go in and just click and track
and select this line, and then you can add
nodes in between. In my case, I press space, and I add an invert
grayscale node. Believe that's the one or not. Sorry, I think it needs
to go over on this side. And then I realize
I'm being a little bit dumb because I don't
need a slow blur gray scale. No now at least, I need a
non uniform bl grayscale. Sorry about that. A
slow blur grayscale is greater art edge damages, but we are not
adding edge damages. I was working on this. For some reason, I was
looking at the edges and my brain just went
into automatic mode. Anyway, non uniform
blur gray scale. And I believe the
top is the input, and the blur map
is the bottom one. Throw this intensity down. There we go, that is looking
a little bit more logical. So let me set my
samples up quite a bit and probably also my yeah, that's set the blades
up, which gives us a higher quality blur. So as I said before, black is down, white is up. As you can see over here, what we can do is we can
basically give it a gradient. This gradient will
translate into a soft foul off
going in the center. And that's basically what we
want to have this one for. Now, next to this, now what we're going to do is
I want to add some type of edge damages to this because right now it's a little
bit too perfect. The first thing
I'm going to do is I'm going to add the tiniest. We just do a blur, high quality gray scale just
by typing in blur. I want to give the tiniest blur. Let's do 0.0 tree, probably, just to give it
like a nice bit of softness. And now we will add the
slope blur gray scale. So with the slope
blur gray scale, you can input your grayscale
and you want to input a noise to basically
break up your edges. In my case, I often like to
use the clouds to noise. If I just go ahead
and drag this in here and set the
samples all the way up, the mode to minimum, which means that it
will only affect white Then if we play
with our intensity, now you can see over here,
this, of course, very, very strong, but
you can see that it just adds these little gap kicks out of our tiles. If I go at the set this,
let's start with 0.1, and I'm going to go in
my clouds to and set the scale a bit higher,
which is just the tiling. This way, we can have,
that's a bit too high. We can have some just like
more smaller details. Let's go for 0.0.
These are tiles. Yes, you welcome them, but we want them to
be very, very subtle. So let's do 0.01,
for example. See? It's just like some
small edge damages. Now, another thing
that you might, if you think about it logically, is that these edge damages
are now everywhere. Like here, you do see a
lot, but, for example, over here, in real life, you don't see that
many edge damages. So what we want to do is
we want to break this up. We can do this by blending
these edge damages, along with our old
mask over here. The way that we do that is
we simply add a blend note, which is one of the
most popular ones. And let's plug into
the top our slope ler and into the bottom our
node before the slop ler. Now, what we can do is
we can blend this using some type of mask or grunge
or whatever we want. In our case, we're just
going to go for noise. And what I want to do
is I want to probably go let's go for a
crunch map 001. And over here, you can change the random C to slightly
change the crunch map, and then you can change
the balance and contrast. So what I want to do is I want to get quite a bit of
contrast here so that I basically just only have the damages in some
specific areas. I said, it's a bit higher,
and it's very, very solid. It will be hard to see until we actually go into norm map, but now you can see
that over here, yes, we have some damages,
but over here, everything is looking perfect. Speaking about looking perfect, there's one last thing that
I want to add to this before I'm just going to
leave the height map, just to keep it simple. And that is that
I want to give it a tiny bit of just like some random wiggling and direction because nothing in real life is perfectly straight. And the same goes with tiles. Like, Yes, tiles can look very straight, but if
you really look at it, you can see that there's
the tiniest bit of, like, unevenness to it. And we want to add that, too. For this, I want to add a non uniform direction
Where are you? No. Sorry. Multi directional
warp gray scale. That's the one I want over here. And it allows us to
input an intensity. In which case, I'm
going to go for a Perlin noise over here. And maybe set the scale a
bigger because we want to have very large scale tensions over here and set
the mode to minimum. Go to set the direction probably
to one and move it down. You so I'm used to using
a multidirectional warp. Technically, you
can also just use a normal directional warp, which is a tiny bit
cheaper in terms of, like, how difficult
it is to render it. As you can see over here. It
definitely does the same. The reason why I like Multi
is sometimes I like to switch 1-2, but in this case, that doesn't work because
it will double the lines, but it is just something
that you can keep in mind. In any case, I'm going
to set the intensity way down to give it just like the tiniest
bit of an unevenness, which if you look
on a larger scale, you can see that now we
have just a little bit of uneven tiles, which will look quite nice. Now at this point, we can, of course, add a
bunch more stuff. We can add some
height difference to it and stuff like that. But honestly, I'm just going
to leave it at this point, just to keep it nice and simple. So we have now our height map. Next thing that we need to do
is we need to add a normal, and this will convert our
height map to a norm map. Now, you can choose between
direct X, which is, as I said before, the one that Unreal engine uses, or OpenGL. Personally, I like to
use OpenGL because it's easier to read
because it reads, similar to the way
that the texture is where this looks like
it's going inwards, and the damages over here, you can see them
a lot better now. See how nice? This is just like these nice
bit of damages. So just a bit easier to read. So norm map done over here. You can just go ahead and input this into your normal note. Like this, if you
want. So the next one that we would want to do is we would want to start
with our base color. Oh, sorry, my apologies. I know that I kept it smooth, but I wanted to go for
something a bit more grainy. So actually, what we can do is this is sometimes better
to do in the norm map is we add a normal combine notes where we can combine
multiple norm maps. And then we just add a
grainy norm map to this. Now, how to make a grainy
norm map if we do it super, super easy, let's say that
we grab a B&W spots tree. Set the scale quite a bit down. Add a normal note to
this. And there we go. We have, we just said
it's like Wi low, we have this tiny
grainy type nor map, and we can just add this,
and now you would see that it's everywhere
on all of our tiles. However, I want
my original tiles to be very smooth and not have any type of norm map detail and only want to have it in between
these areas over here. So first of all, what
I'm doing is I'm just playing out my norm map, making sure that it's strong enough. And then
there are two ways. Way one is to use a
normal blend node, which allows us to
add in the mask. And way two is to just
use a normal blend node, as in just a blend node and
blend as a mask like that. There is not much difference
between them in this case. So I can blend these two, and all I need to do
is I need to go ahead and I have over here my
multidirectional warbGrayscale. I cannot input this directly
because it needs to be a black and white mask in
order to do proper blending. So what I'm going to
do is I'm going to add a histogram scan node to this. And a H Com scan note basically
allows us to control how strong we want to
have our input to be. And if I set the
prolization lower, you can now see that we
have a black and white. I believe that I
need to invert this. Sorry, I don't
invert it in here, add an invert node. There we go invert
it. There we go, see. And now we have this. One issue that we do have with this normal bled note is that
as you can see over here, it is basically cutting out the original normal, which
is not what I want. So instead, I'm going to input my normal combine in here so that it basically
combines those two normals. So it combines this
one with this one. And then it basically
just only showcases the grainy normal in the areas where we
want it using a mask. And this is basically how
you build up your textures. You just keep blending stuff together more and more and more. And if you want, while doing it, you can
also organize it. So let's say we
grab these notes, I can right click and art a frame and call
this one height map. I can go in here, right click
the frame. Call this one. Normal. And now,
as I said before, we can move on to
our specs over here. Now, doing the specs
is not too difficult. First, we need to define
our two base colors, and we can very simply do
this by going in here, because they are
pretty much plain, let's add a uniform
color for the whiteness. Do I want to do that, or do I want to give it a tiny bit of, like, some detail? Let's do a uniform color for the whiteness, so I'm
just having a thing. And I'm going to make it
pretty much white with, like, the tiniest bit of, like, a yellow hue to it. A bit lighter,
something like this. However, I do want to the
tiniest bit of variation. I'm going to do this in the
most basic way possible, which is you blend this
using another uniform color. That's, for example, let's say that we make
this one slightly more darker and a little
bit more yellowish, and you just blend
them using a mask. That's number one that we can
do for very simple colors. And I'm going to
blend this using a let's just do like
a white noise fast, which she gives us just like this little bit of
like a noisy texture. But I think in the larger space, this
will look quite nice. Now, we also have concrete. As you can see, over
here, concrete has quite a bit more
variation in them. What you can do for that is the second way to generate colors, which is you add a gradient map. And what you can do with
the grading map is you can input a color, for example, B&W spots three, and if you're smart by the
way, you can just reuse. Oh, no wait, sorry,
with tiny this. Normally, what you can do
is you can maybe reuse notes that you already
used before just to keep your graph
nice and fast. I'm not going to go over
optimization right now. It's just not needed
at all for dis tutoil. But we have our B&W spots three. We input it in a grading map, and then what we can
do is we can map colors based on the gradients. If we go ahead and click on our gradient editor and
then press PIC gradient, we are now able to, for example, click and drag wherever we want, and it will map colors
based on what we drag. What I'm going to
do, although you can probably not see
it is I'm going to just drag it on
here on a concrete to get a little bit of
our concrete color. So pick gradient, drag
it on a concrete, and now that's a bit strong. You see if I have here.
Let me try this concrete. This one looks a bit better. I can pick gradients and I can just assign a bunch
of colors to this. I think what I'm going to do
is I'm going to drag a lot of it on the concrete to
get the more that you drag, the more little specs you get. Let's say that we have
something like this. Now, I'm not super
happy with it yet. It's actually, yeah,
you know what? I'm going to try to make
it a little bit more even. Because right now
the specs are a bit, but I can also just play
around with my noise in a bit. So yeah, let's go for
something like this. We can also play around
with our B&W spots, as you can see over here
to make it smaller. And what I'm going to
do is I'm going to add a super quick HSL note, which allows me to
play around with the saturation and
the lightness. And I'm going to make this here. See you a little
bit brighter and a little bit more saturated. So that's the second way that we can very quickly
generate colors. The third way is by
using photocrubt textures or anything else. I'm now going to blend
these two together, using the same mask
that we used before. Over here, there we go. So that gives us already a base. Now what we need to
do is we need to go ahead and we need to add, for example, some
specks, and after that, we can also add some dirt
and stuff like that. These specks are not too
difficult to actually create. However, we are
already at 20 minutes. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to save my scene here. 1 second. I'm going
to save my senior. And in the next chapter, we will just go ahead and finalize this material already and
import it into Unreal engine.
10. 09 Creating Procedural Textures Part2: Okay, so let's go
ahead and continue, and we'll go over how to, like, create these additional shapes just because they are
quite interesting and I quite like to add
a little bit of color to our design instead
of just having white tiles. Now, for these shapes, there are two ways
that we can do it. As you can see over here,
there's quite a bit of difference
between the scaling. The original way or let's say the simplest way
to just grab the cells for, and as you can see, this already has quite a bit
of different shapes. However, I know, it just
feels too uniform to me. So I wanted to show
you a slightly more complicated way also. And then you will end up
with a very similar mask, but we can take it from there. And that is that we want to go ahead and grab, for example, a tile sampler, actually, you know what a tile
generator is aady enough. Tile generator is a little
bit more simplistic. And I'm going to set
the X and Y amount to 256 by 256 or
something like that. Like Willy where high. I
don't want to go ahead and I want to set the Where are you the scaling over
here down until we basically get
just little specs. Not too small, like this. Also scroll down and set
the luminans random so that we give it a bunch of
different random colors. We need that because remember that previous shape
I showed you, it had different
colors, and we use these colors to basically
later on select our shapes. Now at this point, we just
want to go ahead and set our position random over here. And now we just have all
these random positions. At which point we can go ahead and we can
fill in this space. We do this using a
distance node and we grab the tile generator
in the source and a histogram scan that has everything set to perfect
white over here into the top. Now, when you set your
maximum distance quite high to 500 or something like that, to push out all of the shapes. Now what you can
see is that we get all of these random
different colors. Although I would say there's
some messiness going on. I'm curious why that happens. Maybe it's because my
shapes are too small. That can sometimes be the case. However, I'm not sure if it is actually bad.
So let's just keep it. So as you can see, we
basically end up with quite a messy looking grid. But what we can do is we can turn this into something
quite interesting. So now what we need is we need a bunch of different colors,
as you can see over here. We can just basically
choose the colors. However, what I like to do is I like to not use the
gradient technique for this one, but have a bit more flexibility. So what I'm going to do is I'm
going to add a few blends. Let's see one, two, three different
colors, probably. Yeah, red. I'm not sure. Or should I use the blend. Now, I'm just going to
stick with this for now. So let's go ahead and grab
three uniform colors. And you want to set these
colors to whatever you want. In my case, I'm just going
to grab them from the image. Oh, that really doesn't work. In that case, I'm just going to go ahead
and I'm going to. Let's see. Let's give
it like a blue colour. This one is going to be more
of like a orange color. And we can, of
course, balance them out later on. That's
a nice thing. This is non destructive.
And this one will be, for example,
like a red color. Plug these pieces in. And now what we can do is
we can basically select from this mask using a histogram select
different shapes. So we can, first of
all, set the position to change what we want
to have selected. We can set the range, which
I will set a bit lower. And quite important is setting the contrast so that
we have full strength. And now, as you
can see over here, when our artists, you can see that we have a bunch
of different shapes. Now there's a few things that
is not correct with this. And one of them is
that, of course, we don't want to
have these shapes on these ends over here. That is quite a simple
one. All that we have to do is we have to, like, mask it out. So let's just add
a simple blend. And this time, I'm
just going to grab my mask and place
it into the top of the blend because this is all gray scale,
so that's totally fine. And then if we just go ahead
and set this to subtract, it will basically
cut away the shapes. It's fine to have them
on the corner here. Now, the next thing that I
want to do is I also want to probably let's see. I want to maybe make sure
that they don't transition. No, actually, you know
what this is fine. I'm not going to overcomplicate
it, overcomplicate it. So what I'm going
to do at this point is I'm going to go ahead
and duplicate these three. And now for this histogram, it's just a matter of
changing the positions. And then when you plug these in, as you can see, it will just
start adding all the shapes. Now, right now, I'm definitely
not happy with the colors. They look quite bad. I am. And it's also the
scaling, I would say. So if I go to my tile generator, let's try one to eight
by one to eight. Okay, that's a bit too much. Let's see. I'm also going
to set my Let's see. Histogram scan is fine. Yeah, I'm surprised it gives me these lines over
here, to be honest. Let me just quickly try to set my output to 16
bits to see if that works because usually it
should not give these lines. Let's do 64 by 64. Yeah, see here, something
is definitely wrong. And I'm going to go ahead
and have a quick look and figure out why it might just be that we need to play around
with some of these settings. Okay, so don't ask me
why, but for some reason, the tile generator
is not working, but the tile sampler is working. I don't know why. I'm pretty sure it always used
to work totally fine. Anyway, let's go back over here, and now I can see that I do
need to set this back to one to eight by one to
eight, maybe a bit higher. Yeah, I think now doing 256
by 256, it's a bit too much. 180 by 180? Yes, I feel like that is
a pretty good distance. So yeah, as you can see, we have quite a bit of masks. Now, what I want to
do is I want to go ahead and balance
out these shapes because I don't
really like them. I'm also a bit
worried about them being exactly the same color. So in those events, you could go in and
add a grading map. But what you can do
is then you can grab the actual this one, the actual distance
mask over here, and then you can set
a few gradients. The way that you can
do that is instead of selecting gradients, if you just click here, you can, for example, go in here. And you can set the gradients to be all slightly different, something like that. See? Just to give it a few more
additional color options, and then we can
take it from there. So yeah, that is definitely
something that we can do to hopefully increase
the amount of variation. And then over here, we would
just go in and we would say, Okay, you are going
to be orange. And at this point,
once we set them, we pretty much only need to drag the slider over here down. Orange. And this is like red, something like that. So in the end, I still use the gradient map, but
slightly different. At this point, what we also
need to do is we need to pretty much balance it out because right now
they are just super, super strong colors. We
can do that in two ways. Way number one or
two ways that I want to use at the same time is way number one is
I'm going to use my HL not to do lightness, but to basically lower the
saturation because often lowering saturation will make them feel a bit more neutral. You can also then go in here
and use the HL over here to basically slightly
change the color a bit. And once that's done, I'm also going to
go in my blend and I'm just going to lower
the opacity of them. I can do the same over here.
I can add an HSL note. It's going here, and I start by saying saturation bit lower. In this case, I want
to also lightness bit higher and yeah,
something like that. Create some specs here.
And the last one HSL. Actually not giving
me enough colors. I think the reason why
the color variation is not working well is
because of our select. Our select is only selecting the specific colors
that we wanted. And to that aspect, I do know how to change it. So just give me a second.
I will finish this. Let's give it a bit
more lightness. A bit more paste. There we go, just to give it a
little bit more specs. Okay, so one cool
trick, first of all, is that you can press
D to dock a note, and that will just make everything a
little bit more clean. And over here, we should
probably also go in select this. Right click frame, call
this spec mask like this. Okay, so the next thing was
that, yeah, the colors, they don't properly
change just yet. And that is because of the way that we have
this distant note. Now, this distant note, we should be able to just change the color seed by adding
a what's it called? There are a lot of
notes. Histogram shift, I believe. There we go. Histogram shift to
basically shift the colors a bit in the hope that it will give me
various different colors. And if that doesn't
work, oh, yeah, here. See now there are
different colors. Great. On the red, it doesn't feel as strong yet. Let
me just check. So if it doesn't feel
strong enough yet, what we can do is we
can, first of all, try to just add a few
more notes in between here and then see
where the problem is. And else what we'll do is
we'll just change the mask. Another thing that we can
do is we can just go in here and in our Hicrum select, set the range a bit higher. As you can see here, that should add some different colours, although it's being real
pain, to be honest. Yeah, it's not doing what
I want. She's too bad. Let's actually set
the range lower for these because I don't
want red as much. And purple, I'm just going
to set these a bit lower. Yeah, here we definitely have
we do have the colors down. Pretty much, it's just
some of the colors are not super do not have
enough variation. However, that might be solved by just adding some
additional dirt on top, which is what I was
planning to do anyway. So I'm just going to
go ahead and do that. I'm going to art one No, two more blends over here
for some additional dirt. And after that, I'm just
going to call it dump because it's just about showing
you the general concept. Of course, you can
refine this a lot more. Blend number one, we are
going to go ahead and we are going to grab now, let's do a gradient map. Throw in. You know what? No, you know what?
We can use this one because this dirt actually
works quite well. Yeah, let's just use
that brownish dirt before we add it to an HSL note. And I'm going to go in
and I'm going to grab a where are you? Uh, so I'm just
trying to find it. Mask, what was it called? It was called a Here, if you type in mask, I believe it was the
ground dirt mask. There we go. Yes, the
ground dirt mask. Okay. So with the ground dirt mask, what we can do is we can
input some type of position. Now, the nice thing
about this is that I can input a tile position like we have over here by
giving it various colors. I do that. So yes, you can do it all
the way over here, but what would be easier is
if we add a flood fill note. And we need to do this at a strong mask at
this point over here. So a flood fill node
basically turns our mask into position data. At this point, we can add
a flood fill to gradient, which gives us a gradient map, as you can see here
on every position. Now, what I basically
wanted to do is I wanted to grab four gradients. And one of them
is going at zero, one of them is going at 90, one of them is going at -91
of them is going at 180. Basically, we have a gradient
going in every direction. At that point when you blend
these gradients together, using a multiply probably just add a bunch of blend notes. Multiply and multiply.
It will look quite dark, but then if you add
a outo levels to it, it should push the levels
back. There we go. This is now a gray map
that basically has all of our edges masked out
as a smooth gradient. When you throw something like
this in your grown dirt, you can see that over here,
the dirt basically is allocated around these etches, and I'm able to also control
how much I would want these to be here without losing any of the deformations and
stuff that we did before. So having this, next
thing that we need to do is we need to you know what? We don't
even need to blend it. We just need to input a mask. Let's invert the mask. There we go. So basically, it doesn't have the
edges over here. Now if we artist to our blend, we can add some
dirt and we can set the opacity to be quite low. And most of this dirt will
come into the roughness, not so much into the
actual base color. Now the second one
with our blend, I just want to grab a
very simple grunge map. I believe we even
used it before. We did use it, but sadly we used it at a very
powerful level. So let's just copy
grunge map 001, lower contrast all the way down. Play around with your balance. And now what we want to do
is we don't just want to overlay this on our blend
because if we do that, it is just one giant crunch. Instead, we want to add
a directional warp. And in the intensity input, basically what we need
to do is we need to add one of our flat fills, but we want to add a flood fill to random gray scale over here, which we just basically generate
random colors per tile. Doing this in our directional warp and
setting it down and, for example, really,
really high to 500. It will basically shift our
warping based on every tile, which means that it will
be completely unique on every tile the
grunge that we get. At that point, we just
once again blend this, and I'm just going to go ahead
and set this to subtract. And now you can see
that now we have this extra grinch
added and we are able to still change the balance of it,
change the contrast. In my case, I'm going
to you know what? Actually, I'm going to
set the contrast a bit lower like this or
the balance soil, and then I'm going
to lower this also. And I think at this point, I'm just going to call it done. Like this was already quite more complex than I expected
it to be for tiles. But what we can do at
this point is we can go ahead and drag this
into our base color. For ambient occlusion, although we don't
probably need it, you can art and I
like to use the RTAO which is ray trace
ambient occlusion and simply plug in
your height map. And then not the sample,
set the height scale down. Probably even lower 0.005. Here we go. And then you have a little
bit of emdclusion in there. So our roughness, our roughness
is very, very important. The reason it's important is
because it will take care of all of those wy
fancy reflections. Everywhere you see
roughness, even heresy, the reflections that we get that material response is always, especially with clean
materials, very important. So what I'm going to
do is I'm going to add a blend and I'm going to
add a grayscale conversion. And for my grayscale conversion, what I want to have is I just want to convert
this map to a grayscale. Technically, it's not needed because we have such
a basic texture, but when you have more
complex textures, you would want to use a
grayscale conversion to still keep all of those
little noise bits intact. I then add a histogran I
believe it was range over here. I said range fill, but then now we can
change the position. Darker means more shiny, white means duller
looking duller. So I'm going to lower this down. Then I'm going to simply
grab my mask over here, this one, throw this on top. And blend is using a sub using an art so that basically our grout in between looks duller
than our actual tiles. At this point, what we can again do is we can add
another blend or actually a cup of
blends. For these masks. Why do I want to do that?
Is because it might be nice to just give it like the
tiniest bit of spec highlights. So if we set this to
black and give it the tiniest bit of just
some color in here, it will show up whenever we
have a Wi low camera angle, and it will show as if there's just a little bit of interesting looking like reflectivity in
all of our little shapes. Now, at this point,
we can do some dirt, and then we're pretty much
done already for this. So let's go ahead and blend. And one blend is
probably enough. So what I'm going to
do is I'm going to add a Oh, you know what? No, one blend is not enough. What is it? Yeah, yeah,
one blend is enough. I'm going to blend these
two masks together, but we, of course,
need to control the opacity. That's what
I was thinking about. So we can go ahead and set these two Maxten which means that they softly
add on top of each other. Throw it in here,
set this one to art, and then just lower the
opacity way down to give it just a little bit of some
interesting variation. At this point, we can
throw this all in here. If you want, you
can add a frame and call this one roughness, and we are now ready
for the exporting. And over here, you can
call this one base color. I do always like
to work organized, but usually what I do
is at the very end, I just go in and I just
clean up my entire graph. Because you never know
if you need to go into it a couple of years
later and at that point, you might end up with the issue that you don't know
what's going on anymore. Now I'm going to go
ahead and create a new folder called Export. And what we can do
is we can click on our floor tiles over here. Right click Export outputs, and our outputs are
those final notes where we direct everything in. Targa file. I like
to turn this on. Basically, what this does is whenever we make a
change in our graph, it will automatically export. So at this point, we can go at an export and save our settings. Awesome. So what we can
do now is we can w way go into over here into
unreal engine. Let's see, do I have? I don't know where I place
this Airport Ayahir. Taxes. Floor tiles. I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to
drag these in here. I will once again
show you how to make the most basic looking material just to quickly drag it on there just so that you have control. So first of all, in
our floor tiles, we need to go ahead and
click on our normal, go down and flip the
green channel in the advanced channel
because remember, we used OpenGL this time. Now, for material, I
will show you how to create a material where you can basically don't need any UVs. So this material,
as you can see, I don't need any UVs. However, I will show
you also how to do it with UVs just in
case you need to. Let's create a new material. I'm just gonna call it
floor tiles for now. And basically, all
you need to do is, of course, start with
dragging in your textures. Let's make this a bit
bigger. We have a normal. We have our roughness. We have a base
color, and we have our ambit occlusion. Here we go. Okay, so way number one, which is with the use of UVs, so that it will use
the UVs that you created on your texture. This is great, of course, if you need specific directions or for walls and
stuff like that. Here, let's amb seclusion. Way that you do that
is you just add a texture coordinate
node over here. And then what you want to
do is you want to multiply this texture coordinate
using a scale parameter. You can get a
scalar parameter by pressing S and then clicking once and call it tiling
and set it to one. Now, this basically, what
it does is it will grab your UVs and it will
tie it once by one. But of course, the general goal about this is because it
is a scalar parameter, which means an
exposed parameter, we are able to
control the tiling. So if we would go ahead
and save this and then right click and turn this into a material instance over here, let's say I go now over here. Not the right example because it's not working
the way I wanted to. Let's just go here.
Let's grab this one. If I drag on my texture, you can now see that
our texture is here. At this point, we
are able to go in here in the instance,
click on tiling. And if we said it's the two,
you can see that now it is properly tiling. So
that was the main one. Now, another one is that we want to go ahead and
have worldspace dialing. The way that we do
that is if we go back into our texture is by creating something called a world align texture.
You can remove this. And basically, what
you need to do is a world align world, aligned. I cannot type texture. And we also need a aligned
normal for the nom map. So with this, we need to
insert a texture object. A texture object is basically
your texture sample, right click and convert
it to a texture object. And then you simply
drag it in here. Now we want to go ahead and
do that for all of them. So we convert them
to texture objects. And then we have here on normal, and then just copy the
world align textures for anything else. Like this. And then the XYZ texture, you can simply
drag that one into your embitoclusion.
This one was roughness. XYZ texture is normal, and XYZ texture is
base color like this. Now what we need to do is we
need to control the tiling. And for that, we just need one scale perimeter,
colored tiling. But remember, what it will
do is it will basically tie your texture over the entire
world, the entire map. So we need to set this really
high to 300 because else, it will be way too large and simply set this
to your texture size. So this is a very
simple way to quickly. There we go. Add some
additional tiling to this. If we now go ahead and go
in here and let's say that we grab our world instance
our Interitecture, and set this to 300 Okay, I don't know what
that circle is. That's really weird, but
let's just see what it does. And we drag it on here. Yeah, okay. That circle
is really weird. I don't know what it
does. Oh, wait, sorry, the circle is because of the
wilding texture. Ignore me. Basically, as you
can see over here, we now have our texture, and we are able to go
in here and we are able to control
the tiling of it. Let's say that we
set this to 350. Now, at this point, what you would want
to do is you might want to go in and balance
your texture a bit. As you can see over here, I find that my roughness
is a bit boring. So I can go in here, set my roughness a
little bit darker. And let's set the grout. Now what we can do is over
here, I can also control and maybe setting the specs to
be a little bit lighter, to be even more shiny and then to add a
little bit more dirt. Now, it will automatically
export these textures. That's nice thing about
it. So I can go in here. I can select these,
right click and re import because it will have
exported automatically. And now you can see that it is a little bit. Let's
try that again. You can see that the roughness is a little bit more shiny. If you want to go ahead and see, you can see a tiny
bit more shine. If you want to go ahead
and you want to have a little bit more control over your roughness
inside the engine, what you can do is you can
go to your floor tiles, and at your roughness note, you can add a power node, track in the base
your roughness, and then another scale
parameter called roughness and set this to one and track that
into the exposure. Doing this basically
allows us to increase the power of our
roughness or decrease it. So if I go ahead and
just play around with this here
instead it to two, you can see that
now our roughness is quite a bit more shiny, see, and it responds
a bit better. I would not rely on this 100%. Here, you can see
0.5, almost nothing. The reason you don't
want to rely on this is because it does not make
your base textures correct. So if you need something quick to quickly balance
it out, use this. However, else, I would keep
going back and forth between your substance file and
your base textures to balance it out until it is at the point where
you want it to be. Now I'm going to leave things
off by just right click, frame and call this dirt mask. And I feel at this point, I gave you a pretty
solid overview on the general concept behind
procedural textures, how to even create a
little procedural texture, and how to set it up
inside of unreal engine. Which means that we have gotten to the point where
we have textures. We covered textures,
we covered models, we covered procedurality, which can essentially create everything that
you see over here. At this point, the next
thing that we need to do is we need to go over on how to actually put it all together inside of in real and
build a little scene. So that is something that we'll go over in the next chapter, and I'm looking
quite forward to it. We'll do some level art, we'll do some
lighting and just get this overall scene over here to look quite
nice and interesting. So let's save your scene, and let's continue with this
in our next chapter.
11. 10 Doing The Level Art For Our Environment Part1: Okay, so we ended our previous chapter with
finalizing our floor texture, and now we have gotten to
the point where I will show you pretty much
the final chapter, not the final chapter,
but the final part, which is actually putting the environment
together in real. So we covered all
of the elements on how to create an asset
along with its textures, how to create modular assets, and how to create
procedural textures, and all of these elements
can be put together. Now, as you can see over this is already quite an
extensive environment. It even goes all the way to the back and to the outside
and stuff like that, and it has, like, all these
interesting elements to it. I will create something
much more simplified. And the reason I'm doing that is because it is very
straightforward. Once I've shown you the general
techniques that we use, it is extremely straightforward
to just add more to it. And this is one of the ways that we can keep this as
a budget environment. So I'll do is I will
actually start probably with just a new level just
to keep it nice and simple. And I'm just going
to go ahead and I'm going to go for a
basic level over here. Just like this.
The reason I like basic is just because
then we can at least use some of the lighting to be able to see
what we're doing. Now, over here, as you can see, the basic scene already
comes with a floor, and that's fine. That's
actually pretty good. I'm going to go
ahead and let's see. I'm going to set the
thickness probably to, like, just one and I will probably, this should already
be fine, actually. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to go my materials instances, and I'm just going
to drag in over here my floor tiles because
they were quite important. And I want to make
sure that my plane is on the center of the grid. So you can see the grid is
exactly on top of the plane. If I move it down, you can see
that the grid is floating, which will just make things
a little bit more annoying. So what we want
to do when we are creating environments
is we want to go from large to small. So over here, we, of course,
now have the large plane. So let's say that
we now start with just mostly other
structural assets, which are walls and all
those type of things. Now, of course, at this point, you would want to
gather a lot of reference on what type
of a design you want. I myself already know what
type of design I want. And I'm going to get
started probably by creating one of those glass
walls that we have over here. So I already showed you this
in the previous chapters. So here we just have
a simple glass wall. I can go ahead and I can set the snapping over here to 100. And it's first of all,
a matter of, like, how long do you want
your room to be. Now, I know that these
glass walls are 4 meters. You can also see it
based on the grid. So I'm just going to
go four, eight, 16. And sometimes what you can do in order to help you figure out roughly how large you
want your scene to be is by already placing some
main elements in there. So, for example, for
our main element, it would be the baggage. What do you call it? Tables, whatever you
want to call it. Sorry, my English is
not very good today. So what I could do is I
could go in here and then interior and we're secure here. So here I have all
my security assets. And also, if you want, if you want to sort
a bit more easily, let's say that you grab
your interior folder, you can go down here and you
can turn on static mesh. And then when you
select it, it will show you all of the
static measures. However, because I created
a very large airport, I just want to go a
little bit more precise. So what did we have? We had an X ray scanner, which was like, Oh, sorry, turn off
snapping at this point. Because if you don't
turn on snapping, it will always try to snap. Anyway, we have
an X ray scanner. And then next to this,
we wanted to have our over here, just
metal detector. Let's give it a little
bit more space, but put it on one line.
No, you know what? No. Let's put it a
little bit further. I think it will look quite nice if it's a
little bit further. Then next to that, we need to have our actual baggage testing. So this is like the main
console where people will test. So let's say that we
put that probably here because you would not
want to have the baggage people to be able to grab
the bag bags on this side. Wow, my English is really
bad, all of a sudden. Sorry about that. And
having that done, we now want to just have
some conveyor belts. And this is mostly the reason why I wanted to do this
first because I want to figure out exactly how long
I want these belts to be. You can always just go up close. Yeah, so it should
kind of transfer over. And even these models over here, they should be
somewhat modular, see? That even them, they are able to basically snap using modularity. So I think two is enough. It's a small airport. So what
I will do is I will do two. One here at the back. And
then what I'm going to do's turn on snapping is I'm
going to have one more here, but I can just drag
in the second table, which is a flat table,
and also one here, which going to be a flat table. So think about the logic when you're creating
an environment. Now, this is an
airport environment. Of course, what you
would want is you would want to be
able to just put your stuff over here on your table and then push
it along, stuff like that. So at this point,
you would also have, for example, here, over here, you would have a bunch of
these internal snapping because else it doesn't work
well, a bunch of these ones. And at this point, you
could even already here, duplicate a few so that you
have a few stacks like this. But of course, we're
going to go for micro details a
little bit later. But anyway, so this is the general length that
we probably want to have. Knowing that, now what we can do is if we go ahead and
grab our windows, and you can always go
your outliner and just select all of the windows
by holding shift. And let's say that this one
is going to be quite close. To the end. Not like close enough that we still
have some spacing between it. I would almost want
to have 1 second. Somewhere here, I have,
what's it called? Those Wow, my English
is so bad today. I'm really sorry. Over here,
there's tape barriers. Yeah, okay, a tricky one. So I'm just going to go
ahead and grab this one. Going to duplicate it. And what you can then do is when
you duplicate the mesh, you can instantly drag on
another asset to replace it. So now you can see that
I very often do this. I duplicate the mesh, and I instantly replace it with the mesh I want next,
which is this one. So knowing this, we can now go ahead and grab
this piece and move it out. This is probably
where we want to have our scaling, something
in this direction. So as you can see, what
we keep doing is we keep using other elements
of the environment in order to basically figure
out the scale that we want. So at this point, we
know that over here, we have the scale, and now we would probably
say, like, Okay, I need maybe one more window or maybe even turn
it into a wall at this point in order to give
some more space for people to actually walk around so that
they because in an airport, they would never just walk into the door and instantly be here. So let's say that I want
to turn this into a wall. At this point, I can go back to my structural and interior. Okay? So turning this
basically into a final wall, what we can do is we can
simply duplicate this mesh. And if we go into the interior folder
and apply this mesh, as you can see, of course,
the mesh is different. The reason it's
different is because the Pivot point placement
is slightly different, and, of course,
well, the height. But anyway, that doesn't matter because what
we're going to do is we are basically having
it go around the corner. So let's grab this mesh.
Duplicate it again. And this time,
let's go ahead and grab a corner piece over here. Now, a nice thing that you can
do in real is that you can flip your pieces by just putting a minus
next to the scale. So here you can see that now we are instantly flipped around, and at this point, we can go in and I'm just going to
turn off my snapping. And I want to place this at a nice position where it's just touching
the rest of my wall. There we go. And also push it out a little bit more,
probably something like this. And at this point, you can
also go in and if you want, extend this wall
out to the outside. Of course, we are not going to actually create an outside, but here you can
see that I can just extend it out maybe twice, and then let's say that
I then duplicate it again and just drag in
my corner again on here. So it's the minus one
again to basically go around the corner
to the point where you will no longer
be able to see it. So yeah, basically, whenever you are creating all
of these structural assets, the act of just being able
to flip things around and to just drag in new meshes
is your biggest friend. So let's say that we probably go around this point.
I think that's enough. Now at this point, I'm going
to go ahead and I'm going to duplicate this also
over to the other side. And once again, we
do need to grab this, drag in a corner. Let's select these
three and just scare fully move them in. There we go. And as I said before, at this
point, you can also go in. Yeah, let's grab this
one, push it in. And thanks to the
modularity of everything, we can very quickly and
easily build an entire room. So that's pretty much
it for this end. If you want to later
on, of course, make something interesting on the outside, feel free to do so. I myself am not going to. What we will do is
we will just go ahead and continue
with the design. So over here, we can
also snap it here, but as you can see,
what will happen is that you will have
an empty corner here. This is not very good
because with lumen, this might cause some issues. So I'm just going to
turn off snapping, and I'm going to push
this out because it does not snap
based on the grid, it snaps based on the
pivotint position. So what I can do is I can
go in here and let's say, I want to now define
the center of the room. Yeah, I would say if I
do this, and now here, there will need to be a door. So what I'm going to do
is I'm going to drag in once again my corner piece. And in this case, I actually want to grab
this corner piece, and I instantly want
to just flip it around also. Like that. Then maybe turn it back into a wall just in case
if you can see it. And this will just become
like an empty hallway for me. In our case, here, it's
just going to end here. That's pretty much it.
And what we also want to do is we also want to
now drag in our door. If we just go ahead
and click on props, turn on the static mesh filter, and type in door because I know if we turn off snapping that I have
this doorway over here. That we can use. So
let's just zoom in, and you want to make
sure that you just nicely place it against. This is also
something to keep in mind that when you are
creating things like doorways, keep in mind the thickness so
that you have some spacing, if you have any type
of floor trims over here to add some
of that spacing. I think that's pretty good. I'm going to go ahead and
I'm probably going to select all of these,
duplicate them. Rotate them. A,
sadly, they moved. Let's see if turning on snapping
can fix it. Ah, perfect. So they moved at
a very even pace. And now what we can do is we can also push this out over here. Just going to go ahead and
carefully move this in. There we go. Yeah, that
should do the trick. And for this one, at this point, I probably want to make
the room a bit bigger. So what I will do is I will duplicate this, rotate it here. Probably move it somewhere at this point because I don't
want to make it too big, also. Turn on my grid snapping
duplicate this again, and I want to actually
know what I'm going to do. I'm going to replace
it with this one. Let's delete this. I want to replace it with the
one with the door. Where are you? This one here. I'm gonna rotate this 180. Yeah, there we go. It
feels a bit better. So we just have a
piece with the door. Now what we can do is we can
once again duplicate it, turn on the corner piece. Oh, I need to just
set this to one. No it. I need to rotate
this, snap it back. I'm confused which way
I need to rotate this, to be honest. This way? Hmm. Did I find a spot in which the modular asset is not exactly working?
That's interesting. I'm going to go ahead and
I'm going to replace or add a plane wall over here
because technically, here, we don't want to have
this plain wall flipped. Ah, that's the problem.
We flipped the walls. I do not want to do that
because the walls are a little bit more sensitive
to this type of organization. So this should do the trick. So we flipped it back. And now, if we add
a corner piece, minus one, there we go, see. So that was a bit confusing. Anyway, we have this one. I'm once again going to
duplicate this wall, turn it into flat wall. And I like to make
a little corner. Because often having
purely like flat, I should say, yeah, pretty much having
100% square rooms, not flat rooms, square
rooms is quite boring. So often just adding
a little bit of some additional elements
to it can be quite nice. I'm going to go ahead
and I am going to close this off because
there is a door here. So I'm just going to
close off this room. And what I will also do
since I'm here is I'm going to close of this end somewhere
here, that should be fine. It's made in a way
that you should probably not be able
to see the end. Now, of course, it
depends like here, see? I cannot really see the ends of the hallways, so
that should be fine. And I can also just extend these out just
to close this off. There we go. Because we do want to sort of like
close things off nicely like that. So, cool. Now, what we're going to
do is we are going to finish off this room, which should be quite
quick because all we need to do is we just need to
duplicate this, and over here, we need to also start because I need to know at which
point we will end. If I just, I'm going to
do this nicely by moving this like this and
you know what? I'm also going to do a
bit of a reuse, actually. I'm going to No, not these ones. I'm going to grab these
ones along with the doors. Although it would be nice
to already place the doors, but let's just do that later because then I don't have
to place the doors twice. Let's just grab this
element over here. And move it somewhere here. I think that should
be fine already. Yeah, that should be fine. And over here, I'm
just going to go ahead. Extend these out also. Okay. Awesome. Cool. So that already gives some
of the elements. Now, we, of course, also want to go ahead
and create a ceiling, and I'm going to show
you a few tricks. So first of all, let's go in. And extend these out,
and then we will probably end the ceiling
piece somewhere over here. Another thing is that over
here we have this empty door. And what I would
want to do is I want to fill it up with something. Now, what you can
sometimes do if you're a bit lazy like me, is you can just grab a
floor mesh wall mesh, rotate it 180. And then kind of just
like place it in here and place it up. It depends how you
need the environment. If you need to be
able to also see the end of or the outside
of the environment, then of course, you want to make sure that it's a
little bit cleaner. But if not, We can
just kind of do this. I even have a lower version. Here we go to make it a
little bit nicer even. And the general idea is that once we have our ceiling pieces, you won't be able to
really see any of this because you are only
looking on the inside, like we are just creating
an interior environment. So sealing pieces, that
will be the next one. I need to have a
look. So here we have because I have a bunch
of office ceiling pieces, and I'm going to go for probably just like a nice basic one. Let's see. Is this the one?
Kind of looks like it, but I just want to go to
assets and type in ceiling. Or Roof. Okay, so I
guess it is all in here. So we will go for probably just this version over here
to keep it nice and simple. Gonna rotate this 180. Although funny enough, it
looks like it will work. Oh, no, sorry, we don't
want to rotate this. The top is actually fake. The end is the good one because it has some actual
extrusions in here. And what we want to do
is we want to go ahead and place it in a nice position. I want to just go ahead
and already measure it out because I want to make sure that it ends at a good
place for my window. So what I'm going to
do is I'm going to go here and I'm going to improve that end a little bit more or I can improve it a little
bit more later on. For now, however, let's just go ahead and
place this piece. Let's see, let's
place the ceiling, first piece over here. And it's okay to extend
it out a little bit more, but I do want to kind of make sure that here
we have a nice ending. And what you can do at
this point is quite easy. First, create one row, and then I'm going to show you
how we can use grouping to our advantage. So here we go. We have one row. Now what
we can do is we can select this one row and press
Control G to group it. And once it is
grouped, you can go in and just instantly and it will just select
everything a bit easier. So we can also
select, of course, multiple, and very quickly, we can fill up this space. Until everything is turned off. And as you can see,
now all of a sudden, we have a pretty nice
looking interior. Now, at this point, if you
want to ungroup something, you can press,
what was it CtraG? No, Shift G, sorry,
to ungroup it. And then we can just go ahead
and extend this out over here. Maybe also a bit here. And at this point, you
can barely see it. And often, if you really
cannot see an element, I tend to just cheat
a bit and here. I just basically overlap
it just so that we can at least see the parts
that we need to see. It might sometimes
cast some flickering. So it's up to you if you feel like the flickering is too bad, another twig that you can
do is you can select it. And for example, if you
just go in and just give the tiniest bit of
like a movement, it will stop the flickering. But in my case, the
movement is too much. I should technically just
do it using these values. But as you can see here, there's pretty much nothing
to see anymore. We can go in and let's
do ChevG and also this one, duplicate, duplicate. And, of course, I'm doing
this very very quick. You guys might want to spend
a little bit more time, or I highly recommend that you spend a
little bit more time. I'm just creating a quick, simple environment over here. Okay, Awson. So we have these
door elements over here. What I'm going to do is
I'm going to for now, let's see, not extend this one. I'm going to grab a normal wall, and I'm going to turn this
into, like, a long hallway. Oh, make sure to
turn on snapping. Yeah, the most important
thing was to show you how to do how to quickly create a structure that is still looking correct and everything is working
well, all that stuff. There we go. And at this point, what I can do is I
can just create two. Rotate one, move it in a bit. And move it along here. And over here, what you can always do is
you can always just get a quick corner minus one. And if you want, you can close off this hallway. Of course, in my real airport, this hallway goes to
the entrance terminal. But that's all up to
you. There we go. And once again, we can select this element, extend it out. And if you want, you
can then select them and you can press Shivji and just delete the parts
that you don't need. As you can see, we
only spent, what, 16 or not 16 a bit more, like 30 minutes or
something on this. And we now have a pretty
solid entrance over here. So, of course, the lighting
is just completely blown out, and the reason for that is just because there is no real
lighting or thing in here. It's just not properly set up. However, something I want to do is I now want to go in and I want to select all of these office ceilings and because they all
have the same name, it's very easy for
me to do that. Create one big group Contra G
so that I can then hide it. So now I just have a little
bit more space over here to look at things
and work it all out. So what we're going to do
is in the next chapter, we are going to start with
medium and small details, finalizing the doors, placing some of these
security checkers and some other
stuff in there just to get a general environment, good enough so that we can start doing some proper
lighting on there. So let's go ahead and continue with this
in our next chapter.
12. 11 Doing The Level Art For Our Environment Part2: Okay, so we're now going to focus more on
the medium assets. Now, whenever you have
a large room like this, one of the things
that I always like to art is some type of
structural elements, in this case,
pillars, because it always feels a bit off when
you have such a large room. And yes, it is
possible, of course, to make rooms this large
without any structural pillars, but the pillars are
visual interest. So I should have
a bunch of them. I should have, like,
round ones over here. But I also have, if I
believe I'm right here, like the square ones
that have some wood. The square ones are the
original ones that I used over for this area, so that might be the best ones. And I want to also go
ahead and press contro H. Oh, okay, so I don't. Hm, shall I move
my ceiling lower or make the pillars
a little bit higher. I think I want to make
the pills a little bit higher because I think that
will look a bit better. Now, cool trick that we can do, and this is only Unngin five is, let's say that we have
this pillar and we just want to make a very
quick variation. We could go inside of
three a Max and edit it. But if you want to
do it very quick, you can go here to
your modeling tools. If you don't have them,
just go to Edit, plug ins. Type in modeling tools
and turn them on because they are
in beta version, so they might not
always be turned on. And then what you can
do is you can go to your let's go down
here to attributes, and we need to
generate poly groups. Generating polygroups allows
us to edit the model. Find quads. Yeah, let's do find quads and
just press Accept. And now what we can
do is we can go ahead and we can
go, first of all, to our XFm and duplicate
the mesh. Super important. If you do not
duplicate your mesh, um, underscore high in name. What will happen is it will
replace your original mesh. So if you have it
placed anywhere else, it will completely mess
everything up. So do not forget. Now that I've
duplicated my mesh, I can go to my model and edit
polygroups, select the top. And because it's not
that much higher, I'm just going to go
ahead and do this. And here, you won't really
notice it on the UVs. So we are pretty much in
the clear in that point. I'm going to go
ahead and press H to height and I'm
going to decide where I want to have these
pillars. Now let's see. Let's first of all,
turn on my snapping, have one pillar maybe
here and one here. Pillars are often on a very similar
positioning because they would be attached to metal
beams inside of the roof. So having these pillars on
these similar positions over here will make more sense. It's four enough. I think
for now four is enough. I'm going to press
Contra H because what I would like to do
is I would like to match these pillars. You know, it's like both of
them somewhat with our roof. So I'm just going to
move this one in just because it looks a
bit nicer compared to when it's on actual
structural line of another asset that always
feels a bit off to me. I want to go to this side here, once again, keep it a
bit more even and here. There we go. So that's already
some structural assets. Now what we can do is,
let's say, over here, I'm going to slack my door, and at this point, I am
going to move a bit faster. Once I've done some
of the big elements, what I will do is I will most likely turn on the time naps to just do some
additional level art that you can still
see how I handle it, but not that we waste a
huge amount of time on it. Oh, so I need to rotate
this other way around. And what I probably want to
do is I actually want to move these ones out like this. You see, you can see that we have support for the railing. Let's do minus one. There we go. And then these
doors, if you want, you can even have them slightly open, something like that. Up to you, I'm going to
go ahead and I'm going to Are deleted that
door. That's good. I'm going to select this
topiece door and these doors. And at this point, yeah, it's
pretty much his placement. So I'm going to mostly just
do some measuring out. And after that is done, we can just start
by populating it. Just give me a second to, like, carefully
move this in here. Okay. For some reason,
I'm missing a door. I guess I just forgot to. It, but you know what? I'm
going to make these doors. So if they're closed,
there we go. Okay, cool. So we have these large
elements over here. Now, next thing would be
the medium size elements, and over here, you can
once again use grouping. So let's say that this is all going to be
pretty much the same. Maybe over here, it would
have a where are you? This little keyboard. But that's like small deta, but because we are grouping it, I want to kind of keep it on. You can go up here
and you can switch your pivot point between
world and local, which allows you to do some
local movement over here, which might be easy when you
need to rotate something. So what I can do is
I can go ahead and select all these
pieces over here, and I can press Control, not Control H. Control
G to group it. And this way, we can very
quickly work on this. So let's say that I do
something like this. Yeah, let's do two points away. Maybe another maybe
space for one more. Yeah, there we go. So nice
and easy at this point. And what you can also
do is if you can maybe create a little barrier
that goes from here. And I have also
individual lines, so I can switch this to
a barrier like this, duplicate it, throw in one of these and then
duplicate this one. There we go. Just
some storytelling because it's security. You would not want someone
to just quickly be able to walk past it in ways
you don't expect. Oh there we go. Awesome. So now we already
have some pop lating in there. And with these pieces, we
can also go in and let's say that we want to have
some type of a waiting line. At those points, you can also go in and if we just
grab, let's say, this one, how would this
waiting line look like? I feel we would
just need to give a bunch of space to people. So let's say we grab
something like this, and these ones are also modular. Yeah. You know what? Let's do
this. Let's grab one here. Now, these are modular, but not on the 1 meter scale. And grab a piece here. Let's move it a bit. And let's say we can also pick
those up over here. And at this point,
we can rotate this. And this one, we can just
continue on to the end. And now what we can
do is over here, we can just start
building out like a zigzag patron as some
type of structure there. Now, I would say
that at this point, it's honestly just going to
be about me placing assets, placing larger and
smaller details. So what I will do
is I will go in and I will kick in the time
labs where you will see me just like design a
very basic version of this level just to get something interesting for our lighting. So let's go ahead and kick in the time laps and
continue with this. No
13. 12 Lighting, Post Effects And Final Polish: Okay, so I have now finished a pretty basic but still nice
looking environment layout, as you can see over here. Of course, there's a lot
more room for, like, micro details and a
lot of other stuff. However, what I want
to do now is I want to go over lighting and over colors and then also
over some final polish. Now, when it comes to lighting,
we have two versions. We have the exterior and
the interior lighting. So let's get started with
just the exterior lighting. For this, the first thing
I'm going to do is, as you can see over here, I have this plane, which is white. But because it is outside, it actually blows things out
of proportions quite a bit. So what I'm going
to do is I'm just going to go ahead and
I'm going to create a quick probably just like a
normal plane because I should have a very basic tarmac material that
we can use for this. So let's move this here, and be I think I called it asphalt. I just need to make
sure if it is, good. It's world space, which I already showed you
what that means. What I will do is I
will go ahead and probably move this
a bit over here. I still want to keep
some thickness. So as you can see, over here, I'm just basically creating
a pretty large plane. To cover the outside
because I'm not going to create the outside,
but you can still cover it. If I want, I can even go
in here and I can type in plane, for example. And then there should be
take this one pretty much. I I scale this down, and this can just kind of fill
in some of the space. Actually, just having one, a bit to the site over here. I believe there was even
control over here on, there we go to get a
different texture. And just that from
the outside here. See? That's pretty
much all we're going to do in this
specific case. This plane I just
downloaded from the inal marketplace,
by the way. So, okay, our interior lighting. Now, we already
have a basic setup over here where we have
our volumetric clouds, our sky atmosphere,
and our skylight. Just to keep the lighting very
basic, I'm fine with that. Like, that's no issue to me. However, I do want to go ahead and work on my
directional light, and I also want to go ahead
and work on my post effects. So first of all, for
my directional light, the first thing that we want
to do is we want to kind of figure out a nice
lighting angle. And for that, I
feel like an angle where the sun is
shining through. This entire scene
will look quite nice. So I'm going to turn off
my snap rotation and see. The nice thing about
the sky atmosphere is that it will automatically
when the sun is lower, already work with the
color of a light. We can, of course,
change that later on. But let's for now
go for something that's quite nice and drastic, maybe go a little bit more. I'm just trying to figure out from the side or
something like that. Y. Maybe a little bit
from the side like this, and then we can cover some more interior
lighting for the rest. So as you can see
this very quickly already gives us something
quite interesting. I would say that over
here, I have an emissive. Here, let's go ahead
and what you can do is if you want to keep
something as a group, but you want to select
an individual asset, you can go to settings and turn off allow group selection,
and now we can select it. I'm just going to go
in this material, and I have here like
an emissive map, which I'm going to set way lower because it's not
looking very good. Maybe if I do zero, maybe 0.1, 0.01. There we go. Just to give it the tiniest
bit of like a globe, but nothing too special. Okay. Sorry for the quick cut. Sadly, during saving my
unweel engine crashed. Anyway, I just lowered the MSF, and that's
where we left off. So at this point, what I want to do is what
you can also do from the outside is over
here, as you can see, we use the plane
basically to sculpt some interesting shadows
also in our scene. So first of all, I'm
just going to work on getting some
interesting lighting. And using the
defaults of a wheel, you can already get
very quick lighting. We have an entire
course about lighting, so I do recommend if
you want to have much more complicated and in
depth knowledge of lighting, that you would
follow that course. But in general, as you
can see over here, we are able to use
planes to capture some interesting shadows and to already get some nice
looking lighting very quick. I would want probably Hmm. I'm not too big of a fan, to be honest of this lighting, so I'm just going to go ahead
and not use this plane. Yeah, I think this
is already enough. Also, it's really
nice that we have these quite thick
frames over here, which will also introduce some additional nice
looking lighting. So I would say that that's
already pretty good for, like, the exterior lighting
coming to the interior. However, we will go
ahead and we will work on some post effects later on. The next thing I want
to show you is I want to show you some
more interior lighting. So whenever you do
interior lighting, it always starts with a simple
if I just navigate to it. It, of course, starts
with a simple model. Now, this is an
office environment. So what type of interior
lighting would be good? That would probably be
just like an office lamp. I have one here in a blueprint that I will show you in a bit. So here you can see that we
have a lamp that is set up. And now, if I go
ahead and go into it, you can see the setup. So I won't go over
this because it's a little bit more complicated. But basically, what we do is
we have a light over here, which is just a simple
model with an emissive. And what we have is we
have a rectangular light. Now, I do expect that you know the basics of unreal engine, but a rectangular light,
you can even audit yourself by going
down here, lights. And here you have a
rectangular light. It's basically just a light that we can use and we can
have various settings on it. Now, if we go ahead and go into our construction
graph over here, what I'm basically doing is I have my construction
graph and use the set visibility to be able to turn on
and off this light. If I click on it,
you can see over here that the light
can be on and off. Right now, I seem to still
have some emissive problems, which I will fix in just a bit. After that, we also are setting our light intensity using the set intensity
node over here. As I said before, I'm not going to go over
blueprints, but basically, what I want to convey in this is that setting up light
lights in blueprints, which allow you to basically
change in this case, just the intensity and change if the lights are on or
off is very beneficial because it allows you to
very quickly just place lights like this and be able
to turn them on and off. Now, I have no idea
why the emissive is being so blown out over here. It might be because we don't
have to correct post effect. So what I'm going to
do is I'm going to go ahead and save my scene, and I'm going to add a
post effects first to basically minimize the amount of emissive strength
that we have. If we go up here to visual effects and
post process volume, the first thing that
you want to do with the post process volume
and post processing is basically adding effects after all of the rendering
on top of your camera. This is things like
bloom, exposure, color grading, some controls for lumen and a bunch of stuff. First thing is go all the way down and turn on
infinite extent. When you do this, what
will happen is that the post effect will
always be active no matter where you are in
your scene or environment. I like to go to my bloom, and I always like
to go ahead and set the method to convolution, which is a little
bit more accurate. However, it's also very
expensive to render. So it's more for final
screenshots and stuff like that. Now, in here, I'm also able to play around
with my exposure. And for your exposure, if you have a scene where you
go from outside to inside, it might require a
little bit more work. However, if you just
have an interior scene, what's often easy is to just set there min and max
to one like this, and then to play around with your exposure compensation to basically control
how much exposure you want everywhere
in the scene. You can see over here,
because what we are after is just after getting quite a nice looking environment for some portfolio
pictures, for example. Now, next thing that I'm
going to do is over here, I have my office ceiling light. I'm going to go in, and I'm
not entirely sure why it is being so intense with the emissive because that should have the exposure
should have fixed that. So I'm just going
to go in here and probably set the emissive lower. Um, 0.1, probably. Let's hope it doesn't crash
this time. Yeah, it does not. Okay, awesome. Now, when
it comes to blueprints, you are always able to also
edit the original light. As you can see over here, here's the original
rectangular light. And I can see over here
using this line over here, the radius of my light. If I want to change that,
I can always go in, see, and lower the radius. Let's say I set it to
somewhere over here. Another thing that I'm going
to do is I'm going to go to my original blueprint and
set my intensity way lower. See, that's sends to here. So I feel like our intensity
was just blown out, and that might be
because we have slightly different
lighting settings in the original airport, but that's not what
we're after right now. I'm after just giving you a quick overview on how to
get some decent lighting. So what I can do is I can go in here and I can increase
the lighting radius. I can also go ahead
and work on the color. In which case, I
always like to use temperature and not
the light color. Temperature basically
controls how white or yellowish
your color is here. Lower down the temperature, you can see it
becomes very yellow, and if I set it higher,
it becomes very white. I know that's a very
basic explanation, but what I'm going
through is I'm going to start with 5,500, and I think that
works quite well. Okay, so at this point,
let's say that we have a light that is
working quite well. Now what we can do is we
can populate our scene. Oh, I need to make sure that I select the actual blueprint
and not just the light. When populating our
scene, as you can see, it will just move
these lights around. However, adding a lot of lights to your scene will
become quite expensive. So you are able to, for example,
turn on and off lights. Something that you should
keep an eye out is, let's say that I have these
three lights over here. And what I'm going to do
is I'm just going to go ahead and I am going
to place them, also in the areas
where technically right now I don't
need any light. You won't even be able
to see these lights because the sunlight
is overpowering them. But what I want to do is I
want to show you something. Let me just place some more
lights. Let's see over here. In this case, I'm going
to place one more in the center and then another
one here at the end. May move this one over here. Okay, so now as you can see, if you have a powerful pasen PC, so not much will happen only that there's a
lot of light here. However, if I would
go to my It section, optimization viewpot
and light complexity, here, what you can
see is you can see how complex our lighting is. If it goes in the
direction of red, purple and white,
that is very bad. Over here, you can
see because we have so many lights that we
have some areas where the lights are
overlapping and they basically end up becoming red, which I would like to avoid. I would like to keep it roughly
in this area where it's maybe sometimes um light yellow, orange, but that's about it. Now, what you will
notice is that, for example, these
lights over here, we know that our scene does not need these lights because of
the intensity of the sun. So if I would go ahead
and set these lights and then simply turn
them off over here, you can see that now this area becomes much more optimized. But if we go into our scene, you also notice that you don't really notice that
the lights are off. Like, here they are
on. Here they are off. Yes, there is some additional
reflections going on, but they are actually
not that nice. I would even argue
that the lights are too strong at that point. Speaking about too strong, I would argue that even
these ones over here, if I just select
all three of them, I set my lighting
intensity probably to like two or maybe even one. Because there is so much light
going on from the outside, it wouldn't make sense
for interior lights to have such a strong
effect, basically. Now, another thing
that you can do, if I just go ahead and set
these probably to two is, is you can also
control how much of the light from the outside
bounces around on the inside. You do this by selecting
your directional light, and down here, you can go to the indirect light intensity. If I would set this
really high to like ten, you can see that over here, the light basically
bounces around so much in the room that
everything blows up. Not what we want, but you can see that here
if I go from one, and let's say I
said this to two, you can see that now
the entire environment, it just takes in a little bit more of
that exterior light. And it's up to you to
find out what you want. Let's say 1.5, for example, is what I want because I don't want to blow
it out too much. Now, at this point,
we have our lighting. Let's go ahead and just
continue with our post effect, and I will show you a few
little tricks for that. What I want to do is I
want to go in and well, first of all, let's
save my scene. Post process volume.
Let's just type it in. I will clean up my
scene later on. So, okay, with our
post process volume, there's a few settings
that we can control, but the ones that
we're only really interested in is if we go
into our image effects. Over here, we can
control the vignetting, if you want to give it a little
bit more darker corners. And you can also control the sharpening, as you
can see over here, which can make our vim just
feel a little bit sharper. I'm going to set this
one, for example, to 0.5. Now if we go down, we
have our color grading. In our color grading, there's a few things
that we can do. One, we can over wit
the temperature. So if you go to
temperature over here, you can, for example, balance out the temperature. However, I recommend not using this too much because as
you can see over here, it is just adding a
temperature on top, which means that it doesn't actually get rid of the
original temperature, which makes it quite difficult for unreal to balance it out. I'm just going to go
ahead and leave that. But we can also control
global settings, our shadows, our mid tones, highlights, all that stuff. So let's say that I go to
global and I play with my gain. You can see over here, I can
make my scene a little bit lighter or a little bit
darker next to the exposure. Now, where would I use this for? I would often use this by
going into my shadows. And in here, I can control, setting my shadows, for example, to be a little bit darker. Let's say that I
set this to 0.85. It is quite subtle, and let's say that I also
want to go in and I want to make my shadows
a little bit more Blue. Is there a good way
where I can show it? I think in the gain, it doesn't look very good.
Let's go to Gamma. I guess our sunlight. Here you can kind of see
it. See how making a blue, it can often give like a
bit of a cinematic effect, but we want to make that
super, super subtle. But of course, we have
a very sunny scene, and the sunny scene makes
it quite blown out. Now, why would you want to
art a little bit of blue in your shadows? It
kind of depends. It is more for exterior scenes because in exterior scenes, there's always a little bit of the bounce light
from the sky, which is often blue that
goes into your shadows. Your shadows are
rarely actually black. They are often like Wi Willy
dark blue, in that sense. In my case, I also
just like a little bit more of the cinematic
feel to it. But anyway, so over here, you can also play around with your midtones and
your highlights. Let's say that you
want to, for example, boost your highlights a
little bit over here, see? That might look nice to
set this maybe to 1.2, just to boost it a little bit. And you can just play
around with the settings. It's quite similar to,
for example, Photoshop. Now next we have over here our global ilumation
and reflections. The first thing I like to do
is I like to always go in reflections and in my
luminar reflections, I like to turn on high quality
translucency reflections, which will give us some
higher quality reflections in our windows over here. Now, next to that, what
we can also do is we can, if we want, set the
quality a bit higher. This will be good if you have an environment that has
a lot of reflections, but always remember that
higher quality also means that it is a little bit
more intense to render. Kind of keep that one. It's a little bit more
intense to render. So, in turn, yes, you
get a high quality, but it will also be a
little bit more difficult. Or for your FPS to maintain
higher FPS levels. I was a really weird
way of saying that. Next, we have our lumen
global alimation. In here, we can also
set our scene quality. What I tend to do is I tend to if I make just like an image, I tend to just set the
quality quite high. The lumen scene
view distance and trace distance,
this will increase, again, the performance or
decrease the performance, but if you set this higher, it basically renders
lumen for further. So if you have a really
large environment, just keep that in
mind that you can set those settings higher to basically be able
to still see all of the global illimation
in the far distance. Okay, so next to
that, I would say that there isn't really that much that we
need to work with. One nice thing that we can
do to give it a bit more of a cinematic feel is we can
add some film grain, sorry. So adding some film grain you add it if you increase
it over here. What you can see, I
said, it really strong, is that it gives us just like that I wouldn't say that
it's for old cameras, but more just like
the slight bit of grain that you can often
see in cinematic movies. If I set this to, for example, let's say, let's set it to one, but I meant to probably set my grain less strong in my highlights over here
and probably in my midtones. What that will do is basically, it will increase the grain
whenever there are shadows. Like over here, you can see
that the grain is stronger. But then as soon as
I go into my light, the grain will be less strong. This to me feels a little
bit more logical because the light would not be able
to show the grain as much. At this point, you
can also by the way, control how large you
want the grain to be. Gonna probably set this to 1.1 to make it slightly larger. And I want to set my final
film grade to maybe like 0.5. Just to give it a
little bit maybe 0.7, just to give it a little
bit more of like this, cinematic feel to
it, which to me, often makes it feel a
little bit more realistic. Okay, so let's say acne. And let's say that now we have covered how to do
interior lighting, exterior lighting, and how
to go over post effects. As you can see, you
can very quickly get some really interesting looking lighting using just the default. Once again, this is such an enormous topic within game development and just environment art and
everything like that. Which is why I highly recommend when you get a little
bit more advanced to go into our courses and
to go for where are you? The ultimate lighting course, because it will go over
every single thing that has to do with
lighting in wheel. It's done by an amazing tutor, who is the lighting arch
director of the Star Wars games. So, honestly, I highly
recommend following that one. I will also later on, give you a little
bit more information on which courses would be good
to follow after this one. In any case, let's
say that now we have over here our scene and we have some
decent lighting. Let's say that now
what we want to do is we want to create
some final renders. For that, what you would
want to do is you want to start by creating a
cinematic camera. You go down here, create
camera and cynicamera actor. Now, why would we
want a Cygamera actor just because we have a bit
more settings in here? If we go ahead and go in the actor and scroll all the way up, there's a few controls
that we have, but the main ones
that you want to work on is that over here, we can control, the lens,
sorry, the lens settings. And we can say which lens. Say, if we want to go
for, like, a close up, we would want to go for
50 milliliter lens. But if we want to
go from a distance, we would want to go for
30 or even 12 like this. You can also go in
here and set it to custom why is it not working? Custom. And you can set this to, for example, let's say,
25 millimeters like this. Now, this scene, I never
like the look of 16 by nine. So what I like to do is
I often like to cut it. I can do that by going
into my crop settings over here and setting this
to crop two by 39. As you can see this will
instantly give you more of this cinematic feeling to it. So at this point, what
I would usually do, let's say that we have a
like a scene overview. I would probably
set that to maybe, let's say, 18,
something like that. So this is just like a
nice scene overview, I can choose where I
want. The scene to be. Let's say that more
like from an angle, something like
this, for example. Now, let's say that
you also want to go ahead and create
some close ups of, like, whatever you
did of the scene. What you would
then do is I would just duplicate my camera actor. And for close ups,
I would always set my millimeter to be quite a bit higher. So, for example, 50. If I set this to 50 and let's say that I
make a close up of, let's see, something
interesting, first of all, what I want to do is I want to just
select this one. Give me 1 second. Let's say that the close up
is going to be of, like, but this part over here. I go to throw in an
extra back in here just to make it a little bit
more visually interesting. Now, as you might notice, what is happening is that
everything is very blurry. What you need to do is you
need to go into your camera. And then over here in
your focus settings, you need to grab the
manual focus distance and set it where you
want your focus to be. For example, I want my
focus to be on this back, but not on the
background over here. As you can see,
this will give you a realistic depth of field. Now, at this point, it will
keep the focus distance, not so much on the back,
but just on this distance. So if I go ahead, the set
this here, here, see, if I set it to the
back, it will, for example, put
the focus more on the back and less on
the front over here. Let's say that now, for example, we have a close up,
have a close up, sorry. And like this, you
are able to just switch back and forth
between your cameras. So at this point, you would
probably want to say, Okay, let's go ahead and start
by creating some images. I recommend that
you, of course, set a few more camera angles. I will, for example,
do another one. It's, for example, like this, maybe give it some symmetry
by having the door in here or you can go in and you can make it a bit
higher, whatever you want. Or maybe make it like here. It's all up to you. Of course, you guys don't have this scene, so that's why I'm not going
to focus on it too much. But let's say that,
okay, you are now ready. You have your camera angles
that you want to create. Next thing that you would
want to do is you want to create some high quality images. To do this, you go to the
camera angle that you want. Now, something very
important is that you need to press G to basically go into game mode so that you don't have any of these
icons because these icons, they will show up
in your redder. So I press G. And now what
I want to do is I want to go ahead and I want to go to my high resolution
screenshot. Over here, sets, for
example, the two. The higher you set
it, the stronger your PC needs to be in
order to handle this, and you simply press capture. Now, if you quickly click
on this link over here, what you can see is
that it will have captured the image. Load it up. There we go. So now we have a nice high resolution
capture of image. Something that you might often
notice is that the grain is a little bit too strong sometimes on the actual capture. This is because
when it captures, the scene freezes a little bit, and then the grain becomes
a bit overpowered. So in that case,
you want to go to your post effect volume and set this quite a
bit lower to like 0.3. And I'm also going to set the
textil size a bit smaller. Now you can go ahead and try
to create another image. And if I can navigate to
it, give me a second. Here. Now you can see that the grain
is a little bit smaller. Don't worry. There are
some issues over here, and I will show you how
to fix those later. So we now have a high
resolution screenshot. What I would often
do just to make it feel even more cinematic is
I would go into Photoshop. Here we go and go ahead
and create a new scene, and I often like to go
for a resolution that is 2560 by 14 40. Don't know why didn't
type 2560 by 14 40. And I like to set my background over here to black
and press Create. Now, with the scene,
all you need to do is you need to
drag in your image, and it should drag in on the center over here,
as you can see, which is good
because now you can see that we have these
little black bars, and saving an image like this, just with these
little black bars, it instantly makes it
look more interesting. Now, personally, of course, we have a company. So what we would do is
we would also place our logo down here. I'm just going to very quickly
navigate to one to give you an example on what I mean. So give me 1 second. Well, Here we go. So here you can see an
example on the airport scene, and you can see that we
have quite a large image. We have the black pass
and then we place the logo in the bottom,
which works really well. And as you can see, this
airport scene, of course, has gotten a lot
more work into it, like more than 1,000 thousands of hours
probably at this point, across multiple artists, most
of it creating the assets, but also doing all
the level art. And as you can see, with the techniques that
I've shown you, you can theoretically
make something like this. It will take you a very long time if you're an individual, so I would highly recommend going for something
much more smaller. But here you can see this was our final post apocalyptic type or abandoned type security hull, as you can see over here. You can see how once again, I played with the camera angles, I played with the grain, as you can see over here
and the close ups and stuff like that to get a
quite interesting look. We have this across a
bunch of different images. So at this point, let me just check my note. What I want to do is I
just want to show you how to fix some common issues. So one of the most common issues that you already see
is that over here, sadly, we still have some
light bleeding from distance. Remember how I was saying
that we should push this out. Sometimes even pushing it
out just isn't enough. However, if you are
creating an interior scene, and this is just a
limitation of lumen, if you are creating
an interior scene, what you can do is you can basically use your
modeling tools over here. To create a quick
box, press except. Let's go to our model,
poly group did. And in here, we are able
to what I like to call a What do I like Light blocker? That's what I like
to call it. Sorry, I forgot how I like to call it. Basically, what the
light blocker is is it is a shell around
your environment, which is quite thick,
as you can see here, I made it almost a meter, and you can press the extrude, for example, extrude this out. And using this tick shell, it basically blocks any unwanted light from
shining through. So if I would go ahead
and, for example, here, apply this in here, what I'm going to do is
I'm going to This can be very messy geometry because it's geometry that
you will not see. So here, if I just add
an edge, and once again, for the moding tools,
I recommend that you just watch some
introduction videos. It's not something that
I'm going to go over. But what I can do is
I can go ahead and let's say extrude
this because I want to extrude this that it does not cover my
windows, of course. And then extrude this again,
probably at this point. And let's make another
loop here and here. And I should be able to now
extrude this down without being able to see the
light blocker and also extrude this one down. Now, if I go back
to my environment, making sure that doesn't shop. And now, as you can see,
if I just press except, using this light blocker, all of those issues are now fixed. You now don't see any
type of light bleeding anymore in any of these
corners, even from a distance. So that's a very
easy and quick way too and also a very old school way of basically fixing any of those issues
with the light blocker. Okay. So having shown you
how to fix that smell issue, at this point, let's
go ahead and go back to our original scene. Here we go. I just lower it up. So as you can see, this scene, of course, is a
lot more polished. But I have now gone
over very quickly, although I feel like I already
went more in depth than I expected in how you would go on constructing
a scene like this. So, of course, when you
create scenes like this, it requires a lot of balancing. Over here, you can see
that, for example, we balanced a lot in getting the perfect reflections
on all of our materials, getting the perfect
amount of lighting. Of course, creating
the scene to feel more full by having all of these exterior assets
and stuff like that. But in general, it is
all the same workflows. You go over, and
as I said before, we started by just,
creating our assets. After that, we went over on how to create structural assets, how to put it all together, and how to do some
lighting and post effects. So creating a scene like this, yes, that's pretty much
the workflow I would use. Of course, I would
have multiple artists. So, for example, what
I would be doing is I would be focusing on all
of the structural assets and already create
a empty room while my artists are focusing on creating all of the
individual assets. If you are an individual, this is something
that you would just want to go over on how to do, or you would go over
this all alone, at which point, it will
become quite time consuming. This is why I often
recommend to not go too big. A scene like this might not seem very big in terms of the size, but it honestly is very big. If you look at it,
all of the assets that you need to create
at high quality, this will cost you weeks
to create if you want to hit that true AA
quality most likely. I would say that at this point,
I will leave it off here, and I want to recommend to you some additional
courses over here. So the whole goal of this tutorial course was
to basically give you a very quick overview on how you would go about
creating a tre environment. That's why I like to call it
a budget environment course, because as you
might have noticed, I didn't cover any of the micings like
setting up blueprints, using decals, how to create even more refined
textures and how to create various
amounts of assets. However, we have a
very large library of tree D content that can
help you with this. So for example, a few that I want to go over that
I would recommend. If you want to
learn how to create full tre environments,
everything, modular assets, procedural assets like
procedural textures, unique textures, everything, there are a few
courses I recommend. One of the most
recent courses is the Sci Fi environments
for games. This course, yes, it goes
over Sci Fi environments, but you can apply it for many
other type of environments. Or if you want to have something a little
bit more refined, we have the Japanese
environment that also goes over a lot
of those elements, although it makes
more heavy use of nanite to be more
for cinematics. We have our medieval
town environment. However, that one goes
more about modular design and nanite and a few
good ones is also our interior environment or or a very old school one is our full environment
or large environment. If you want my recommendation, I would use probably
the Sci fi environment because it shows the most
up to date techniques. If you have a serious
interest in learning how all of this stuff is done
inside of actual studios, I recommend creating
treed assets for game and production studios. So this one goes over not only how to create a
high quality tree asset, but it will give you an in depth overview on how studios work when creating tree assets or environments and
everything like that. Next that, if you have a serious interest
in photogramtry, we have the ultimate
Photo gramry course, which will teach you everything you need to know
about photogram try. We also have some individual asset courses like over here, the creating hero assets
for games and cinematics. That one goes over
on how to create a full asset in Blender. And if you want to have
still a introduction, like you are more of a
beginner to environment art, but you want to have a more
in depth introduction, I recommend I highly recommend even the complete introduction
to environment art. So this one will teach you basically every single
element you need to know about creating a three environment
from start to finish. So it will go over sculpting. It will go over module assets. It will go over unique textures and unique assets over
level art, over foliage. It will cover all
of those things. However, of course, it will
be quite a larger course, and the price is also a little bit more
expensive in that sense. Now next dead, what
else do we have? Over here, we have some realistic
prop texturing courses, some level art courses,
some decal courses. So there is a lot
more refinement in here also courses how
to use trim sheets, which is more optimized way of texturing courses how to
create destrod assets. So have a look around. We have everything you need to basically become a
Trey environment artist, I would say, and
you can, of course, supplement it with some
additional introduction courses, for example, on YouTube
or from other publishers. I would say that
that's about the end. I hope that you
enjoyed this course. I hope that it didn't go too fast and that
it still gives you, like, a solid overview on how to create a
three environment. And I hope to see you in any future Fast Rec
tutorial courses. So my name is Mis Ligas and thanks for watching
Fast tutorials.
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